Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD - Listen Now - Scene on Radio: Danger

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Sharing an episode from Scene on Radio's acclaimed Season 2 series, Seeing White, by John Biewen and featuring Empire City host and creator, Chenjerai Kumanyika. For centuries, white supremacist U.S. culture has raised the specter of the dangerous Black man. Biewen tells the story of a confrontation with a Black teenager, then he and Kumanyika discuss that well-worn narrative and its neglected flip-side: the harrowing history of white-on-Black violence. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey y'all, what's going on? It's Chinjirai. First of all, I want to thank y'all so much for listening to Empire City. We're getting so much great feedback. I hope you keep spreading the word. And today, I'm excited to share this bonus episode with you. It's from a collaboration I did a few years back with the podcast Seen On Radio. If you don't know, Seen On Radio was an incredible show hosted by John Beewin. He and his collaborators do deeply research, story-driven, historical dives into big questions like where did ideas of whiteness or white supremacy even come from in the first place or patriarchy or like how democratic was America even supposed to be? The show's latest season is called Capitalism. It tells the story of the world's dominant

economic system and considers what should we do now that a lot of people see that capitalism isn't working for most people or other living things. You should absolutely check it out. But we chose this episode of Seen on Radio to share with you today. It's from the 2017 series Seeing White and it's about crime, violence and racism which makes it a good fit for Empire City. And by the way I show up in the second half from Seen on Radio season 2 this is Danger. Hey this is John Beehan it's Seen on Radio this is part 11 of our ongoing series Seeing White. Looking at whiteness, where it came from and what it's for.

The thing about seeing white, and here I mean not our series but the actual seeing of white, of whiteness. The thing about seeing white is that it changes how you see so many things. Politics, good lord. I am the law and order candidate. You can't watch movies the same way. The sky people have sent us a message. Here's the white hero in Avatar taking charge of the tribal people of Pandora. You know, to save them. You ride out as fast as a wind can carry you.

Come out, Tony Wind, and not this bivouleh up hell. You ride out as fast as a wind can carry you. Come out on the wind. I'm not a spew-le-o-pel. You tell the other clans to come. I-o-lo-lo-a-la-he-pen-see-va-oo. Or sports, if you watch sports. There's a racially loaded slice of American life. Flynn flips it up and puts it in Jeremy Lin once again. He has been a surprise in the first half!

But really, is there a corner of American life that's not racially loaded? Ice cream, maybe. Everybody just loves ice cream, plain and simple, even if you're vegan and not actually eating it anymore. Doesn't matter if you're black, brown, red, yellow, or plain vanilla like me. Right, so much vanilla like me. Right?

So much for ice cream. No doubt this is why a lot of folks, especially white folks, would rather not see white. It complicates things. Even in our own individual lives, get to know a little more history, get a richer sense of what race is and how it works, and moments in your present and your past can take on new meanings. Take a story that you sometimes tell, this thing that happened. It's one of your better stories in a life not all that eventful, frankly. You've told

it to friends over the years. You get to seeing white and it changes on you. For my last bit tonight, I'm going to just stand here and tell a story, which is not something I usually do. As I said, the show is usually pretty produced, so I feel a little naked. That's a recording of a live show here in Durham, North Carolina, late last year. A few of us podcasters based here in the Triangle got together and did this show at Motorco Music Hall. I was working on stories for Seeing Light at the time and I thought I might use this one in the project somehow, this personal

story, so I told it on stage that night. I don't want to say I was naive as I walked down that street in a rough part of West Philadelphia in 1986, the height of the crack epidemic and gang violence in American cities, pushing a pretty good 12-speed bicycle that was worth a few hundred dollars. I was 25. I'd lived most of my life up to that point in small towns in Minnesota, not places where you're worried about walking down any street at any time. Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking,

and all the aggression is passive. I'm going to step in here with an apology. As I'm recording this today it's about a week after the verdict in the trial of Geronimo Yanez, the cop in suburban Minneapolis who killed Philando Castile. My glib line there about passive aggression in Minnesota. It's a twist on a line Garrison Keeler used every week in the public radio show, Prairie Home Companion. Somehow I don't think Philando's mother Valerie Castile or his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds or his

