On a day slightly more than fifty years ago,
a young black motorist was stopped by the LAPD.
His name was Leonard Deadwyler.
Mr. Deadwyler had led the police officers on
a 50-block pursuit before stopping. He
had good reason: His pregnant wife Barbara was in labor (though this later
turned out to be a false alarm). The
officers were unimpressed by the young man’s urgency. One of them, 23-year old Jerold Bova, leaned
inside the car’s driver side window, gun drawn, to discuss the matter.
In his haste, Mr. Deadwyler had neglected to
take his car out of gear. The car edged forward
a bit. Officer Bova, thinking his
suspect was making a break for it, fired his gun into the car, killing Mr.
Deadwyler. Bova claimed at the coroner’s
inquest that his weapon discharged “accidentally.”
This tale from the distant past has a
sickening familiarity about it. As
everyone knows by now this week has witnessed the senseless-to-inexplicable shooting
deaths of two young African American males at the hands of the police. Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge was selling CDs
outside a convenience store when accosted by the police, supposedly after
Sterling had threatened an anonymous tipster.
Much like Leonard Deadwyler, Philando Castile was shot dead in his car
by police in a Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb during what should have been a routine
traffic stop.
The Deadwyler incident happened less than a
year following the 1965 Watts Rebellion.
Popular reaction to the shooting was comparatively muted, though there
were a few street disturbances in protest.
Thomas Pynchon, in his own inimitable style, wrote of the Deadwyler case
in the West Coast edition of The New York
Times. Pynchon portrayed the image
of a black Los Angeles as an unwelcome intrusion upon the popular culture
notion of an LA of palm trees among opulent houses with well-manicured lawns overlooking
pristine beaches teeming with well-scrubbed blonde haired, blue eyed youth.
It’s a point hard to argue with. The mainstream view of America remains very
much a white perspective. People with
dark complexions still scare the living daylights out of millions in white society,
not to mention the very thought of anything connected with Africa. (Don’t believe me? Just recall last year’s Ebola outbreak when a
Liberian man thought to be infected with the virus was reported to have visited
a Texas school. Within minutes of the
media report the streets around the school in question were jammed with polo
shirted and khaki wearing tract house dwellers in SUVs anxious to save their
precious spawn from the dark peril lurking among them.)
Pynchon wrote that black encounters with
white America entailed a plethora of negative presuppositions on each side; it’s
pretty clear that this is as much the case in 2016 as it was in 1966. Even as the Obama administration draws to a
close it is still a mistake to claim we live in anything close to a post-racial
society. Two years after the killing of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and a little over a year after Freddie
Gray died in the back of Baltimore police van, it doesn’t seem as if minority
communities have made any progress in their relations with law
enforcement. In fact, an already deep
chasm has merely gotten deeper. The Black
Lives Matter movement has raised the hackles of certain Americans, further deepening
the racial divide and, I think, implicitly increasing their support of cops
involved in the deaths of African American citizens.
I’ve had several conversations with white acquaintances
on this subject in the past year, one of whom was a retired police officer, and
none of them wanted to have a serious discussion concerning law enforcement’s
lack of accountability in incidents of police-on-citizen violence. Each person I spoke with misinterpreted the
phrase “Black Lives Matter” as meaning the only
lives which matter and that those of police officers somehow do not. There was a strong undercurrent of besieged
white privilege in their words, leavened with a more than a hint of resentment.
The killing of five Dallas police officers by
Micah Johnson in response to the deaths of Sterling and Castile can only make
us more apprehensive. It also underscores
how little we’ve learned from decades of such incidents. A half century ago Barbara Deadwyler was
widowed and left to raise her son on her own.
At the televised inquest, featuring a young Johnnie Cochran channeling
questions on Mrs. Deadwyler’s behalf to the witnesses via the investigating deputy
district attorney, Leonard was portrayed by the police as being responsible for
his own death. The autopsy report said
that Leonard had an improbable blood alcohol level of .35 when he died.
His wife struggled with the question of guilt
long after the inquest cleared the officers involved and a wrongful death
lawsuit against the LAPD was lost in court.
Fourteen years after her husband’s death, she was described in a story
published in The Washington Post as
struggling to make her way in the wake of the tragedy. Mrs. Deadwyler admitted that she blamed her
son for his father’s death for a number of years.
The blame for many if not most of police
shootings of unarmed people of color then and now actually lies with
mindset. Law enforcement in minority
communities resembles a military occupation; the community’s residents in turn perceive
themselves as living under occupation. The
militarization of policing reflects an entrenched self-perception of law
enforcement personnel as being under constant treat of attack. It doesn’t help
that for the last twenty years the Department of Defense has made surplus
equipment, including semi-automatic rifles and armored vehicles, available to
state and local police agencies. The
siege mentality which has taken hold among law enforcement, bolstered by its
military trappings, can only lead to trouble should there be any challenge,
real or imagined, to their authority. I
get nervous every time I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror, and I’m a law
abiding middle aged white guy driving a late model car. God knows what was going through Philando
Castile’s mind when he was pulled over.
Compounding the problem is that police
violence against people of color is that it appears to have given license to
white civilians who suspect minority individuals of criminal activity; one need
only remember the controversy surrounding George Zimmerman’s stalking and
murder of Trayvon Martin several years ago to recognize this. The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils
may be thought figments of a vanished past, but racism itself is alive and thriving. Half the country still cannot come to grips
with the fact that a black man is President.
A thinly disguised rhetorical code has replaced the white hood,
manifested in doubts over Mr. Obama’s religion or national origin and allusions
to his early work as a community organizer.
Much like the epidemic of school and
workplace shootings, the use of excessive force and the wrongful killing of
citizens by law enforcement has become so commonplace as to scarcely merit
notice. And why not? We are products of a violence worshipping culture. Might makes right, or at least it does in the
stories we’re told through literature, movies, and TV. Whoever shouts loudest wins the
argument. If something bad happens to
you, it’s your own damn fault. Sterling
and Castile were probably asking for it, right?
Until our collective mindset toward race and
violence shifts, we can look forward to a bleak procession of more victims in the
months and years to come.
© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar
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