Online Video Has Brought to Light Old News: Sanctioned Violence against Black and Brown Bodies

In Thomas Jefferson’s memoir, Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote that the slave is incapable of love. The slave is incapable of possessing and sustaining complex emotion. And that black people are inferior to whites in both the endowments of body and mind. And so for me, that’s interesting because the man who was largely considered the intellectual founding father of this country, responsible in large part for the conception of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, didn’t think I was fully human.

He didn’t think that I was capable of loving my mother. Didn’t think I was capable of loving my sister, my brother, my partner. Didn’t think I was capable of having passion, of creating art. And so there’s, you know, an entire history from the very inception of this country of black people being dehumanized by the state and people who represent the state. And so that’s why I think it’s important to have this socio-historical context and understanding so that when we see a police killing black men and women in the streets, we recognize that this isn’t sort of something happening out of nowhere.

That this is actually consistent with the narrative that has been given about black people throughout this country’s history. And so it’s part of what’s happened now is that we live in a hyper-documented era in which everything is being captured on camera phones and in videos and gone viral and shared on different social media platforms. A lot of people are saying, “Where did all this come from? Like how are the police doing this? Like why are they doing this? This just happened out of nowhere.” When actually this has been happening for an incredibly long time in black communities.

We’ve been experiencing disproportionate incarceration. We’ve been experiencing stop and frisk. We’ve been experiencing police brutality on an ongoing basis for decades and decades and centuries, if we’re being honest. And what’s happened now is that there are sort of these primary sources, so to speak, these empirical pieces of evidence of these events transpiring in America. The world is being forced to look itself in the mirror and reckon with how so many of us have been complicit in allowing such a thing to take place for so long.

We are really forced to ask ourselves what are we doing or what are we not doing to allow this state-sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies to continue. Black children in this country, in part, necessitate a different way of means of parenting in the sense that it is important to inform a black child of the realities that exist around them without making that child feel as if it is their fault, right? Like racism isn’t a child’s fault. Systemic oppression isn’t a child’s fault.

At the same time, you have to teach that child how to navigate a world that is often taught to fear them. My mother and my father had ongoing conversations with me throughout my childhood, adolescence, and teenage years. And even now as a young adult about understanding the way that I was seen even if I wasn’t able to see that myself. To recognize that when I went out with a group of my white friends or when I, if I’m in an interracial relationship or if I am engaged in certain activities, those things are perceived differently because I am a black man.

And that the United States and the world has certain sort of stereotype or caricature of who they believe black men to be. That there are people judging me before I ever open my mouth. There are people who have decided who I am before I’ve ever had an opportunity to show them or to engage with them. And that this exists in every sort of realm of class.

I think that was an important thing for my parents to teach me as well as that, you know, I come from a home with two parents with professional degrees, and I attend Harvard University where I’m getting my doctorate. A lot of people can operate under this assumption. They’ll say, “Oh Clint, you made it. You’ve transcended, you know, racism and you moved beyond these oppressive forces and obstacles that have sought to keep you down.”

And the reality is that’s not true. The reality is that I still get followed around in stores wearing my Harvard paraphernalia. The reality is that I still can’t catch a cab on Massachusetts Avenue. The reality is that there are people who, you know, white women will cross the street when walking towards me on the sidewalk at nighttime. And it doesn’t matter where I wear my pants. It doesn’t matter, you know, how well I speak or how smart I am or, you know, what my house looks like.

Because I’m a black man, and that is the first thing people see. For them, it triggers an implicit bias that they have been socialized to believe about who we are and what we do or do not do. I think oftentimes it’s easy for us to exist in a bubble and not to move beyond our own reality and to step outside of our shoes, so to speak, and, you know, walk around in someone else’s. Some people simply don’t interact with people beyond their own demographic, whether that’s socioeconomically, racially, or culturally.

I think the only way that we can understand what is taking place in other people’s lives is to listen. I grew up in a family where listening was the foremost important thing we were taught to do. You have to humble yourself in order to recognize that you don’t know as much as you think you know. Whether that’s listening to my grandfather at the dinner table as he went on and on and on—I love him dearly—or whether that’s listening to a classmate explain what a hijab is when I didn’t understand why someone would wear a scarf over their head, you know, in fourth grade.

I think all of these—we have to be concerted in taking all of these opportunities to recognize that our reality is not everyone else’s.