little daughter who watched him get shot to death would find it funny. I'm sorry. Alright, back to West Philadelphia, 1986. I'm walking down that street pushing my bike because I've just quit graduate school roughly two or three weeks into a PhD program. Decided very suddenly and decisively that I don't want to be an academic philosopher after all. That's another whole story that I'm not telling. So I'm leaving town and I'm leaving on a plane and so my largest personal possession,

my bicycle, needs to be shipped. And in order to ship it, I need a bicycle box. So I call, I look in the yellow pages and find a bike shop about a mile away, call them up, guy says, yeah, we have a bike box you can have, come on over. I'm renting a room along with half dozen other grad students in a big Victorian house on the edge of things, you might say, of a gentrifying neighborhood. One block in one direction and beyond, yuppies and investors bought up all the, it's beautiful, Victorians and spruced them up

and were living in them or renting them to students. One block the other way and beyond, this had not happened, it was very poor, almost all black. The streets were not considered safe in that direction. In fact, in the five weeks I lived in that house, it was broken into twice, and the owner had just put bars on the windows as I was getting ready to leave town. The bike shop that I was going to was in that direction, the rough direction. So it's a nice

September morning. I ride my bike over to the bike shop. The trip to the shop was uneventful, so my memories of it are sketchy. I do remember riding down the middle of a street because there were no cars in sight. I passed a young black guy about my age. He was on a bike too, I think. I remember being a little nervous, paying close attention to what's going on around me, because let's face it, I stick out in this neighborhood. I'm thinking, it'll be okay. Hope it'll be okay.

I get to the shop and pick up the box, and now I'm headed back, but I have to walk now, because a bike box is big and unwieldy, this long flat wide thing, and I can't carry it while riding. So I've got the box pinned against my body with one arm and I'm pushing my bike with the other. Once I get off the commercial street where the bike shop is, it's residential and there's almost no one in the streets

It's a beautiful sunny peaceful autumn day It's all good. I've got a pleasant stroll ahead of me When I first see the two kids they are Half a block behind me and on the other side of the street. Not sure why I even look back and notice them there. They are walking in my direction. They seem to be looking in my direction, maybe just curious about the strange white guy in the neighborhood.

They're young, you know, barely younger end of the teenage years. They are black teenage boys, but I'm not a racist racist so I'm not making any assumptions. I turn a corner and keep walking. It happens pretty fast after that. When I look back again, the kids have crossed to my side of the street and they're noticeably closer. It really kind of looks like they're following me now. I could still be wrong. I take a few more steps and look again and at this point one of the kids, the shorter of the two, has separated himself from his buddy.

He's practically speed walking towards me and there's something in his hand. He's maybe only about 10 yards away.. I can see the blade from here. It's about six inches long. Now in thinking back on this incident over the years, I've had a few questions from my 25-year-old self. One comes up here, a few of you may be having this question, which is, at this moment, why not just drop the damn box, which is literally worthless, jump on your bicycle, and disappear?

The answer, I'm afraid, is not very interesting. It's basically that sometimes I'm not too bright. Much later, I thought, oh, that's what I could have done. At that moment, I guess I was focused on my goal or maybe not thinking too sharply having seen that knife. So I walk on and now I'm thinking shit now what? But and I see up ahead of me amongst the houses a few doors ahead there's a bigger kind of institutional looking building it's got a sign out front I can make it out with this, you know Hillcrest or something. It's a nursing home. I think okay

Maybe a place I can duck into if if I can get there Trouble is the kid is Coming up alongside of me now. He's right there on the other side of my bike Walking beside me he's jiggling the knife in his hand. And he says, give me the bike. He is 14, maybe 13. And you know how some adolescents, puberty comes early. They have the bodies of men. This is not, not this kid. He looked like I did at that age. He's a boy. A boy with a knife and some attitude. He's looking kind of determined and a little aggressive but also a little unsure. I

imagine maybe he was sizing me up and thinking, you know, if this collegiate looking white dude thinks he can waltz through this neighborhood with a nice bike, maybe it's because he's a martial arts badass or something. I was not and I'm not a badass. I had no thoughts of fighting my way out of this situation. No interest in going hand to hand combat with anybody with a knife in their hand, including a kid a foot shorter than me. I had no plan whatsoever.

And yet, for some reason, when he says again, give me the bike, I find myself shaking my head and saying, no, I'm not going to give you the bike. So we're walking now side by side. Now we're almost to the nursing home. It's right there, 15 feet away, maybe. He sees what I have in mind.

