Walter Scott, Race, and Black Life/Death (Double Participation)

Black death has become a cultural spectacle: Why the Walter Scott tragedy won’t change White America’s mind

He was unarmed. He was shot in the back. He was a person. These facts should all matter — but they won’t 

By BRITTNEY COOPER  

The most recent coldblooded police slaughter of an unarmed Black man is not the story of “one bad apple.” I refuse to narrate this story as another “isolated incident.”

On Saturday morning, Michael Thomas Slager, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, shot and killed Walter Scott, after pulling Scott over for a broken tail light. Slager initially claimed that he used his taser on Scott after Scott ran during the traffic stop.  He then claimed that Scott tried to take his taser. Therefore, Slager was forced to use his gun.

But video shot by an anonymous bystander shows a very different, chilling version of events: As the video begins, the two men’s hands are interlocked. It’s unclear what is happening. But a second or so later, Scott breaks free and runs at a fairly slow pace away from the officer. Slager calmly pulls out his gun, aims and fires eight times at Scott’s retreating back. He then walks over to Scott’s now prone and bullet-ridden body, and handcuffs him, without offering him any medical assistance. Another officer, a Black man, arrives on the scene and also fails to administer any aid to the victim. Meanwhile, Slager, retraces his steps a few feet, picks up a dark object, widely believed to be the taser, casually saunters back over and tosses the object near the victim’s body. The nonchalance, the lack of urgency, is almost as unsettling as the murder itself. The casual way that Slager aims, fires and snuffs out Walter Scott’s life is devastating.

On Tuesday, Slager was charged with first-degree murder. I am glad there are charges. I hope for a conviction. But charges and convictions are not the ultimate solution here. We need the killings to stop. We need the state to stop creating a culture that facilitates the taking of Black lives and that induces Black mothers’ tears. Walter Scott belonged to somebody. He has brothers, parents who have been married for 50 years; and he has four children of his own.

We keep shouting that Black lives matter, for one simple reason. We want Black folks to live.

Lest anyone be tempted to excuse this as again just another bad apple, the San Francisco chief of police fired eight police officers late last week, after evidence surfaced of them trading racist and homophobic text messages. One text message read: “All niggers must fucking hang.” And another said, “cross burning lowers blood pressure. I did the test myself.” How many rotten apples do we need before we start chopping down the apple tree?

How do we find both explicit and implicit disregard for Black life among police in locales as disparate as San Francisco, North Charleston and Ferguson?

One day after Slager’s arrest, Black folks are being treated to an endless replay of this murder on cable news. There is no collective sense that being inundated with video and imagery of these racialized murders of Black men by the police might traumatize and retraumatize Black people who have yet another body to add to a pile of bodies. Black death has become a cultural spectacle.

On Sept. 11, 2001, parents called into news stations around the country to ask them to stop re-airing footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. News stations complied. Yet Black children got up and went to school this morning, and went to bed last night with video of a white police officer callously killing a Black man running on loop. What about our children? What about their sense of safety? Let me count the ways that seeing the police murder of Black people erodes their fragile sense of security. Who should they turn to when they are in danger?

Police officers (of all races and genders) routinely act with excessive force and callous disregard toward Black people. But Black people’s witness of racial atrocity is never believed on its own merits. Instead, white people need to be able to pull up a chair and watch the lynchings take place over and over again, to DVR them, fast forward and rewind through them, to smother Black pain and outrage and fear in an avalanche of cold, “rational” analysis. Meanwhile, minds rarely change.

The endless analysis never seems to lead to an honest place. An honest place would look like asking critical questions about the culture of policing. Here are a few of my many questions:

Why do racists find policing to be a safe harbor for their offensive and dangerous views? And what about the culture of policing foments and encourages (and, perhaps, even rewards) anti-Black sentiment? It seems like the “good” cops are the exception. And even if they aren’t, how are any of us supposed to tell the difference? Why do we continue to believe that the individual (and even heroic) good acts of individual police officers in any way ameliorates a system whose wheels are oiled with the unjustly spilled blood of so many slain Black people?

These are just some of the questions we need to ask.

