Short Wave - Code Switch: A Decade Of Watching Black People Die

Episode Date: June 6, 2020

The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. So today, we're turning the mic over to our colleagues at NPR's Code Switch. Now, as always, they're doing really important work covering race and identity in the United States. In this episode, they spoke with Jamil Smith, who wrote the essay "What Does Seeing Black Men Die Do For You?" for The New Republic. Thank you for listening.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, everybody, Maddie Safai here. And I'm Emily Kwong. Bringing you a recent episode from our colleagues at NPR's Code Switch, a podcast which has been reporting on race and identity in America for four years this May. And they marked that anniversary with an episode about how all that's going on right now is not new to them. Not the protests over racial injustice, nor the outpouring of grief over violence against black people. So today, we are turning it over to Gene Demby and Shereen. Marisol Maragi, the hosts of Code Switch to put what's going on right now into historical context.

We promise you are in good hands with them. Okay, here's their episode. Just a heads up, this episode contains language and content that may be disturbing to some listeners. I'm Gene Demby. I'm Shirin Marisol Maragi, and this is Code Switch. From NPR. The family of a Kentucky woman shot and killed by police is demanding answers. The former cop and his son, both white, are accused.

of killing the unarmed black man. We begin with the breaking news from Minneapolis. Violent protests raged for a second straight night following the death of George Floyd after being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer. Last night, protesters turned their attention to the city's third. The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news, stories about police killing black people. And what is sick is that these stories have become the kind of news that we in the business call Evergreen.

They're stories that are always relevant and always in season. These calamities are so familiar at this point that their details have begun to echo each other. In July 2014, a cell phone video captured some of Eric Garner's final words as New York City police officers sat on his head and pinned him to the ground on a city sidewalk. I can't breathe. On May 25th of this year, those same words were spoken by George Floyd just before he died. he pleaded for release as an officer kneeled on his neck in pendums of the ground on a Minneapolis city street.

So we're at the point where the verbiage people use to plead for their lives can be repurposed as shorthand for completely different stories. And part of our job here at Code Switch is to contextualize and make sense of news like this. But Gene, it's hard to come up with something new to say, you know, things we haven't already said or things we haven't already recorded protesters saying when we were both in Ferguson

in August of 2014 after Michael Brown was killed by the police. Or when we were in Baltimore after Freddie Gray's death. I spent the day with junior high school kids in West Baltimore, where Freddie Gray was from on the first day they let kids return to school after all the protests. And I will never forget the eighth grade boy who raised his hand to ask, why have white people been killing us since slavery? And they're still killing us. He said that on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015.

Since it's so hard to come up with any fresh insights about this phenomenon, we thought we would look back to another time when the nation turned its collective attention to this perpetual problem. I'm Jamil Smith, senior writer for Rolling Stone magazine. And when I was at the New Republic, I wrote an article entitled, What does seeing black men die do for you? It was published on April 13, 2015.

We get to see black men tortured or killed by police a lot more often these days. So it's worth recalling why, a generation ago. It mattered so much to see what happened to Rodney King. Now the story that might never have surfaced if someone hadn't picked up his home video camera. We've all seen the picture. We had certainly seen the black and white photographs and videos depicting police abuse of African Americans. and we'd seen the grainy images of lynchings passed. But the conventional ignorance was that this wasn't the America we lived in now.

This was the early 90s, after all. This was in America that viewed law enforcement in the context of the popular reality show cops and where Morton Downey Jr.'s tabloid television style made uncensored aggression a form of entertainment. but when George Holliday's video surfaced. It signaled to a lot of citizens just how bad police violence visited upon marginalized communities actually was. Six kicks and one officer one kick.

People either didn't know what was happening or were willfully ignorant of it. They needed to wake up. The Los Angeles Police Department has a history of brutality and misconduct that goes back a quarter of a century. We are not sure that the police is there to protect us. The fear of becoming the next Rodney King is still here. But what has changed is how often we are viewing that fear being realized.