He hustles ahead, turns and plants himself in the doorway, and holds up his knife. I stop, as you might imagine. And there we are face to face. His knife is a foot or two from my chest. This moment probably lasts a few seconds, no more, but it's frozen in my memory. Scary black kids in the inner cities are big in the news at that time. The murder rate rose through the 70s and Ronald Reagan's in the White House sounding the alarm.

But then there's this actual kid right in front of me. Let's give him a name. Michael. Michael has a round face, short hair. I look into his eyes. He stares back at me. And before I'm aware of making any kind of decision, I find I'm taking one step to the side and then forward alongside him, pushing my bike and still hauling my box and just kind

of sliding past him and his knife into the entryway of the nursing home. He doesn't stab me. He doesn't follow. Once I'm inside and I call out, hey can I get some help here? There's a kid with a knife. Michael, who's still standing in the doorway, says, what a pussy. After a minute he and his friend slowly wander off. The folks in the nursing home called the cops for me. An hour later a policeman came, took me and my stuff back to the house. The officer was a middle-aged black man. He asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, walking through that neighborhood with a bike.

And he shook his head and he said, it's a lost generation. I think he was talking about the kid, not me, but I'm not entirely sure about that. Went home, put the bike in the box, taped it up, shipped it off to Minnesota. And 30 years later, I still own that bike here in Durham. And from time to time, I've told this story over the years, at dinner parties and things like that.

But it's never really had a point. It was just, makes a decent story, kind of a weird, scary thing. Did I ever tell you about the time I got held up at Knife Point, blah, blah, blah. Did I ever tell you about the time I got held up at knife point blah blah blah But in thinking about it now with Given the way I see things now and maybe having a little more

Information and having become a little more thoughtful about what it means to be black and to be white in America a couple things that seem worth saying. Yeah, first one more question for my young self. Why was I so blase about going into that high crime so called inner city neighborhood in the first place, thinking I could walk safely out of it pushing a valuable object in plain sight. I'd say part of my confidence was just reasonable. By now I've spent time in a number of quote-unquote bad neighborhoods, mostly because of my work, and I would venture into just about any American neighborhood on a weekday morning. Walking through that one in

West Philly probably would have gone fine nine times out of ten. But if I look straight and hard at what was in my head that day, I see other things now. I'd grown up in a world that always felt safe for me, and even though the whole country was obsessing about all the gangs and drugs and violence in cities like Philadelphia in the 1980s, I still carried my habitual bulletproof feeling. I was used to a world that kept me safe and I just didn't believe that world would let me down regardless of where I went. And again thinking back on what was in my head that day there's something more cringeworthy. I think I expected to get credit for displaying my lack of fear,

my non-racist, non-profiling swellness. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I imagined folks in the neighborhood looking at me admiringly, even gratefully. Damn, look at that. There goes one of the good white folks. Coming through, not believing the hype about us in our neighborhood. Forget mugging that guy. Give him a round of applause. So yeah, I was naive. Arrogant in a way. Presumptuous. I was pretty white.

Here's the other thing to say from my perspective now. In the story as I've told it over the years, I'm the one in danger. Right? The kid is the threat. I'm his potential victim. And in that moment, yes, he had a weapon. He was threatening me. He could have hurt me.

But isn't it fair to say, of the two of us meeting on that street that day, in our everyday lives, Michael was by far the more vulnerable person. To say that, I don't need to know anything more about his life besides the fact that he was a black teenager living in that neighborhood. A place like so many others created with systematic inevitability by the history of exploitation and exclusion we've been talking about in this series. Here was a community of black people just a few generations removed from slavery, still struggling to find a way in, still pretty much walled off from the life of safety and

opportunity that I took for granted. This is not about letting Michael personally off the hook. It's about finding his existence and his attempt that day understandable. I came down his street with my awkward burden, like a wounded wildebeest limping across the plane, and he did a dumb thing, a wrong thing, trying to get something he could sell. But if he'd done violence to me, the hammer would have come down on him. And he knew that. It didn't take any great bravery to make the instinctive decision I made, to hold onto

my bike and push past him. It just took looking into Michael's brown eyes in that moment. If I'd seen real anger, real hatred, someone itching to stab somebody. But I didn't. I didn't see a killer. I thought I saw in those eyes that he knew how things were. How little power he had compared to me. He knew, and I knew that he knew. Michael and I were both young Americans, but I'd walked into his America

from an entirely different one. I didn't grow up really privileged by white people standards. My dad was a high school teacher in that Minnesota town. My mom worked sporadically while raising five kids. They genuinely struggled to pay the bills. But my folks had college degrees. We were middle class white Americans with books in the house. There was never any doubt my siblings and I would go to college.

