Three days ago, during what should have been a routine traffic stop to check on a bad tail light, police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot 32-year-old Philando Castile four times ‒ killing him. Castile was a supervisor at a local school cafeteria fondly remembered by the students for not only knowing their names but remembering their food allergies. By all accounts he was a role model to the children who knew him. His experience with the police prior to the shooting sounds like a depressingly typical one for many black Americans. During the previous 14 years, he had been stopped no fewer than 31 times for a variety of misdemeanour traffic violations. In the last, fatal stop Castile warned the police officer that he had a gun, fully licensed with a concealed carry permit. That made no difference. He was shot as he reached for his wallet. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting to Facebook, where it has been widely shared.
During the last two years the deaths of many black Americans at the hands of white police officers has become a political issue that cannot be safely ignored. The structural racism that produces these killings has long been established beyond reasonable doubt, yet the problem remains a festering sore in political life, freshly provoked by the justice system’s repeated failures to secure convictions for wrongful deaths. Few prominent political leaders, and neither of the two nominees, have addressed the matter seriously, even though Black Lives Matter activists have successfully seared the names of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Darrien Hunt and Tamir Rice – to name but a few – into the public consciousness. Unconscionably, despite powerful and ever growing evidence of mistreatment and murder, some of it captured on video and widely distributed, there have been no reforms to prevent local police from shooting people like Mr Castile with almost complete impunity.
On June 26, while accepting a humanitarian prize at the annual Black Entertainment Television awards, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ star Jesse Williams articulated his community’s outrage and despair with extraordinary eloquence. “We know,” said Williams, “that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.” Addressing an audience that kept standing up to acknowledge the power of his speech, he added: “I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich.” He continued: “There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s been no tax they haven’t levied against us, and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. ‘You’re free,’ they keep telling us. But she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so… ‘free.’”
One of the many memorable lines in Williams’ speech is that “the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander.” This rebuke to well-intentioned but often patronizing advice directed at black activists – often along the lines that “all lives matter” – is as timely as it is terse. To those who question the work of black activists, while ignoring the irrefutable evidence of the structural racism they are fighting against, Williams counters: “If you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.” Unsparingly, he also chides black celebrities for not doing enough to raise awareness of the problem, and to press for political solutions.
Predictably, there has been a petition attacking Williams for “racism” and – in true American style – a counter petition praising him. More importantly, however, these storms in a teacup have allowed his remarkable speech to linger in the public consciousness for more than a few news cycles. It has also helped thousands of non-black Americans to realize that gestures of compassion and solidarity are a poor substitute for political change. In 1952, Ralph Ellison likened the life of black Americans to that of an Invisible Man: “not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe” but “a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids” that was invisible “simply because people refuse to see me.” Activists like Jesse Williams have shown the lethal consequences of the law enforcement’s enduring refusal to see black citizens as full members of the society, much less treat them with fairness and decency. It is now time for the bystanders in American culture – those who keep witnessing the fallout of this system from afar – to undertake real efforts to “restructure its function” rather than simply offer condolences, and polite criticism, to activists who are already doing so.