Jamil goes on to write that the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and dashboard cameras means this uncensored horror has become available on demand. He says he watched 22-year-old Oscar Grant get shot and killed by a police officer on YouTube before it made it to broadcast news. That happened in Oakland in 2009 on New Year's Day. And it really marked the beginning of this grim genre. In which the slain become memorialized as hashtags, hashtag, Justice for Oscar Grant.

And remember Walter Scott and Eric Harris? Jamil writes that the videos of them being killed became public almost back-to-back in 2015. Both men were running away when the shots were fired. Walter Scott, 50, was trying to escape North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, who shot him eight times in the back, before planning evidence near his body to support a false account of the incident. Eric Harris was running from a team of Tulsa County deputies when elderly insurance executive Robert Bates, whose donations to the sheriff's office and modicum of training earned him the title of reserve deputy. shot him dead.

Scott's death looks even more brazen than the inexcusable shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park last November. In fact, many of the videos carry eerie and terrible echoes of previous incidents. As an Oscar Grant III's death in 2009, Bates claimed he meant to pull his taser, not his gun, before shooting Harris. Eric Garner's futile cry was evoked when the mortally wounded Harris yelled, I'm losing my breath. Fuck your breath. Fuck your breath.

Bates's fellow deputy responded. The police dashboard video of Floyd Dent's traffic stop and Inkster, Michigan, three months ago, brought to mind the brutal beating of Rodney King. Officer William Melendez, as the tape shows, began beating Dent savagely, almost as soon as the 57-year-old motorist was pulled from his vehicle. He's seen punching Floyd Dent 16 times in just 10 seconds. Melendez was suspended for five days last Friday. And a report out of Detroit's ABC affiliate says he could lose his job.

Slager was fired by his department and charged with Scott's murder. Michael Slager was sentenced to 20 years in prison. We see these arrests and firings as victories in the struggle for black liberation from police violence. But how much will an oversaturation of videotaped black death move our justice system and government to action? Dozens of Rodney Kings haven't been enough to move the needle significantly.

The videos have helped spur civic protest, which surely have led to more media attention and perhaps legal action. But they haven't slowed the rate of killings, nor made the officers responsible more accountable. Instead, we face a continued insistence for many that we live in a properly policed America, despite video evidence. That rosy-hued narrative gets a boost from current and former law enforcement professionals like Howard Safier,

who came to the defense of good cops in Time magazine after Scott's death. Quote, our citizens gain nothing from demoralized police forces that believe they do not have public. support, unquote, wrote the former NYPD commissioner. Quote, demoralized forces will not be as effective as they can be, and that would have a tremendously negative impact on public safety, unquote. Keep in mind that we just watched an unarmed man gunned down from behind, then handcuffed and framed for an assault as he lay dying. It was later disclosed that Slager experienced an adrenaline rush from shooting.

And I'm supposed to be worried about whether the cop feels like I've got his back. Be pouring on the visuals and re-traumatizing ourselves, hoping it'll break through similarly reflexive defenses of law enforcement and inspire real reform. People like Fiden Santana, who recorded Scott's death, continue to risk their own safety to record these incidents and expose open wounds, literally, in the hopes that someone will do something. Corporate media outlets have grasped the importance, or at least the consumer appeal, of this footage. Activists, journalists, and concerned citizens continue to spread these images throughout social

media to alarm and inspire. To what end? After Scott's death, time-mastrored. magazine felt the need to declare on its cover that Black Lives Matter. That statement, still inspirational to many, can seem like an awfully low floor for social advancement. Black people have been telling the white power structure that I am a man since at least a 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. America has taken its sweet time in granting black victims this mild degree of humanization. But despite actually seeing the brutalization of our body,

and more vivid detail than ever before. The police and government have remained unmoved. I tremble to think what act or accompanying footage will be required for the powers that be to finally see what is going on. As I revisit this piece, a little bit more than five years after I wrote it, I'm astonished by how much of it I could put into a column today.

