A world where we believe that anyone deserves to die is a world devoid of humanity.
Search for news stories on Ma’Khia Bryant, the young Black woman who was shot and killed by a policeman on April 20, and nearly every headline has the word “knife” in it.
Bryant was murdered by a policeman who, for reasons no one can fully explain, decided that a, yes, violent interaction between teen girls needed not a taser or even a physical attempt to stop them but the discharge of four bullets that killed her (this is not to say that tasers are in any way a desirable part of the arsenal of strategies, but that they are often falsely touted as “safer” alternatives to guns). Bryant’s death came twenty minutes before the Derek Chauvin verdict, when a jury decided he was guilty on all three charges against him. In that case, video evidence showed that Chauvin deliberately and even casually (who can forget that hand in his pocket and his steady gaze up and away as he knelt?) murdered George Floyd. Testimonies about Floyd emphasised his fatherhood and his relationships to friends and community but it’s unlikely that any of that would have brought about the verdict without the clear and disturbing evidence we could all see for ourselves.
But it’s also important to remember what prison abolitionists like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Richie point out, that “The state will gladly sacrifice a few officers in unique and spectacular cases to preserve the status quo while enabling policymakers to peddle the idea that justice has been done.” Furthermore, as they clarify,
Policymakers are already making it clear that they no longer feel pressure to continue with the political theater of passing legislation that would have done nothing to prevent Mr. Floyd’s death and would pour $750 million more dollars into departments like the one that employed Chauvin to investigate police killings after the fact. They will use Chauvin’s conviction to argue that the system is working just as it should, and to stifle any efforts at substantive systemic change. In other words, George Floyd’s murder is being used to recuperate the institution that killed him in the midst of one of the greatest crises of legitimacy it has faced.
Chauvin’s conviction was an inevitability, and it will become a way for those committed to the prison industrial complex and to the violence of policing to always say, in effect, “The system works, and it’s only the bad apples that get in the way.” On various news shows like The Daily, at the New York Times, journalists emphasised that people outside the courthouse on the day of the Chauvin verdict spoke of a new day; such coverage echoes a liberal wish that those of us who continue to point out the issues around policing might finally shut up.
To repeat: the murder of Ma’Khia Bryant happened twenty minutes before the Chauvin verdict came down. And as much as it hurts to write this, I know that there will be many more such cases in the coming days, weeks, months and years and that most of those will not garner any attention. There’s a great deal of sensationalism around the Bryant murder because she can be clearly seen wielding a knife, and a general unwillingness to consider the complexity of her situation. She was a child in a foster care system that habitually exploits, abuses and spits out Black and brown children, as Dorothy Roberts has shown, and that leaves them grappling with emotions and needs which are always unaddressed and unmet by a world that considers them unworthy of attention and care. Bryant was already deemed not human by the police officer even before he saw her with the knife, long before he and his fellow cops came to the scene. Black and brown people are imprinted within policing systems as feral animals that need to be put down at all costs. As I’ve written elsewhere, “The problem is not that there is no such thing as a Black or brown child in the eyes of the police. The problem is that in the eyes of the police, there is no such thing as a Black or brown human.”
Which is why I’m both saddened and frustrated by the many attempts to humanise Bryant. I understand why her mother, broken by grief, would want to let the world know that her daughter was precious to her, why her life mattered, that she was an honor roll student, and sweet and kind. But I’m uneasy about how that narrative is deployed by those who seek justice and accountability for her death, just as I was uneasy about the many stories of George Floyd’s character, his love for others, his leadership in the community, and much more, stories meant to bolster the case that the murder was unjustified. None of this helped to bring about a verdict that was in many ways already pre-determined by the fact that Chauvin was always going to be the sacrificial lamb. Black and brown lives and characters don’t matter to a larger system of policing and, more importantly, they don’t matter to a public that only pays attention to the loss of Black lives at particular moments. No amount of humanising of victims of police murders will bring about any changes to a system that allows police to shoot down a Black teenager while allowing a white one like Kyle Rittenhouse to shoot and kill two protestors and then to walk unharmed through the crowds.
The struggle for prison abolition and against policing is a long and difficult and complex one, and it’s work that’s done brilliantly by activists and writers like Kaba, Ritchie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, several other abolitionists, and a vast number of organisations like Chicago Freedom School and Love and Protect which have integrated prison abolition into their missions and work. I admire their collective endeavour because it consistently describes and illuminates the systemic problems with prisons and policing without resorting to the narrative of humanising which, inevitably, does little more than sort victims into categories of good and bad, deserving and undeserving.
Our struggle is to rid ourselves of the brutality of a world where the inherent violence of prisons and policing is paradoxically offered as a solution to the end of violence. It seems intuitive, then, to emphasise that those killed and brutalised by police were in fact undeserving of their deaths. But we need to confront the uncomfortable truth that rescuing and presenting and emphasising the humanity of victims has the opposite, long-term effect of letting us believe that some people do deserve their deaths. A world where we believe that anyone deserves to die is a world devoid of humanity.
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Image: Flower Garden, Gustav Klimt, 1905.