Connect the Dots 101

 (https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-trump-insurrection-explosions/)

Her confusion was understandable. To proponents of professional policing, an implied special relationship between White civilians and law enforcement that crystalized in the Blue Lives Matter movement has long been a matter of concern. 

“We’re the only ones who have your back,” said a rioter who was trying to persuade the policemen to stand aside who were guarding the last barrier between the mob that had invaded the Capitol and the Representatives who were attempting to flee the House gallery.

In much the same way that “civil rights” came to be regarded in some circles as “rights for Black people,” the movement for equal treatment from law enforcement has been sucked into the culture war as yet another front for White grievance. 

In December, President Trump— a millionaire at birth and a middle aged White man in America—assured his overwhelmingly  White audience in Valdosta, GA that they were all victims. “We’re all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They’re all victims. Every one of you.” 

The mob marching on the Capitol was united by that sense of victimhood and the conviction that the role of law enforcement was to protect the electoral success to which they felt entitled—notwithstanding coast-to-coast voter suppression and the coercion of county election officials, secretaries of state and governors by the President of the United States.

The perspective on law enforcement from Representative Cori Bush—a Black woman representing Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, who watched the mob marching on the Capitol with Confederate and Trump flags before barricading herself in her office—was markedly different.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/09/cori-bush-capitol-mob-white-supremacy-government/) she described her relationship with law enforcement over the past several years:

We faced police dogs when we fought for justice for Mike Brown in Ferguson in 2014. There were police dogs at protests for Black lives this year, from the East Coast to the West. The president himself tweeted in May that the “most vicious dogs” awaited protesters standing up for Black lives at the White House…but there were no police dogs awaiting the white supremacists who gathered outside the Capitol…We’ve been tear-gassed for much less, beaten for much less and shot at for much less. We’ve been assaulted by law enforcement for much less….Thjs is the America that Black people know.

The consensus among news commentators during the insurrection was that BLM protesters over the summer had been treated more harshly than the White Trumpist insurrectionists. There was no “shooting when the looting started.” After refusing to call in the National Guard or call back the mob he had incited, his tepid video dismissal to the rioters, looters and those responsible for the beatings and killing of flaw enforcement officers was mind-boggling:

“You have to go home now [not to jail]. We love you. You’re very special people.”

Not thugs. Not animals. 

If the takeaway from the murder of George Floyd was insight into the matter-of-factness of lethal force when deployed by the police against Black civilians, the takeaway from the insurrection was, as MSNBC cable host Joy Reid succinctly put it—“White Americans are never afraid of the cops.”

Why should they be?

The day before the attempted coup, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Gravely announced the acquittal of police officer Rusten Sheskey in the Jacob Blake shooting on the basis of self-defense and a fear for his life. 

Although Sheskey pursued  Blake—who is Black—around Blake’s vehicle and at one point held him by the shirt while firing seven shots into his side and back, no charges were filed against him, even for discharging his weapon into a vehicle in which three children sat. As a result of the shooting Blake is paralyzed from the waist down. 

“I feel in many ways completely inadequate for this moment,” [admitted] Kenosha County District Attorney Mr. Graveley, who is White and announced the acquittal. “I have never in my life had a moment where I had to contend with explicit or implicit bias based on my race.” 

One wonders how that lack of perspective influenced the grand jury deliberations, how it entered into its  calculations on the justifiable use of lethal force. What would the public framing of the event have been had a Black police officer shot a White woman seven times in her back in front of her children?

One wonders how his office would have seen the case had it not been refracted through the funhouse window of race.