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Shireen. Gene. Code Switch. And we're back with Jemil Smith in terms of. 2015, he wrote, what does seeing black men die do for you? And he said that so much of that piece can be written using the same words today, five years later, especially the ender. America is still taking its sweet time and even recognizing our humanity in terms of its laws, in terms of its mores, in terms of its practices. And I say America in a larger sense, not simply.

the law enforcement folks who would spray tear gas on protesters, outraged by George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, lying, screaming for his mother and his life under the knee, the literal knee of law enforcement. These folks having tear gas shot at them during a pandemic that attacks our pulmonary system. a pandemic that's attacking black communities disproportionately. The power of that image, especially when juxtaposed when the armed demonstrators in Michigan, threatening lawmakers in an effort to essentially want to die faster or want the right to die faster is a real encapsulation of where we are in this country and the fact that we have not moved. an inch since these videos became so popular. So we have to understand what is their value? When are we going to see the kind of change that this kind of shock and awe should be provoking?

If I were allowed to change anything five years after writing this column, I realize that there are a lot of contemporary references within it. And I think that's helpful for people who are reading it at the time. However, the reference to being next Rodney King, it almost seems antiquated at this point. I think that, yes, my generation, Generation X, was afraid of being the next Rodney King. And I think that perhaps I based it a little bit too much in my own experience. I do think that there should have been maybe a little bit more grounding in the historical nature of how our bodies have been treated as souvenirs. And our deaths have been treated as something to be celebrated or even traded amongst people as postcards and pictures of our lynchings traded amongst the spectators, parts of our bodies after being flayed and burned. traded and sent to people and kept by the murderers.

I think that when you look at these videos and you understand how little of an impact they've made on the policies required to make what's happening in those videos stop happening, those souvenirs. They don't really do much else other than traumatize us. The title of my column from April 2015 refers specifically to black men.

And at that time, we'd only seen videos of black men dying or being accosted by the police. Of course, later we saw Sandra Bland, and we've seen so many other cases of black women who have been victimized, who have been brutalized, and who have been killed by police most often for no reason whatsoever, for no charge filed. Brianna Taylor in Kentucky has not received nearly the amount of press coverage or attention or even protest that George Floyd has in Minneapolis. The reasons for that may be traceable, of course, to gender. Are they also traceable to the fact that there was no video of the incident? Is this a case where video has relevance? These are things that we should be discussing. And I think we'd be foolish to dismiss gender as the primary cause of that.

I think certainly, you know, we have normalized violence against women and against transgender women specifically to a point that is absurd. You know, the death of Nina Pop from stabbing earlier this year barely got any notice. And she was about the 10th or 11th victim of transgender violence in America this year. and we're not talking about it. We're not discussing this as an epidemic in our society. Why not? I think that, you know, everybody who is listening needs to go and look up these people. Look at their names.

Look up their stories. Understand what happened to them. I will defer judgment on whether or not this is going to be the moment that finally everyone will understand exactly. what's happening in the black communities around this country with regards to policing and over-policing and militarized policing. After Ferguson, it's hard to hold your breath. It's hard to hold your breath when, you know, a 12-year-old kid gets gunned down with a toy gun

in the city that you grew up in, as was the case for me with Timir Rice. and the city kind of just kind of shrugs and everyone moves on. Tamir Rice would have been 18 in June. And America moves on. America moves forward. I think to a large extent, white power structure waits for us as black people, especially to quiet down, settle down, to get it out of our system in terms of unrest or in terms of online protests.

I'll be writing my column and that moment will happen. But whether or not it will result in any concrete change is really up to people who may be least involved with the trauma. It matters whether or not people who are not affected by this do something. This episode was produced by Kumari David Rajan and just Congress. with help from Natalie Escobar. It was edited by Leah Dinella and Shereen. Shout out to the rest of the Coates, Codeswich fam, Karen Grigsby-Bates,

Alyssa Jong Perry, L.A. Johnson, and Steve Drummond. Our interns are Diane Lugo and Isabella Rosario. I'm Gene Demby. And I'm Shireen, Marisol Maragi. Be easy. Peace.

How do we reinvent ourselves? And what's the secret to living longer? I'm Anousa Zameroody, each week on NPR's TED Radio Hour, we go on a journey with TED speakers to seek a deeper understanding of the world and to figure out new ways to think and create. Listen now.