This is Why They Kneel: Jordan Edwards

Jordan’s picture has haunted me even more than they usually do. Because you can see it, can’t you? The spirit, the humor, the warmth, the potential. All that potential. Shot dead in front of his brothers for something that probably would have produced a police warning, if that, had the kids been white.

But you know the story, right? I don’t need to set it up for you. We read them all the time. We even see videos of them, unarmed Black people running or begging. And then the gunshots, always multiple gunshots. I think Jordan took five.

He was fifteen years old.

This old story, though, has a new ending. And I’m praying that this different ending births different stories. Stories where the police officer takes a deep breath, thinks twice, or maybe just doesn’t aim for the head. The officer might not imagine Jordan’s face, but maybe he or she will see their own child’s face, or perhaps an image of a white police officer being escorted out of a courtroom in handcuffs, headed for prison.

I pray that the conviction of Roy Oliver in Texas today — sixty-three years to the day since fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman — will be a new beginning. I know, I’m a radical optimist. But someday I hope to live in a country where Black boys can go out with their friends without worrying about getting abused, searched, insulted, beaten, or murdered.

This is why they kneel, Mr. President.

Jordan Edwards: Rest in Peace and Power

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Wake Up, White People

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

— Benjamin Franklin

It is time, white people. It is well past time. We can pretend that we are “unaffected” by police violence against people of color in America, or we can be outraged. Those are the only two options I see. Because you can’t watch the video of the police swarming all over Eric Garner in Staten Island and see it as anything other than homicide.

There are no questions, no conflicting accounts as there were in Ferguson; it’s all on video. As is the aftermath where six or seven officers, presumably trained in CPR, stand around watching Eric die on the sidewalk. One goes through his pockets. Another pats his shoulder and gives him the encouraging advice to “Breathe in, breathe out.” How sweet.

Parallel Universe

When I heard that the Staten Island grand jury would bring no charges, I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me — like I was the one pleading, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And I don’t have brown or black kids. I have a lot of friends who do, though, and I can’t imagine how they must feel every time their child walks out the door.

Meanwhile, my white Facebook friends are “outraged” at the latest changes in Facebook privacy policies, or else super-excited because Safeway has whole shopping carts full of candy bars for only a buck. I look around to see if I’ve crossed into a parallel universe. Haven’t they heard the news? I don’t even have a TV, and I heard the news.

But no, life in the white world goes on as before.

But not entirely.

Signs of Humanity

One white girlfriend calls in tears, partly hopeful because there are people demonstrating in the streets all over the country, and partly distraught because of “what has happened to our country.” She has made a sign for her window that says simply, ERIC.

Another white friend who teaches at an elite private school struggles “to justify teaching the structure of a sonnet when there seems to be no structure in the world —or when it seems that the structures that do exist appall and offend you.” I wish more people had his soft heart, where “simply falling asleep in secure comfort feels viciously calloused, knowing there are people dying wrongfully at the hands of others while the world looks on and declares No harm, No foul.”

A Facebook friend asks, “Where is the fierce urgency of now among my fellow white liberal base? The cultural state of the country feels more dire than at any time in my lifetime.” (I might add, where is the conservative base that’s supposed to care about individual rights? Oh, that’s right, they are too busy creating cartoons of our black president’s head coming out of a dog’s butt to notice people being gunned down and strangled in the streets.)

So, Mr. Benjamin Franklin, white Americans may be slow to wake up and slow to outrage. I know that I feel powerless over all this, and it’s easier to be in denial. But there are signs of an awakening. And this is a democracy — or at least it used to be. I think it’s possible that perhaps, just perhaps, these African-American men and boys will not have died completely in vain. Perhaps justice will one day be served in this country when White America recognizes that there is no one “unaffected” by racial oppression.

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Martin Niemoller

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