The road was nicely paved for me. And here I was in my 20s trying to figure out my new path now that I'd decided that the Academy would not be sufficiently fulfilling to me personally. Michael and I lived in a country designed from its beginnings that the Academy would not be sufficiently fulfilling to me personally. Michael and I lived in a country designed from its beginnings and ever since to keep one of us safe, to help one of us thrive, to give one of us choices. I wonder how he is now. I hope he's doing well. I wonder how he is now.

I hope he's doing well. John. Change your eye. How's it going? It's going well, man, you know. I live in Philadelphia now and thinking about what happened to you. There's a lot of things I could say that would be kind of typical for this kind of conversation. Like, I could apologize to you for what happened. Since all black people are accountable for, you know,

what that young man did. And because the violence against white people is of course the ultimate tragedy. Yes. But this is the Seeing White podcast, and you know we don't get down like that. That's right. Chenjirai Kumanika, Assistant Professor in the Rutgers University Department of Media Studies. He's also a journalist, organizer, and artist.

In most of the episodes of the Seeing White series, he joins me to talk things through and keep me honest. All right, you've told this story in the past to friends, right? And I'm guessing they're white friends mostly, right? Yep, most are all, yes. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that these were good white people.

Absolutely. Like, to a person. That's the only kind of white person I hang with. All right. Keep it that way. But I'm genuinely curious. What kind of conversations do good white people have about this kind of thing when black people aren't around? Because I don't have access to that. So how do people react to you telling the story?

Yeah, I guess, you know, what I would say and what from my memory is that the conversations are pretty superficial, kind of like the story itself as I typically told it. Now, there's this whole unspoken backdrop of a story like this, of the centuries old image of the dangerous black man threatening us more civilized white people. And so they're in the story, there I go, venturing into the dangerous neighborhood, the metaphorical jungle.

And sure enough, I have this encounter with this young African-American guy and his weapon, but that's all kind of unspoken. And the people that I would have told this to in the past are not the sort of people who are gonna then proceed to say racist stuff, as I did not. Making some comment about, well, see, there you go. That's how those people, it's not like that.

Right. But it also typically in my memory didn't lead to any kind of deeper analysis or even acknowledgement. It's sort of a gee whiz response. So that's a hell of a thing to experience. Or maybe it's kind of, what were you thinking? Why didn't you just give the kid the damn bike? Or, you know, sort of a, you know,

just at the kind of surface level of the actual story. And so, and that's, I guess in a way, what I'm fessing up to here is that I told the story in that spirit too, just as an interesting yarn of something that happened with all that racial and historical freight sort of hanging in the air, but not really acknowledged and talked about directly

so I guess that's kind of my point here is to Confess to that and to try to address some of the stuff that I've left out when I've told it at dinner parties or whatever Yeah, and I mean I think it's good good that you wanna look more deeply at that backdrop, right? Look at this and look at the white supremacist political and economic history that created that neighborhood in Philly. And to imagine, you know, why this guy that we're gonna call Michael

might've made some of the choices he made. Because ultimately, you know, my thing, when we as a society create situations where a huge group of folks exist in a daily state of insecurity and unsafety, nobody really can expect to be safe. And I guess given that kind of condition of disparity and exploitation, should we really expect to be safe, any of us. But if I could put on my professor hat for one second, given everything that we've talked about, what do you think is actually missing from

the conversations that you might have been having when you told the story? You know, in thinking about this and very much in the spirit of the Seeing White project, and we've talked about throughout this project about sort of turning the lens around and looking at, you know, that usually when we look at race in America, that means looking at people of color and what's going on with them, with you. And that this, in this project, we're turning and looking at white people. And in that spirit, in this case, I wanted to talk about the flip side. We can come back to the, you know, to the trope of the, of the scary, violent black male. And I want us to do that. And the specter of black on white violence and of course, black on black

