The image of Philando Castile bleeding to death, while the police continued to aim a weapon at them was shocking. But what hurt most was the image of the young child who cried after witnessing the police kill Philando. We keep asking, when will enough ever be enough? When will the day come when it is no longer routine for police to kill black men? So, when will black lives ever matter to White America? In 2015, nearly 1,200 people were killed by the police, 24% were African American, which is extremely high given that African Americans make up only 13% of the nation’s population. Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, gained national attention because of rioting after the August 2014 shooting of Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by white police officer Darren Wilson. Most protests were peaceful, but violence erupted again when a grand jury decided not to bring charges against Wilson. A federal investigation later found patterns of racial discrimination by Ferguson police. The demonstrations helped to coalesce the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter. Despite this police brutality, some white Americans still believe that “our country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights to whites.” There’s no excuse for such irresponsible comments considering the mountain of evidence that America is racist. Such discrimination occurs on multiple fronts, with regard to racial profiling, police brutality, media depictions of African Americans, and racism on the part of the public. Much of this evidence is new, other studies are older.
A number of recent studies provide definitive evidence of police brutality in law enforcement. Studies are showing that the race of citizens deeply matters in police stops. That is blacks are more likely than whites to be subject to police violence. There is major inequity between blacks and whites regarding police brutality. The mistreatment of blacks relative to whites, itself amounts to brutalizing an entire race of people. Across many measures, blacks are more likely to be subjected to violence, even in cases when they do not violently resist police. Black suspects are more likely to be pushed against a wall, handcuffed without being arrested, pushed to the ground, pepper sprayed, touched by hand, or had a weapon drawn on them. It is well known that drug arrest rates are higher in minority neighbourhoods, but these neighbourhoods are also targeted far more often than white, affluent ones, despite comparable drug use among whites and blacks. By profiling minority neighbourhoods more often, police are sure to find black perpetrators more often than white ones. Higher arrest rates in minority areas are defended by police as legitimate because minority areas “have higher crime rates.” But racial profiling itself creates higher crime rates in minority neighbourhoods, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Minorities are more likely to be convicted in death penalty cases than whites.
White media stereotypes against minorities allow Americans to rationalize and defend a brutally discriminatory legal system. In mainstream media, blacks are portrayed as perpetrators in stories on violent crime while whites are more often portrayed as victims of crime. This radically uneven portrayals threaten to create stereotypes in the American mind; to be black is to be an aggressor, to be white is to be a victim of black aggression. News stories on poverty continue to depict blacks as poor at a far higher rate than the actual number of blacks in poverty. In this case, a second stereotype is evident: to be black is to be poor, but to be white is to suffer through the burden of dealing with blacks who are poor. We live in a culture in which the media embrace racist stereotypes, and those stereotypes are burned into the American psyche. Superficial efforts to frame all citizens as already equal under the law, regardless of skin colour, or to frame police as the victims of an escalating “war on cops” led by Black Lives Matter should be rejected out of hand. Racial strife in America will decline when the root causes of racial inequality are honestly and openly addressed. Until this happens, we should expect the protests in pursuit of racial equality to continue. But the continuing merciless killing of Blacks is indicative that Black lives do not matter to White America.
