By Georgi Boorman
Monday, July 18, 2016
Temporarily suspending judgment on the recent police
shootings of black men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling does not mean I
don’t think black lives matter.
David Marcus wrote recently here at The Federalist that
white people don’t really think black lives matter—at least, not as much as
they should. The article is called “This Week, We Are All Black Lives Matter,”
but he really means that only black people are Black Lives Matter (BLM). This
is false and needlessly divisive.
Marcus sees the gunning down of black people by police as
an epidemic white people acknowledge, but they’ve been so far unconvinced
“there is a crisis going on.” He writes, “What the term [Black Lives Matter]
really means is that black lives don’t matter. Not enough, anyway. This is an
ugly concept for white Americans to accept. But it is a daily reality for
America’s blacks.”
Marcus brushes off crime statistics baked into the
arguments of BLM skeptics. These includee statistics such as: blacks are
charged with the majority of robberies, murders, and assaults in the 75 largest
counties, meaning cops may encounter a higher proportion of blacks than whites
in potentially lethal situations. As a percentage of total homicides, 12
percent of white and Hispanic deaths are due to police, while only 4 percent of
black homicides are due to police. Ignoring those who point things like this
out, Marcus instead issues an indictment of white America: “As black Americans
shout, yell, and cry that their lives matter, the eerie silence of white
Americans carefully balancing causes and solutions whispers back, ‘No, they
don’t.’”
It’s Simply Wise
to Wait Until the Facts Are In
According to Marcus, white America has been silent, and
“respectful silence” is apparently unacceptable, even as a hyperactive media
spins out of control with toxic levels of conjecture and too few concrete
facts. Many of us were silent for a time after Michael Brown was shot and
killed, even as the pits of our stomach filled with horror reading the initial
tweets covering the tragedy. We were ultimately glad we had restrained
ourselves and did not let visceral rage crowd out any room to accept new
information or lines of reasoning.
It was painful to see a mother lose her son, and to see
young life cut down in violence. But what did we learn? We learned that “hands
up, don’t shoot” was a lie. We learned Brown wasn’t shot in the back while
running away. We learned that Officer Darren Wilson had good reason to fear for
his life and was, according to a grand jury, justified in shooting Brown.
The videos of Sterling and Castile’s recent deaths are
jarring and horrifying, but even cameras don’t tell the whole story. Consider this
video, for instance, documenting a traffic stop from the moment the
officers approach the vehicle to the final violent conclusion. It took three
body camera angles watched multiple times and played in slow motion for me to
even glimpse the driver’s gun, and even then I was shocked. Who would have thought
this seemingly calm individual who obeyed every order from the officer would
turn violent?
Facts Steer Us
Towards Addressing the Real Problems
Empathy for the suffering is critical, and feelings
matter. Humans are meant to relate to one another emotionally, and to deny the
fear, heartache, and horror many black people are experiencing based on these
events is wrong. To deny cops’s fears they may be gunned down for their
profession or viciously smeared for a lethal confrontation between races is
wrong also. Feelings matter, but so do facts. Always.
Without facts, we cannot move toward real solutions.
Without facts, we let our passions launch us ever deeper into our own personal
realities, into deep, narrow pockets of spite, prejudice, and ignorance from
which we cannot view any inconvenient truths, nor even the different
experienced realities of others. Having isolated ourselves into our respective
“sides,” we cease to empathize, listen, and cooperate toward common goals.
Facts alone cannot change the course of events. Marcus is
right that passion is a critical component for any social reform. But facts,
valid information, are the basis for meaningful dialogue that leads to
effective and positive change. Without them, partisanship and prejudice spin us
further into chaos.
Some of us are waiting for more information, and for any
initial misinformation to dissipate. Hopefully we are not waiting for the
“right” information—that is, information that fits conveniently into our
worldview, at which point we launch into our pre-meditated opinions. But we are
not in error to wait for the fog to clear before launching into a full-throated
argument for this side or that. While many white Americans may be reticent to
opine on very recent police shootings, or may not be as “angry and animated” as
Marcus would want, our silence by no means indicates a complacency that rises
to the level of “black lives don’t matter.”
Police Brutality
Is Not the Black Community’s Only Problem
In fact, many whites have been begging America to address
the disproportionately high number of black-on-black homicides, gang violence,
high school dropout rates, levels of poverty, and family breakdown for a long
time. Black lives do matter,
independent of the color of uniform or skin of the people who end them. Rebecca
Cusey’s recent article discussing her experience living in a majority-black
neighborhood casts a bright light on the tragedies afflicting the black
community, tragedies we absolutely must be concerned about.
Maybe BLM is right to assert police brutality doesn’t
rank high enough on our list of priorities for aiding the black community, but
the point is that our care for black lives expands beyond BLM’s narrow scope to
cover these other struggles, many of which contribute to the black community’s
high homicide rate.
May God rightly judge us for any complacency in
unjustified violent deaths, but surely we should not be judged by others for
temporarily reserving our judgement on new, highly controversial incidents,
either.
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