OPINION: Call out the Amy Coopers when you see them, Timson,
Last Monday morning, on the U.S. Memorial Day holiday, New Yorker Amy Cooper went to Central Park with her dog, firmly ensconced in the white woman privileges of her life.
An investment company executive, with roots in Canada, she decided to run her rescue dog, Henry, off leash in the Ramble, a wooded section of the park where signs stipulate that dogs must be leashed.
At the time, Christian Cooper (no relation) an African-American man and experienced local birder, with his own credentials — Harvard educated, a member of the board of the local Audubon Society — encountered Ms. Cooper and asked her firmly to leash her dog.
When she refused, and after he began videotaping her, Amy Cooper played what appeared to be an egregious race card, one that only a white woman could seemingly instinctively pull out of her deck.
Not only, as the videotape shows, did Ms. Cooper approach Mr. Cooper in what appeared to be a threatening manner, imperiously ordering him, one arm outstretched, to stop filming her, she then warned him: “I’m going to call the cops and say an African-American man is threatening my life.”
His calm reply (but not his image) captured on tape was:
“Please call the cops, please tell them anything you’d like.”
So she did, her voice rising on her phone saying at least twice that an African-American man was threatening her and her dog. Nothing in the video taken by Mr. Cooper suggests that was the case. She demanded the police come “immediately” to the Ramble.
Mr. Cooper said later that the tape didn’t reveal that, before he started filming, he had decided to offer the dog treats as a way of getting his owner to leash him and in doing so, he had said, “You’re not going to like what I’m going to do.”
Let’s stipulate two things: There was nothing “unconscious” about Amy Cooper’s inexcusable privileged white woman anti-Black racism.
With every rising inflection in her voice, she had to know she was falsely accusing a Black man and perhaps, depending on which police officers showed up, putting his life in danger.
Set this in the context of the still aflame Minneapolis riots this week in protest of the death of African-American George Floyd in police custody after one arresting officer was shown on video to have a knee on his chest; and February’s shooting death of Ahmed Aubrey, 26, who was jogging at night in his Georgia neighbourhood and shot dead (a white father and son were charged two months after with his murder and a third man who recorded the incident has now been arrested).
All of these incidents and many more represent an unending racial tragedy in which, over and over, Black men are denied their humanity, denied even their right to be who they are in open spaces — a birder in a park, a jogger on a street, as white men seldom are.
Except, as Mr. Cooper said later, he refused to “capitulate” to Ms. Cooper’s act of racism.
After the video of the encounter was posted by Christian Cooper’s sister Melody and viewed widely on social media, Amy Cooper’s current life as she knew it was over.
Her company, Franklin Templeton Investments, swiftly terminated her after first placing her on administrative leave while they reviewed the incident, saying on Twitter the next day, “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton.”
She even had to surrender her dog back to the rescue organization. In the video it appeared that, because of the way she was holding him, the dog was choking. Perhaps by now Amy Cooper wishes with all her being that she had not taken her dog to Central Park last Monday morning and not followed the rules of leashing him when she should have. Perhaps by now Amy Cooper also wishes with all her being that during a momentary tense encounter with Christian Cooper, she had not responded to him in such a consciously and dangerously racist and inflammatory fashion.
Or perhaps Amy Cooper just wishes she had not been filmed while being racist. As actor Will Smith succinctly put it, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”
Amy Cooper, with an undergrad degree from the University of Waterloo and on record as a Democrat party donor, has issued a public apology. Christian Cooper has given a few thoughtful interviews in which he said to the New York Times: “Any of us can make — not necessarily a racist mistake, but a mistake,” Mr. Cooper said, “And to get that kind of tidal wave in such a compressed period of time, it’s got to hurt. It’s got to hurt.”
“I’m not excusing the racism,” he said. “But I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”
I don’t feel sorry for Amy Cooper. After watching the video several times, I still feel appalled and even angry that a well-educated, apparently liberal-leaning woman, calling forth very old tropes of white women being menaced by Black men, could so blatantly distort this situation.
I do feel for everyone who has to live in this racially heightened nightmare that often has lethal consequences.
It’s a systemic problem and it’s never going to be fixed until more people like Amy Cooper are revealed to be what they are. And forced — by shame and consequences — to do better.