The Making of A Great America Uprooting the Spirit of Racism

This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "African Americans and the Police":

There is a video that went viral of a white police officer in uniform responding to a 911 complaint about noise. The officer, Bobby White, responded by stopping to play basketball with the black neighbor kids who had caused the complaint. In that setting, Officer White’s actions mirrored the setting in the news coverage of Sergeant Rutling; Rutling is shown throwing the football around with the kids. Back to Officer White, what would happen if the setting changed with different kids, who had a different response to his arrival?

“Chanae Jackson, a real estate agent who was born in Gainesville, has a different understanding of policing in the city. Her son had a troubling encounter with law enforcement in 2018, and she became a vocal critic of the department. This May, someone sent her a different video of White: A cellphone recording of him slamming a black teenager into the hood of his patrol car…

      Shot on a cellphone, the video showed an encounter from 2014. Semajiah Ferguson, then 16 years old, stands next to White, looking at the ground as the lights flash on the patrol car at nighttime.

   ‘He bothering us Black folks for no reason,’ says Ferguson’s cousin, who was recording the video. ‘“Can you tell us what we did, sir?”’

      White later told his superiors the teenager had committed two minor traffic violations — running a stop sign and having improper lighting for the bike — but on the video, the officer mentions neither. Instead, he tells the teenager to sit on the ground. Ferguson says he doesn’t want to.

      White suddenly grabs the young man, and pins his knees against the hood. The boy goes limp. The officer then throws Ferguson’s upper body against the hood of the vehicle twice, and a loud thud can be heard.

‘Down! Down! Lay down on the car!’ White shouts.” (Casey, 2020)

Same officer, different black teenagers. I believe that the “system” that Officer White was trained in triggered a pre-programmed, inappropriate, abusive response to a challenge of his authority as a policeman. It may even be an unwritten, pre-programmed response to a minority teen that is a part of the culture of the department where he works. I don’t know the man, and I am neither trying to absolve him of his moral responsibilities as a police officer nor condemn him for what most people would consider wrong. I say most people because I believe that in America, there are far too many people that would say that a policeman is justified for roughing up black kids, especially boys. A 2016 article from Forbes shows that African Americans were more likely to be roughed up by police in New York, even while complying with instructions:

“In contrast with his analysis of police shootings, Fryer found consistent and robust racial differences in the use of nonlethal force, such as grabbing a suspect, slapping him, or pushing him into a wall. Based on the New York Police Department’s data, he found that blacks ’are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force.’ The difference was smaller but still statistically significant after Fryer took into account various other factors that might affect the use of force. ’Even when officers report civilians have been compliant and no arrest was made,’ he writes, “blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to endure some form of force.” (Sullum, 2016)

The policing “system” in New York at that time produced outcomes where force was used on African Americans who were complying, and no arrest was made. So it might not take a great stretch of the imagination to envision a Jekyll and Hyde type transformation for Officer White, when confronted with an African American, who was not complying, even though he was a minor and even though he ran a stop sign, ON A BICYCLE! Often black teens are predisposed by their appearance, their music, the neighborhood they live in, to be thugs, to be dangerous.