violence, which is a favorite topic of a lot of white folks. But I also want to talk about the body count on the other side which we really don't talk about in this country. Ah you're talking about the weaponized whiteness, white on black violence. White on black violence. You just don't hear that phrase a lot, do you, in the news media? No, no. Or in school or in the history books. And as I was thinking about it,

a mental image kind of came to me without sort of uninvited, and it's an awful image, but maybe it's useful for this conversation. Picture a gigantic scale, right? On one side the bodies of white people killed by black people throughout history in this part of the world. Okay, on the other side of the scale the bodies of black people killed by white people in the United States and colonial America

in the last 400 years, right? It's grotesquely out of balance, of course. Yeah, you know, that's a good, I mean, that's a horrible image, but sometimes having an image like that is useful. And let me say, again, I mean, I'm in favor of creating conditions in which we all are equally safe or at least where the risk is more distributed

more equally. But since you mentioned that, I mean I would say you know yeah we have to think about that and I think one of the first things we have to do is we have to we have to think a little bit And I think one of the first things we have to do is we have to think a little bit more broadly about what we're gonna call violence because some of the most potent forms of violence are institutionalized things that organize people's lives and they kill in a slow and diffused way that actually touches maybe even more people.

And so I do think we have to call those things violence. And we've talked about some of those things, but I think we could just think about slavery and all the different types of physical violence that happen within slavery. I mean, there's, you got, I think around the, by the time of the Civil War, there's four million human beings enslaved in this country.

And you know, there's just like, you can't even quantify how many black millions of black people had their lives stolen during their lives in that 200 plus years of chattel slavery. I mean, it's massive scale of violence. Absolutely. And I don't know, I actually tried to find figures, estimates of if you were to add up all the human beings who lived their lives enslaved in the United States and in colonial America, how many people is that? And I actually couldn't find an estimate like that, but there are some other numbers that shed some light on that that I looked up.

Historians estimate that 10 to 15 million African people were captured by slave traders in the Atlantic slave trade between the early 1500s and the 1860s. Now, that's counting the Caribbean and South American slave trades, which actually account for the vast majority of those people who were actually Captured in Africa only about five percent of that total came to North America Most of the black people who lived as slaves here in the US over the centuries were born here So most of those four million right in

1860 were, you know, were people who had been born here over many generations. But back to the captured African people, the estimate is that up to 40 or 50% of those people died before they ever really lived as slaves. So between the time they were captured and their captivity on the African shore, the Middle Passage, of course, which killed many, many people, and the process of being broken

and tortured into slavery in the New World. In looking up this, in doing this research, I came across a word I had never heard before that slave owners called it seasoning. There's a euphemism for the ages. The process of breaking someone down and acclimating them was another term to slavery after stealing them from their lives across the sea.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, the numbers get a little bit higher when you start thinking about, well, a lot higher, you start thinking about the difference between the enslaved people that were brought into the United States and more people, you know, brought into, you know, like the Latin American Caribbean.

Right. And, you know, but I mean, if you're looking at the death toll that you talked about, around two million or so. But people who survive, they also have shorter lives. And I mean, it's just hard to quantify. So even for the four million blacks that were here by the mid-19th century, it's estimated like half of their babies died.

You know, things like that. And then there's like the violence, because we're counting violence, right? We're like building this image that you have. So then you have the violence of separating families from each other. I mean, I think people know that, but you know, I really,

I've really been thinking about that lately, what that means to have your children constantly under threat and actually being physically taken away, wives and husbands and mothers and, you know, that's a special kind of violence there. And then of course there's lynching, right? So during slavery and then after slavery

onto Reconstruction you have that kind of racial terrorism. White people lynched over close to 5,000 African Americans during the Civil War in the middle of the 20th century. And those are just the ones that you could document. The real number, I mean, all these people who disappeared and were murdered without any kind of real accountability in the 18th and 19th centuries,

and even in the 20th century, those aren't even counted in those numbers. So these are the ones that we can sort of document. And a lot of us, I mean, I know that there's people feel like they have heard some of these numbers before, but I think that a lot of us repeat these numbers and kind of rehearse this because there never has really been a real attempt to account for this

and to acknowledge the scale of violence against black people. Yeah, I really agree with that and that's why I think it's worth having this conversation. I can imagine that there are people who would hear this conversation and say, oh my God, there they go again. Now, haven't we heard enough about this?

