Forget the specifics of each case which range from the literally outrageous to the somewhat plausible. What all three of them have in common is that the perpetrator looks like me and the victim is black. It's not that black people don't kill other black people, or for that matter that white people don't kill other white people or that Chinese people don't kill Chinese people, or that….you get it. Murder first and foremost is a crime of familiarity and intimacy. Most murderers know their victims. The way to prevent murder is to strengthen communities, the condition of which often display stark descrepancies along racial and policy fault lines.
But that partially misses the point and partially exacerbates it. Why do these type of murders like these only happen when the victim is black and the perpetrator white, why are they carried out by agents of the state whose existence is premised on protecting the community, and why the perpetrator is never punished?
Setting aside our feelings about the individual officers involved and their underlying motivations the answer is all too obvious, embarrassing, and terrifying. Things happen this way because we allow them too happen this way. We have codified racism in a way that turns the worst stereotypes into self-fulfilling prophecies. The stark and naked injustice is ugly and horrifying.
Imagine if you will, two young white men walking down the street through a middle class suburban neighborhood and being asked to move onto the sidewalk by a black cop. Assume without assigning fault that the conflict somehow escalated into one in which non-lethal force was used, and the teen suffered some minor injury. What would happen to that cop for causing minor harm to a young white man? Fired, forced to resign, public apologies, a law suit if not a criminal trial? Would there be outrage in a white community if a black cop treated a white student that way? All of those are possible, if not probable, outcomes.
The "system" is rigged in such a way that the above scenario is implausible. It seems unlikely that a black cop would find himself yelling at kids in an all-white neighborhood even if they, and not he, had initiated an altercation. It's certainly unlikely that he would use any manner of force, but especially lethal force, and you could bet the farm that if he did use lethal force there would be AT LEAST a trial. Already the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite is trending filled with stories - probably true and false - of white people getting away with things. The tragedies we see are inevitable by design.
It's not just the legal system that is the problem, although that's certainly a huge issue. From the time they're born, African-American children are more likely to be impoverished and to be denied a route out of that poverty. Imagine all the circumstances that led to Michael Brown even being told to get out of the street and for it to have spiraled out of control. Schools are generally horrible, opportunities are infrequent, financial resources are often inadequate, good food options are scarce. Instead we give poor minority communities a lifeline on subsistence in the form of welfare and other "handouts,"that are morally justifiable because they keep people alive, but do little to improve their circumstances in the face of these systemic inadequacies.
The racism in the system only becomes visible to most people when it boils to a conflicts and simmers on the surface. Managed in the way it is, our entire socio-political system can be gerrymandered into our prejudicial whims, segregation can be made easy through hard and soft regulation, resources can diverted for the benefit of some people at the expense of others, white police can "protect" black communities by making residents feel unsafe. The odds can be stacked for white people like me and against black people like Eric, Trayvon, and Michael from day one.
It is all to easy to see why things play out the way they do. That's how we designed it. Did it have to be Eric Garner? Did it have to be Michael Brown? Of course not, but it was going to be some black male and some white officer at some point, not because the black guy was necessarily a bloodthirsty thug or the white cop was a racist punk, but because the inequities in the system - that are glaring when investigated, but largely invisible when ignored - make it impossible for some encounters not to end in conflict. When they do, we see it. We see Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner (along with many others who sadly, remain invisible). And we are rightfully outraged. It is shameful that black men can be murdered without repercussion or regard.
But it is more shameful that we will allow it to continue to happen by failing to prosecute, failing to provide, failing to care at all about low-income and minority communities and populations. Until the structural inequities are addressed, they will continue to operate as they were designed to do, and sadly more people will die.
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