February is Black History Month in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. We know this because we see more of Martin Luther King, Jr., on television and in advertising material than we see the rest of the year. News anchors intone solemn acknowledgment of the contributions of celebrated African Americans to American culture. Schools and communities host concerts, essay contests, and art exhibitions to acknowledge these contributions. We talk about Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington – although Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bobby Seal, and Eldridge Cleaver get little notice because they are both too recent and too threatening to the soothing rhetoric of “I have a dream” and the “content of their character.”
This month is also, apparently, the month that the College Board has decided to water down the curriculum of a proposed AP African American history course (at the behest of Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis) by omitting the names of some of the best writers and analysts of that history – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and bell hooks, to name just a few. The revisions also eliminated all mention of Black Lives Matter, reparations, and affirmative action. Any idea of intersectionality – that black people might also be queer or women – is no longer in the curriculum.
And meanwhile, the funeral of Tyre Nichols was on Wednesday of this week. This is the story of yet another black person killed by police under circumstances where a white person would have been free to “get home,” as Mr. Nichols achingly pleaded while he was being beaten to death on January 7.
He joins the ranks of the following young black people, who also “had a dream” that was cut short by police:
Eric Garner (2014)
Michael Brown (2014)
Tamir Rice (2014)
Walter Scott (2015)
Alton Sterling (2016)
Philando Castile (2016)
Stephon Clark (2018),
Breonna Taylor (2020)
George Floyd (2020)
Daunte Wright (2021)
This list does not include Ahmaud Arbery (2020); he was killed by civilians – residents of a suburban neighborhood outside of Brunswick, Georgia – who were protected from prosecution by local law enforcement officials until a video of his murder was released by one of the defendants who believed that it would exonerate him and his buddies. He believed that his actions would be okay with local law enforcement, which is an extension of the problem.
These are only a few of the black people who are subjected to violence and intimidation at the hands of the police every damn day. If you don’t recall these murders – and they have slipped from public awareness over time – look them up and rekindle your outrage. Each time one of these events occurs, the rhetoric is the same: profiling, lack of training, using police when a social services response might be more appropriate, disproportionate response to non-violent offenses, and so forth. We say “this cannot continue” and “this is not who we are” and “these lives were tragically cut short.” But it continues; it is who we are until someone (or many someones) stops it; and we are apparently okay with lives being tragically cut short. People offer up thoughts and prayers for the grieving families, but I am over it. As George Costanza would say, they can take their thoughts and prayers and “stuff them in a sack.”
It is now likely that there will be video of any police use of “excessive force” (apparently the accepted euphemism for beating someone to death, shooting an unarmed or sleeping person, or depriving someone of the ability to breathe) – from either police bodycams or videos by onlookers. Video makes accountability easier – although not automatic, as we have seen. It does raise the question: before the technological innovations that made on-the-spot video not only available but inescapable, how many such murders went unprosecuted or even unacknowledged? We all know the answer.
Policing is difficult – but the militarization of police forces and the creation of commando units within the structure of community policing agencies is not the answer. I don’t have any solutions – I have some thoughts, but I am not expert enough to suggest that I know what needs to be done. But there are well-intentioned people out there who are making changes at their local levels to return the police to a peace-keeping and law enforcement body, not a state-sponsored execution squad. We should listen to them.
Let’s not continue to make a mockery of Black History Month. You can take your “Happy Black History Month” wish and stuff it in a sack.
😢