And there are some questions that don’t need to be asked. We don’t need to ask about Walter Scott’s “history of violence.” We don’t need to ask about his “past crimes.” We don’t need to ask “whether he was a good father.” In this moment, none of those things matter. He is not on trial here. He was a person.  He was unarmed. He was shot while he retreated from police. The police officer lied.  Walter’s Scott’s life and the unjust taking of that life by Michael Slager are the only facts that matter.

As long as white people remain unconvinced that policing is a fundamentally anti-Black, racist enterprise in this country, the police will keep killing unarmed Black people.  As long as the ridiculous argument that this is “just an isolated incident” proceeds unchecked, Black bodies will continue to pile up. Local juries might opt to throw the book at “individual” suspects, but individual solutions will not solve the epidemic of police murder. As of February 2015, the police were killing someone every eight hours. That is simply too much killing, and it far outpaces the police murder rate in every other developed country.

In this cultural climate, it will take, it seems, an ocean of Black bodies to convince white people that structural racism is a problem. Therefore, I am not convinced in this moment that this video means anything. We watched Eric Garner die on video. We watched Tamir Rice die on video. The officers who killed both of them are free. Black people have no reason to trust that video evidence will lead to any significantly different outcome in the case of Michael Slager.

To put it the way Dr. Treva Lindsey put it, “These extrajudicial killings are at the heart of U.S. democracy. At the core of our nation’s history is [Black people’s] annihilation and dehumanization- how do you ‘reform’ that? So save me the good cops argument- we are indicting the ENTIRE SYSTEM.”

She’s right. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.

Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers. Follow her on Twitter at @professorcrunk.

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What Walter Scott’s death reminds us

David A. Love writes for thegrio.com. He is a writer and human rights activist based in Philadelphia. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidALove The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN)On Tuesday, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, was charged with murder for shooting an unarmed black man in the back. Officer Michael Slager was arrested after raw video surfaced showing him firing numerous shots at Walter Scott as Scott ran away from a traffic stop.

The video footage contradicts Slager’s statement that he felt threatened after Scott allegedly took his stun gun during a scuffle.  The Post and Courier reported that the FBI has opened an investigation into the shooting death along with the State Law Enforcement Division, while the South Carolina attorney general is investigating possible civil rights violations.

David A. Love

Now, after watching the footage — which should remain in your memory for a long time to come — one could say that Slager shot Scott like a dog. But then again, dogs usually are not treated this badly. But the man was shot like a runaway slave.

In this case, there was clear documented evidence of what occurred, and no room for fabrications. Most police fatal shootings do not result in indictments because prosecutors conclude they are justifiable. The police officer can always plant a gun on the suspect he shot to death, or like Slager, apparently place a Taser near Scott’s body and concoct some story that his life was in danger.

“We can’t bring Mr. Scott back, but something like this today can have a bigger precedence than just what happened here with Mr. Scott. Because what happened today doesn’t happen all the time,” said L. Chris Stewart, an attorney for the Scott family, at a press conference.

“I don’t think that all police officers are bad cops, but there are some bad ones out there. And I don’t want to see anyone get shot down the way that my brother got shot down,” said Anthony Scott, brother of the victim.

“What if there was no video? What if there was no witness, or hero as I call him, to come forward? Then this wouldn’t have happened, because as you can see, the initial reports stated something totally different. The officer said that Mr. Scott attacked him and pulled his Taser and tried to use it on him. But somebody was watching,” Stewart added.

“After watching the video, the senseless shooting and taking of #WalterScott’s life was absolutely unnecessary and avoidable,” tweeted Sen. Tim Scott. “My heart aches for the family and our North Charleston community. I will be watching this case closely.”

Although the black community and others have been aware for years of the problem of police brutality, through personal experience and anecdotes, the data confirm that police use of deadly force is a black and white issue. A ProPublica analysis of police shootings from 2010 to 2012 found that young black males are 21 times more likely to be fatally shot by the police than young white males. And 67% of teens killed while fleeing or resisting arrest were black.

Of the whites who are killed by cops, 91% are killed by white cops. Sixty-eight percent of people of color who are killed by police are also killed by white officers. Furthermore, 10% of police involved in fatal shootings are black, and 78% of the people killed by black officers are black.

According to Cynthia Lee of George Washington University Law School, the disproportionate representation of blacks and other people of color in police shootings is due to the role of racial stereotypes by police. Racial stereotypes, Lee argues, subconsciously influence an officer’s decision on whether to use deadly force, even if the police do not consciously decide to use deadly force based on race. A simple question posed to the officer by a black person could be perceived as a threat to the officer’s authority.

