Finding the way
This week was made incomprehensibly difficult and painful by the release Friday evening of the video that documents Tyre Nichols’s murder at the hands of five, now former, Memphis police officers.
I do not want to write about it too much tonight, simply because I want to ask you to center Black voices, as we learn more about this unspeakable tragedy. I wrote a piece for MSNBC earlier this week, published this morning, discussing the importance of the federal investigation and talking about DOJ’s important role in what comes next. But tonight I am listening to Black voices and reading everything I can to try to grasp what the Black community is thinking, feeling, and recommending we do next, because it’s clear that what’s been tried up until now has failed, and I want to listen to them.
One place to start, if you’re looking for an explanation of the state charges filed against the five men responsible for Mr. Nichols’s death, is my friend and former DOJ colleague Elliot Williams’s thread from the day they were announced, laying them out.
We are here, in large part, because the country did not get police reform, the comprehensive package of legal reforms that came tantalizingly close to passing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The Black Lives Matter movement helped white Americans who were willing understand what systemic racism meant and, more importantly, how it impacted people’s lives in harmful, damaging ways. But we haven’t fulfilled the promise those days held for George Floyd’s young daughter, who was captured on video saying, “Daddy changed the world.” The best we can do is try to understand with open hearts and a desire to do whatever it takes to make sure Gianna Floyd and Tyre Nichols’s 4-year-old son come of age in a world that makes it possible for them to thrive and contribute their talents without fear.
This evening, I read former head of the Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill’s piece, “When White America Offloads its Failures on to Civil Rights Movements.” She is one of the most fearless, honest, thoughtful people I know and we’re fortunate to have the chance to learn from her. I was also struck by journalist Wesley Lowery’s thread, which helps us see the police stop that led to Tyre Nichol’s death for what it really was. I hope you’ll share important comments, perspectives, writing, etc. that you come across in the days and weeks ahead, as we all try to learn more so we can do more.
Tonight my thoughts are with Mr. Nichols’s mother and his family, and with the community in Memphis that is shattered, again, because this is not the first time that community has experienced loss through police violence.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
A young man isviolentlybeaten by the cops
And not one had the balls to tell the others
to stop
Where is human decency when the police
stayed outside the classroom
And children and teachers died and
The school became their tomb
Where is accountability when
the President tells a big lie
AndCapitol Police and others die?
Where is our country and those that don’t want to help Ukraine
With so many shootings
Our country is filled with pain
I am unwilling to watch the footage of Tyre Nichol's getting beaten, or read the details of the footage. It reminds me of when a professor in an African history course in college showed us a film on how Dutch colonizers mistreated Africans in South Africa, and I skipped the class. Then the professor told me I could make it up by watching it in the library on my own. I told him I was not going to watch it, after seeing one already where we saw Belgian White Supremacists using special tools to crush in the faces of Black Africans who did not do what they wanted and how the shape of the tool fit into the place where a man's face was crushed in. I told him that I refused to watch anything where I was not learning something new, and where the suffering I was seeing was not further enlightening me. While I think it is tremendously important that the Memphis footage exists and is released, I am not going to be watching it. Instead I am going to want to know the results of the trial and hope that the results reflect the full awareness of the horror of this murder. Everyone I know that is Black fears being stopped by police. My friend Dona and I had taken my friend Frank from Germany out to hear music one night. Later we went for a nice drive along a lake front road into wealthy suburbs with huge mansions. My friend Dona is Black and was driving. At one point as she drove by one of the mansions on our way back into the city, a police officer who was parked by the gates of someone's enormous driveway, pulled out and followed us. He pulled us over. Frank was next to her and I was sitting in the middle of the back seat. The police officer pulled her over because he had seen her skin color. It was pretty obvious. We had told Frank even before we went out that all Blacks who drive up to those suburbs get pulled over and he did not believe us. He had not heard of the concept of "driving while being Black." So, when it actually happened he was shocked. We were not doing anything illegal. The officer looked in and he saw Frank sitting, and Frank, who is a pilot was spluttering and told him that this was like the Gestapo in Nazi times. I asked the cop why he had pulled Dona over. He tried to save face by asking if we had been drinking. I said, "1 beer 2 hours ago." So, he then told Dona that he had pulled us over because she had not been driving straight. She wanted to go along with him to get out of there and agreed that perhaps she had not been driving straight. I was furious and said, that I was sitting in the center of the car and she was driving absolutely straight and I had had a beer after eating a spaghetti dinner and I was not at all intoxicated. After I said that he let us go. Dona was scared, I was furious, and Frank was just in disbelief. Dona no longer lives in the USA. She has retired to Spain after working in UAE for many years. She is an ESL teacher. I find that Germans are often shocked at how racist the USA is, because Americans always claim the moral high ground globally, and particularly when it comes to Germans. Today I read a discussion in the NYT that Amanda Taub had with Anne Meng, a political scientist who studies autocracy. She said that she would not even code the USA as a democracy before 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. That is after WWII ended. Our democracy has not been in existence for very long and it still does not exist for everyone. Let us hope that this trial contributes to the desire on the part of the majority of Americans to be democratic.