And I think the answer to that question is absolutely not. Because even though, to the extent that slavery gets mentioned and talked about and acknowledged, it's usually just that one word. It's this sort of big abstract concept and we don't have in our minds, we have in our minds, for example, that six million Jews died in the Holocaust,

but we don't have in our minds that, I think most people don't know, I wouldn't have known if I didn't look this up, how many people were enslaved when the Civil War started or any of these kinds of estimates of how many people or any of these kinds of estimates of how many people died or, you know, had their lives stolen from them in these ways. We don't get presented with it in a way that even begins, I think, to get across the scale of the crime against humanity. Yeah, but I mean, I think this is really important, you know, if we're going to look at the context

of black people being understood as essentially violent, like where somehow essentially violence is a part of us and that the primary fear that we should be concerned about in society is the fear of black folks, some massive black violence on white people. It's in that context, especially, that you have to think about this other, why it's relevant to bring that back up and say, well, if we're gonna essentialize. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you know, let's, like you said, let's do a different kind of accounting. I mean, the fact is that there's nothing remotely comparable to these things, this mass killing and violence that has been done by white people against black people. There's nothing comparable on the other side of the ledger. And yet, right, for centuries now white folks have been telling ourselves and each other that you all are the ones to be feared. Now, here in 2017, it is the case that black folks commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes in the United States today. And I looked up

a statistic or two on this topic from the federal government. Black folk commit over half of robberies and murders and almost half of the assaults in the nation's biggest metropolitan areas, though African Americans are only about 15% of the population in those places. Now that doesn't mean that white people are justified in being scared when they walk past a black person somewhere, right? The vast majority of violent crimes committed both by black people and by white people are against people they know, people in their communities, people who look like them.

90% of homicides committed by black people are against black people and likewise 83% of white homicide victims are killed by a white person. Right. You know, a woman named Afiya Nangwaza taught me to call that interpersonal violence, you know, because that takes this racialized stigma out of it, you know. I mean, and that violence, it hurts. I mean, I've seen seen the pain that victims and families have to go through, whether they're black or white

or Latino or whatever, you know, your identity is, violence is serious, and I don't wanna, I understand if you've been a victim of this violence, it's like you don't wanna just write it off like, you know, it doesn't matter. But the truth is is that the higher crime rate among black folks is also a socioeconomic problem. And the Bureau of Justice statistics says

poor urban white people and poor urban black people have similar rates of violence. So again, you put people in certain conditions and it doesn't matter what their ethnicity is, they're gonna, you know, that you're gonna have certain phenomenon of interpersonal violence. I mean, this is proven. Also, you have riots, right? That's another thing that there's a history of white riots of various kinds that can also be linked to certain kinds of economic conditions. The problem is that there's disproportionately

more black people than poor white people, which goes back, I mean, at least in terms of the, you know, relative to the larger population, which, and that is linked to this history of exploitation that we've been talking about here. So, you know, exclusion from resources, from, you know, government housing resources, from government housing practices, all these things that have produced that.

So, again, you create that kind of condition where folks are insecure, and black folks are disproportionately in that situation, and then what results from that is then looked at as the cause as opposed to the result. Chenjurai, have you watched the dash cam video of Philando Castile being shot that came out the other day? I have not. I didn't watch it man. I you know I've watched these videos and I've you know I've marched and I feel like eventually I'm gonna have to watch it

because I don't think that as someone who's alive and has the ability to work against us I think eventually I do have to face it but I just couldn't when I saw that, when I saw that there was that video I mean I read descriptions of it but I was like I just can't it's just something, you know, I just I knew I couldn't, I couldn't see it and actually I wonder what what is the effect of watching so many of these

videos and they're being shared I mean I think it's important on one level but this there's something that starts to become unhealthy about about about that. So I haven't seen that video yet. I watched it and you know, it's clear that what we have is a society in which if a police officer says, says they were afraid. And I guess I don't have any, it appears that officer Jan is lost his cool completely that he that he was terrified. In that moment, pull out his gun and fired off seven shots. But that we have a

society in which if an officer says they were afraid then that's all that's that's that settles the issue. Whether they had any justification or not for that fear. If the person's black at least and you say you're afraid then we believe you and and it's all good and that's what judges and juries say again and again. Yeah, if a black person is,