What’s more, a Washington State University study on deadly force found that participants felt more threatened in scenarios involving black suspects, suggesting participants “held subconscious biases associating blacks and threats.”

Scott is the latest in a long line of black bodies, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, to John Crawford III near Dayton, Ohio, and Tanisha Anderson and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

In this case, the bystander video of Scott’s killing and the cover-up of the crime by Slager made the difference. Otherwise, the bogus narrative of the good white cop protecting himself from the menacing black thug may have prevailed.

What happened in North Charleston tells us the epidemic of police deadly force has not died. And yet, the mobilization and heightened consciousness of people across the nation have kept the issue on the front burner. The taking of black lives by the police remains a crisis situation in America that must be addressed, because #BlackLivesMatter.

May Walter Scott rest in peace. The arrest and charging of Officer Michael Slager is a rare event that must be celebrated for the small victory that it is, in the midst of unspeakable tragedy. But this is by no means over.

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Race and Tips (Participation)

Black Restaurant Servers Get Smaller Tips

BY TOM JACOBS • September 04, 2014 • 8:00 AM

Among acrimonious acronyms, it isn’t as fraught with potential peril as DWB (Driving While Black). But newly published research suggests there are definite disadvantages to WTWB (Waiting Tables While Black).

In a study, both black and white patrons at a moderately priced Midwestern restaurant tipped black servers less than their white counterparts. This disparity was found in spite of the fact that patrons reported being more pleased with the black servers’ work.

Considering the fact that tips make up more than half of waiters’ income (at least according to a 2012 survey), this is more than a symbolic slight. It suggests black servers, on average, take home significantly less money than their white colleagues.

The study, by sociologists Zachary Brewster of Wayne State University and Michael Lynn of Cornell University, confirms the results of similar research published in 2008. The earlier study, however, was conducted at a restaurant in the U.S. South.

“Our results indicate that both white and black restaurant customers discriminate against black servers by tipping them less than their white co-workers.”

The establishment at the center of this new study is in the Midwest. The similar results, the researchers write in the journal Sociological Inquiry, suggest “this phenomenon is not unique to specific locales.”

Brewster and Lynn surveyed 394 people who had just eaten dinner. Patrons were asked the amount of their bill, the size of the tip they left, and the race of their server.

In addition, the diners rated their server’s “appearance, friendliness, attentiveness, and promptness,” and noted such specifics as whether he or she “made them feel comfortable and welcome” and “seemed to sincerely care about their dining experience.”

The disheartening findings: “Our results indicate that both white and black restaurant customers discriminate against black servers by tipping them less than their white co-workers.”

Furthermore, “to the degree that there are interracial differences in serving skills, black servers in this study are perceived to provide better service relative to that provided by their white co-workers,” the researchers report. “Black servers were rated more favorably than white servers across each of three unique indices measuring service skills.”

Thus, after their quality of work was taken into account, “the disparity between tips given to black and white servers was enhanced rather than attenuated.”

Demographics suggest there weren’t a lot of overt racists among the restaurant’s patrons. (The average patron surveyed was a 43-year-old, college-educated female; 63 percent were white.)

Rather, the researchers point to unconscious bias as a “sound, theoretically informed explanation” of their findings.

“Tipping decisions are not only made quickly, at the end of the dining encounter, but are also to some degree made without much thought,” they write. “Consumers tend to round up or down from the calculated tip percentage they leave their servers, and such adjustments seem to be made without much conscious deliberation. Thus, it makes theoretical sense that tipping decisions might be unconsciously influenced by implicit racial biases.”

Why this behavior extends to black customers is less clear. But the researchers point to anecdotal reports that blacks sometimes over-tip white servers for fear of perpetuating the stereotype of “blacks don’t tip well.” If so, that would contribute to the imbalance the researchers found.

“Like all social inequalities,” the researchers conclude, “the underlying causes of such disparities are likely to be multifaceted and complex.” But as this research confirms, they are also real, and they do real, if unintended, economic harm.

So here’s a tip: The next time you’re throwing down 15 or 20 percent before heading out of a restaurant, take a moment and think about how much you are leaving, and why.