‘AN UNFATHOMABLE TRAGEDY’
EMPATHY FOR ALL VICTIMS OF THIS TRAGIC WEEK IS ESSENTIAL
Dallas police Chief David Brown pauses at a prayer vigil after a sniper opened fire, killing five police officers and wounding others in an ambush at a Black Lives Matter march.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in the very first speech that brought him to wide American attention, “There comes a time when people get tired.”
Well then, let’s hope we are all there now — the frightened and furious young black men whose brothers are shot and killed by U.S. police in staggering numbers and in sometimes galling circumstances, the scared and beleaguered police, and yes, the mass media and social media with our giddy group embrace of violence in all its forms.
As the CNN commentator Van Jones said Friday, if you bleed for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (the black men killed by police this week in Baton Rouge, La., and near Minneapolis, Minn.) but not for the five dead Dallas police officers murdered during a Black Lives Matter protest Thursday night, “you need a heart check.” If you bleed for the slain police but not for Sterling and Castile, Jones said, “You need a heart check.”
It is, in other words, time for empathy, that great saving human ability to feel the pain of another without having to have walked in his actual shoes.
The great American civil rights leader made his speech on Dec. 5, 1955. It was long ago and far away. King was in Montgomery, Ala., about 585 kilometres from Baton Rouge, where Sterling was killed, and almost twice that to Falcon Heights, Minn., where Castile was shot to death.
But what he said, in part, to a thousand black Americans crowded into the Holt Street Baptist Church that night was this: “We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired — tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression.
“There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, when they experience the bleakness of nagging despair.”
Segregation ended, though it was another nine years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put an official end to it, and while much has changed, does that language not sound an awful lot like the same general bone weariness heard in recent weeks from black residents in U.S. city after U.S. city and even in Toronto? It does. This week, former Canada AM news anchor and co-host Marci Ien was a guest host on The Live Drive, a Newstalk 1010 radio show.
Conflict-of-interest declaration, I do a bit on the show, but listened afterwards as Ien spoke with tremendous eloquence of her experiences as a smart young black woman growing up in Toronto.
In her quiet voice, she said, “There isn’t a man in my life, from my father who’s in his 70s to my husband to my brothersin-law, who hasn’t been stopped by police (in effect, for driving while black) at some point.”
Born and raised in Scarborough, Ont., and proud of it, Ien had a girl seven years before she learned her second child was a boy. “My heart skipped a beat,” she said, “when I realized I was having a son. I was worried. No mother should ever feel that.”
‘There comes a time when people get tired’
Now, as her little boy grows up, Ien said, she is braced for the conversation she will have to have with him — about the clothes she wonders if he can wear (“Can he wear a hoodie? Lowslung jeans?”) and how he’s to behave if he’s stopped by police. “The utmost respect should be there anyway,” she said, meaning she and her husband would teach that as a matter of course, but their son will be told to ramp it up.
“These are the conversations black families have with their sons and the young men they care about,” she said. If this great woman has to have this sort of discussion with her son, that’s something the rest of us, including the police, have to accept.
Ien was commenting on Tuesday, after Sterling’s death, but before Castile’s and before the shocking Dallas mass murder.
The officers — seven others were wounded — were slain by what the FBI says now was a lone sniper, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson, a former U.S. army reserve veteran.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that before he was essentially blown apart by a bomb-laden robot the police force dispatched, Johnson told hostage negotiators “he was upset about Black Lives Matter. He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset about white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Armed to the teeth, better equipped than the unsuspecting police watching over the protest, Johnson did just that.
The ambush came everywhere as a terrible shock to police officers, who, as Chief Brown said dryly at one point, “aren’t very accustomed to hearing thank you, sometimes from the citizens who most need our help.”
That’s putting it kindly; even at peaceful protests, even in Canadian cities, police are routinely faced with people spitting at them, cursing them and trying to provoke them.
Yet few of them would have predicted what happened in Dallas.
It was Newstalk host Jay Michaels who suggested Friday that just as hateful ISIL propaganda and violent beheading videos on the web have served to radicalize unhappy young men in the West and turn them into homegrown terrorists, so perhaps the constant inflamed rhetoric about police violence in the press and the ghastly cellphone videos of police shootings may have inspired Johnson.
It feels as though we’re on a precipice. We need to be accountable for what we collectively have sowed: the bad and racist police officers and the forces that employ them, the empty violent rhetoric of the mob, and the media and web airing of every grievance anywhere in the world and making it local.
What we need is light, not heat, and we need to do Van Jones’ heart check.