Pain, anger & collective frustration
Protests stem from decades of racism, inequities
The protests in Columbus last week were about Miles Jackson – the man shot and killed by police at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s medical center in Westerville – but they also were about much more.h During such protests, one protester shouts, “Say his name,” others respond, “Miles Jackson” or “Andre Hill,” or “Casey Goodson Jr.” h All of those Black men were killed by law-enforcement officers in central Ohio in recent months. h Yet it takes just one look at the signs that many protesters carry – such as
“Columbus is Not Safe for Black People” and “The Whole Damn System is Guilty As decades.
“We see these same white supremacy terrorists and they are actively killing people and they get to live. Black and brown people are murdered.”
Hana Abdur-rahim
South Side resident and lead organizer for the Black Abolitionist Collective of Ohio
They are an expression, activists and experts say, of the collective frustration that has built up in the Black community for being held down by systemic inequities in American institutions. Those institutions include housing, education, banking and government, but the results of this racism are felt most sharply and consequentially when it comes to law enforcement.
“The protests today are only symbols of what has happened historically,” said Terrance Dean, associate professor of Black Studies at Denison University in Granville and a member of the Dispatch editorial board. “We’re not protesting that shooting even as much we are protesting every event that has happened and every trauma and every encounter that every Black person has had.”
Ashley M. Howard, an assistant professor of African-american studies and history at the University of Iowa, cites the similarities of the recent protests nationwide – which gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year – to the uprisings that took place in more than 300 cities during the civil rights era in the 1960s.
“The fact that in so many different places over so many different years, we see Black people upset about the same things shows that this is a structural and systemic phenomenon,” Howard said. “The police incident is just the catalyst, but these are grievances that the Black community has had for decades and really, generationally.”
At its root is how racism or implicit bias among police officers affects their treatment of Black people. That the treatment is unequal is not a mere theory among people of color – rather, it is a truism they live with daily, experts and activists say.
Dean calls it “the angst and the terror a lot of us feel within the community.”
And that is why Black people feel each police killing collectively and viscerally.
“I remember last year, after George Floyd, people having this sense of grief, like, `That could have been my brother or uncle or loved one,’” said Sheronda Palmore, a licensed social worker for Mental Health America of Ohio. “There is a collective experience that takes place that is rooted a great deal in the
historical and present system of racism.
“You can’t be disconnected from that because it hits way too close to home. That could have been someone I know, and that’s overwhelming when you walk out that door and you don’t know if today is the day you could run into someone and you don’t know how they will respond to you.”
South Side resident Hana Abdur-rahim, lead organizer for the Black Abolitionist Collective of Ohio, pointed out the disparities in the treatment of Black and white men who have guns and encounter police.
Jackson had a gun when he struggled with police and was shot and killed at St. Ann’s, but, Abdur-rahim asks, what about Kyle Rittenhouse, a then-17-yearold who shot and killed two people and wounded a third during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020?
Footage showed Rittenhouse, with his AR-15 rifle still strapped on, walking toward police with his hands up. He wasn’t taken into custody in the chaos and only turned himself in later. That matters, Abdur-rahim said.
“We see these same white supremacy terrorists and they are actively killing people and they get to live,” she said. “Black and brown people are murdered.”
In Columbus, Goodson and Hill – two unarmed Black men – were fatally shot by white law enforcement officers in December. Authorities are still investigating Goodson’s death. Columbus police officer Adam Coy has been fired and indicted on charges that include murder in Hill’s death.
Taken as a whole, the events led Abdur-rahim, who helped organize some of last week’s protests, to say the entire law-enforcement system should be dismantled.
And it prompted people such as Zach Usmani, 32, a mixed-race Clintonville resident, to attend the protests in Columbus last week and say, “Police do not serve the people; the police as an institution is rotten to its core. We need to be brave, and we need to rethink what safety can look like in our community.”
In that regard, Howard said she is cautiously optimistic that the protests beginning with the Floyd death last year might actually make a difference in the law enforcement system.
“I’m encouraged, because something that was seen as a fringe idea three years ago, like defunding the police, now is becoming part of the mainstream lexicon,” she said. “People are beginning to imagine a radical alternative.”
To get there, though, will take more hard work, experts and others say, particularly the work of listening and trying to understand an experience different from one’s own.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Columbus Deputy Chief Greg Bodker said police have no qualms about having a conversation with activists and pointed to the contact information for deputy chiefs available on the division’s website.
Kyle Strickland, senior legal analyst and special assistant to the director for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity at Ohio State University, said “knee-jerk reactions” and defensiveness by white people are hurdles that must be overcome before meaningful progress is made.
“Some people fail to see how big of an issue this is,” he said. “It’s your extraordinary privilege if you do not have to face it. So those in a position of privilege need to recognize that this is somebody’s story and somebody’s experience. Because far too many people do have to live with this fear every day.”
Short North resident Aileen Day, 26, agrees. She attended Wednesday’s protest and lamented the fact that it took a proliferation of cellphone videos documenting abuses and killings, such as in Floyd’s death, before white people took notice.
“Historically, as white people, we have not trusted or listened to the experiences of Black people,” Day said. “We’re late to this work.”
Another reason Howard is optimistic is because of people such as Usmani and Day.
“Those people out in the streets are young people, teens and young adults,” she said. “These are the folks who are going to be senators and doctors and lawyers and business people and parents. This is the next generation of people who will hold power, and my hope is that they will keep a critical lens on these issues and lead us to a radical reimagining of our institutions that will be more inclusive.”
Dispatch reporters Bethany Bruner, Eric Lagatta and Holly Zachariah contributed to this story.
“We’re not protesting that shooting even as much we are protesting every event that has happened and every trauma and every encounter that every Black person has had.”
Terrance Dean Associate professor of Black Studies at Denison University in Granville and a member of the Dispatch editorial board.