This issue and this issue are deeply connected. And are even more deeply connected to the national conversation about race that the national media is pretending to have right now.
See, we like to pretend that certain people just CAN’T be racist. Feminists, for instance, get a pass because they’re feminists and are working for justice for all (but all too often starting with middle-class white women). Or my goodness, the police in the Sean Bell case, well two of them were black! So race had nothing to do with it.
We all screw up sometimes (hopefully not to the extent of killing an unarmed person). But to write the screwups off as ‘human’ and pretend that there isn’t more examination to be done here, well…yeah. How about examining how we’ve internalized images of black male bodies as threatening, bad, evil, for so long that many readers of Marcotte’s book didn’t even notice the symbolism? That other black police officers shot and killed a man who presented no threat to them?
I don’t have a long post about this in me right now, but all those people linked above did, so read their words instead.
Thanks to Holly at Feministe for continuing to make that blog worth reading, btw. Literally each time I think I should just take it off my list, she posts something brilliant and I stick with it.
Also related, you should read this.