New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
New Haven shooting exemplifies unjustified fear of blacks
Music festivals are seldom comfortable places for black people. But, neither are our home communities, it seems.
That’s the biggest lesson I learned after spending last week in Coachella Valley only to come home to the news of the frightening police shooting of Stephanie Washington Tuesday morning in Newhallville.
Let me explain … Beyonce could have sent personal Coachella invites to every black woman in the country and it still wouldn’t be a sufficient welcome to make that historically white space comfortable for any of us.
Still, I dutifully answered Beyonce’s Coachella call to action and flew out to Indio, Calif., for Weekend 1 of the festival on April 12. Janelle Monae, Childish Gambino, Kid Cudi and countless other black performers made appearances throughout the weekend. But while the masses of mostly white people were more than pleased to elevate and exalt the black folks on stage, the ones like me standing next to them in the audience were at best insultingly invisible, and at worst casually battered.
Of all the ways in which Coachella is inaccessible to people of color — location, price point, lodging options — after conquering all that, the biggest barrier is the deeply rooted anti-black fears and dispositions of those privileged enough to frequent the festival. It was the constant shoves, the erasure of my femininity, the nonchalant cuts in long lines, and the low hum of epithets whispered amongst themselves that made sure I knew that the welcome mat wasn’t really rolled out for me.
White people tend to forget black people are around. Even in the presence of several dozens of black faces in the crowd listening to Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” the mostly white audience never held back a single N-word, for respect of my (or anyone’s) comfort. But most black people are used to being seen as either the help, the entertainment or the furniture — basically, any fixture in the space, put there to enhance the experience for white people. Still, that dynamic was physically and mentally fatiguing and left me eager to get back home. But New Haven offered no racial respite.
I struggled all week thinking about Washington’s shooting, feeling like there is no place to escape the manufactured fear of black people. Even in our own communities, that fear causes people to overact, escalate, and in some cases shoot and kill unarmed black people. If tried for these acts, it seems the magic words to evoke an acquittal are “I was afraid” and just like that the shooting is justified.
In this case, before asking any questions, one of the two officers involved in Washington’s shooting drew his firearm and erratically shot into the car nearly a dozen times before running away on foot — presumably believing he was being shot at. Early reports say officers found no guns in the vehicle. Police said later they thought the driver, Paul Witherspoon, was a suspect in a Hamden robbery; he was not charged.
Every similar situation is the result of an arbitrary and unjustifiable fear of black people. This incident, more than others, depicts the impacts of internalized fear and the need for rigorous, arduous, implicit bias training for every beat officer authorized to carry. Though both officers involved in the shooting were black, the expectation of returned violence caused an overaction from the public servants who are equipped to protect themselves against civilians who were unarmed and unsuspecting.
Every space a black person is in is politicized because of this country’s deeply lodged anti-blackness which demands people pick a side. Do their lives matter or not? Are their lives under threat or not? Are they part of the problem or not? Typically, if the answer is “not” the former questions are disregarded along with any consideration for the real problem.
Whether it’s me being black and minding my business at Coachella or being black and minding your business in your own vehicle in Newhallville, white fear of black people robs us of our ability to ever truly relax. We can’t ever fully be in the moment while we soberly navigate white fear, a matter of life or death.
It’s really not any black person’s responsibility to quell this unjustified fear of us, but it is our burden. Washington and Witherspoon were trapped in police crossfire that began only because those officers’ fear forced them to shoot first and keep shooting in response to the ricochets of their own bullets. As a result, Washington took a bullet to the face.
The next steps of this story matter. If either of these officers receives anything short of being fired, charged, indicted and sentenced the message we’re sending New Haven’s very large and active communities of color is that trained officers with lethal weapons are allowed to be irrational, skittish, jumpy and overall bad judges of situations. If that’s the case, we’re saying that officers receive inadequate training and that the public truly cannot trust the words or actions of the police.
I, like so many black and white people, am tired of this incessant rhythm of death and protest. But my exhaustion comes from the feeling that no amount of protest is going to forge safe spaces for us — whether that’s a music festival or the front seat or your boyfriend’s car. That’s because the problem we’re up against is dislodging the almost intrinsic and certainly unjustified fear of black people.
For this particular shooting, which displayed a reckless disregard for the safety of anyone on that street, I suspect the community will want a lot more than a superficial firing. But, I can think of a number of organizers and at least one couple who would see that as a fine start.