She's a former writer for Salon, so that helps explain things, heh.
After Dallas, we dont need to say 'Blue Lives Matter'- it's as established as white supremacy. My 1st @RollingStone: https://t.co/pY4CObQ6Tl— Natasha Lennard (@natashalennard) July 8, 2016
I won't say Blue Lives Matter, because it does not need to be said. We know this because the death of five officers this week provoked an immediate response from the president, as did the assassination of two NYPD officers in 2014. That's what mattering looks like. While the president’s remarks earlier in the week on the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were moving, dozens of unarmed black men killed by cop go without presidential comment....Ms. Lennard is someone whose default position is to hate the police, and it's visceral.
There was never any doubt about the mattering of cops' lives in this country. To say Blue Lives Matter is to falsely assert that the cops' lives are undervalued and systematically discarded. They are not — no life should be — and the shootings in Dallas do not change that fact.
Five police deaths provoke cries of "Civil War," but hundreds of black deaths are just the "tragic" normal.
And that is why we continue to shout "Black Lives Matter" — the statement contains in itself the recognition that it very much still needs to be said.
It's also relevant that it has consistently taken the visceral and visual representation of black death — Emmett Till's broken corpse in the open casket his mother demanded, Mike Brown's body in the street, Philando Castile bleeding out onto his whiteT-shirt — to prompt popular and media outrage. Black civilian bodies get humanized only through death. It doesn't take a photo or video of a killed cop to provoke outcry. That mattering doesn't demand brutal spectacular cues.
Which is not to delegitimize growing fears among police ranks that they will become targets by virtue of their profession, their uniform. Dallas shows the validity of these concerns. Yet it remains the case that policing does not even rank in the ten most dangerous jobs, according to a 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Fisherman, farmers and, above all, loggers are more likely to die on the job, and police are, according to the same statistics, more likely to commit suicide than be killed by a criminal. While cops may have reasons for increased concern, this does not deserve a movement. There remain no grounds at all to call police officers a persecuted minority, nor to equate the oppression of black life with that of police in America....
By comparison, for example, Peter Liang was the first NYPD officer to be convicted for an on-duty killing in the last ten years. He shot unarmed black man Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn project housing stairwell, after he had his gun drawn because a stairwell light was out in the residential block he was patrolling. He had not been called to the scene of a crime. He won't spend a day in jail; his manslaughter conviction was accorded a sentence of five years' probation.
I'm not equating the intentional assassination of police officers with the (regular) killing of black people by cops. I don't believe most cops are hunting down black people — but I also don't believe murderous racist intention is necessary to make an execution a brutal, racist act. There are not very many people hunting down cops. Cops' lives are already valorized; it costs everything to take one. For a cop to take a black life, in criminal-justice currency, costs nothing at all. This, again, is what mattering does and does not look like.
Keep in mind that police are the only ones who run to the source of danger, to protect those very same people, black Americans. No one is more important to the lives of blacks, with the sole exception of black families themselves. But as Heather Mac Donald has said, until we see the reconstitution of the black family in America, it's the police who're the first line of defense for at-risk black communities. Leftists like Natasha Lennard thus make the problem worse, actually threatening the safety of black lives.
She might as well be saying, "No Lives Matter," for that's the logical consequence of her thesis.
0 comments:
Post a Comment