Last week, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. This abhorrent act of political extremism cannot be divorced from American history—recent or old. In black communities, the police departments have only enjoyed a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is because wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.
To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.
I don’t see Black Lives Matter as inciting violence, except that speaking the truth about violence may inevitably incite further violence. It doesn’t seem to me ignoring these truths is helpful in the long run. There have been decades to correct these problems without threat of violence and nothing seems to have changed.
One of the themes in, Blood Done Sign My Name is how violence and threat of violence does sometimes force positive change. In that case, it was the destruction of white owned businesses. I am NOT condoning violence. I am making observations. For several years now, Coates has been writing about the destruction of the Black body throughout American history. He demonstrates it is ongoing.
I find his arguments extremely compelling.