if someone else feels threatened by a black person of color, a black person, then they are, yeah, they're responsible for whatever happens to them. Yeah. That's the message. And then not just the message, I mean, it's basically the law at this point because it's been reproduced. There's so much precedent for it

that it operates as a kind of law. And you know, as a white guy, having these conversations with you and this one in particular, I, for what it's worth, which is probably nothing. But I'll say it anyway, I just feel very humbled about my ability to, to imagine, to imagine what it must be like to be on the other side of that divide. I can intellectually understand that you see these things happen and know that you could be next, that Philando Castile did nothing whatsoever to deserve being shot by a police officer aside from being a black man, and that he'd been pulled over 46 times before that, before this terrible thing happened.

And I know intellectually that that would not happen to me, just as I know that my son, who recently made it to the ripe old age of 18, could go out of our house when he was 12 or 13 with his airsoft gun, sort of like the gun that Tamir Rice had in that park in Cleveland. Oh yeah, Tamir Rice. And it would have never occurred to me in a million years to tell my son not to do that, not to go out with his toy gun

because a police officer might drive up and shoot him dead. It wouldn't occur to me to tell him that because in fact, it would not happen. No cop of any color would do that to my son. Um, and I know that the way that I know the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning. Um, so I, you know, to say that I can imagine how in the East tomorrow morning. So, you know, to say that I can imagine how it feels to be on the other side of that, I just wouldn't be honest, I can't. How it feels to be on the other side of that is,

it's horrible, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, I mean, every lie. Every time I get pulled over by the police, I'm conscious that I don't even have to do anything dramatic. It could just, if the person feels, it's a subtle shift in my tone, certain body language could escalate to the point very quickly. I could feel the beats that would lead to me, you know, could be me being killed, you know.

And so I'm aware of that. You could tell the police officers are aware of it. They're aware of the power of the precedent of the law and these decisions that are behind them. So that's yeah that's not a good feeling but I kind of you know a lot of times in these conversations when we get into talking about how we feel about this I feel like there's almost like this moment of catharsis that happens where we we try to feel and I Worry about that because I wonder that after if that feeling sometimes we try to walk away from that because now we felt do

We try to connect or we felt Philando Castile's mother's pain or diamond Reynolds pain. It's like You know, I'm less interested in I mean, I'm interested we got a feel you know, we're human less interested in, I mean, I'm interested, we got to feel, you know, we're human. But my thing is, what are we going to do? How do we allow this kind of system to remain in place? And cause we're talking about people who recoil from that violence, but they also recoil, I mean, when I'm, you know, a lot of us recoil from the idea of a radical rethinking of the system that's called a criminal justice system. You know people are comfortable with tweaks in it, people are comfortable with police training,

body cams, those kinds of things. Even as the research comes out and shows you, I mean like how much footage do you need to realize that the video isn't what's doing it. I'm glad we have the footage. But how are we comfortable with this system? I mean, there's a resistance. I mean, people feel a lot, but there's a resistance to actually concluding that the system that's called the criminal justice system

has to be radically rethought at a fundamental level that goes far beyond body cams and things like that. And I don't know if it's because people have family that are police officers, but I don't know if it's just, you know, people don't wanna, people sense that the lifting of really transforming the system. But the thing about it is, you know, so in a way,

I mean, you didn't necessarily ask me how I feel, but I am curious about, or the question that I want, so we're talking about whiteness, the question I want white folks to carry with them is like, what is that resistance really all about? Because it wouldn't take very many white people to actually transform the system, to end this, actually. I think it would take very few relative to how many white folks there are. And I think no one is waiting for white folks to do it.

Organizers, I think black folks have gotten the message, like if we wait for white folks to change these things, it's like don't hold your breath. Thanks, Chenjirai Kumanika. Our editor is Loretta Williams. Next time, an African-American photographer and her photo essay, My White Friends, turning the lens literally.

Music in this episode by Sometimes Why, Lee Rosevere, and Blue Dot Sessions. If you're new to the show and the series, by all means go back and listen to what you missed. The earlier episodes in the series go pretty deeply into history and help explain how we got here. Like our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter at SceneOnRadio. The website is SceneOnRadio.org. The show comes to you from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.