It’s Never Enough

Whenever a police officer shoots an innocent black person, one of the first reactions is that the black person “should have just listened to the officer.” In the past, I’ve immediately jumped on those arguments as stupid and having a clear lack of empathy.

But now I’ve started to realize that people don’t say that because they don’t understand the situation, it’s because they don’t want to understand the situation. It’s a lot easier to convince yourself that there was sound reasoning behind the death of an innocent black man than it is to grapple with the truth of racism in this country. We live in a country where we believe that police are there to help. We don’t want that image to change, and because of that we shift focus to the victim’s faults. We want to think of police executions as anomalies, not everyday occurrences. We want to think that being a good person and listening to the officer should be enough to stop us from being harmed.

But as we saw with the shooting of Philando Castile, there’s no amount of compliance that is adequate. Philando Castile was shot four times for informing the officer that he had a (legal) gun and showing the officer the ID that had been requested. He did everything right, yet he was still murdered while his four-year-old daughter watched in the backseat.

Following all of the recent police shootings has been difficult. It’s happened with such a frequency that it is emotionally tiring. I try to tell myself that I will keep up to date with every single police shooting I hear about, but with the rate at which they’re happening, it’s impossible. It’s hard to see every update and detail of a case when one seems to happen every day. The killing of Trayvon Martin struck a chord with me, but with each killing that happens, it gets harder to have the same level of understanding of how truly tragic they are.

Every time I feel myself becoming numb to the tragedies at hand, I think about how easily the man on the ground could be me. There’s no amount of books I can read, NPR I can listen to, or white friends I can have that will stop a police officer from only seeing my dark skin.

And as I saw Alton Sterling’s fifteen-year-old son crying at a press conference, I could only see myself. I could only reflect on the day where a ten-year-old me saw an officer — gun pointed — scream at my dad to step out of the car as my dad asked to take his seatbelt off. I can only help but think of how I could be the one crying onstage if my dad hadn’t gotten lucky that day. I saw the pain and anguish that black people in this country are never completely safe from.

Ever since I was young, my family told me that if I ever got into an altercation with a police officer, I should do whatever they ask. But all of the graves of innocent black men prove that obedience doesn’t matter, only luck does.