At the Memorial
/Will you imagine with me? For just a second?
You are at a memorial service. You are seated near the back because it’s not your usual place of worship, and you didn’t know the individual personally. You chose to come because she was a member of your community. You know she was killed in a horrific way. A plumber came into her home and then attacked her from behind with a wrench, bashing in her skull. The community is horrified. So you chose to come mourn with your neighbors.
The pastor is speaking about her, but he’s also talking about the injustice of her murder. You are moved to tears. She didn’t deserve this. No one deserves this.
And then the man sitting next to you, an acquaintance who feels overly comfortable talking to you because you’ve met a few times, leans over and says,
“You know, I heard she did something bad when she was young, so she probably did deserve it.”
And
“I have a cousin who is a plumber. I’m not saying this plumber was right, but plumbers are important, so we really need to support plumbers now.”
And
“If she’d just done what the plumber told her to do, he probably wouldn’t have killed her.”
And
“I heard the reason he hit her in the back of the head was because she was running away to get a weapon. So it was really self defense, if you think about it.”
And
“She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
And
“I’m not even convinced this really happened. I think this is part of a conspiracy. Have you heard about these secret child sex rings? We should be talking about child sex rings right now.”
And
“This pastor has a weird accent. I don’t think it’s appropriate for a foreigner to be talking about this situation.”
And
“I don’t see why you are so upset. She wasn’t in your family.”
And then he starts to laugh at you. Loudly. Loudly enough that everyone in the sanctuary can hear him.
What would you think of that person in that moment? Would you have the grace to allow for the possibility that he’s got some severe mental illness? Would you calmly assume that he’s simply misinformed due to the media he consumes? Or would you think that, regardless, his behavior is completely unacceptable? That he is not someone you ever want to associate with again? That there’s a distinct possibility he’s a very bad person?
This kind of behavior, in the flesh-and-blood world, is hard to imagine. It’s like a scene out of a movie, a poorly written drama or a very dark, unfunny satirical comedy. But I have been watching this movie play out online over the last few hours on my social media, and it doesn’t even feel unusual anymore. It feels predictable. Still poorly written, but part of a script we have all seen too many times.
The victim, in this case, is not dead. He’s a man named Jacob Blake, and he’s hopefully going to survive. I’m not the praying type, but if there are any gods you believe in, I would ask you to pray to them for some miraculous healing. Jacob Blake wasn’t attacked by a plumber. He was shot seven times in the back by a police officer, Rusten Sheskey. He was shot for being Black. We know this, because since then the police have made it very clear that they do not shoot white people in those circumstances. When Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year-old self-appointed militia member, a Blue Lives Matter terrorist who was activated by a diet of Donald Trump rally rhetoric and pro-police propaganda, drove from Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin to confront protesters there, his behavior was far more dangerous than Jacob Blake’s, but the police did not shoot him. They did not arrest him. They did not question him. They gave him refreshments and thanked him. He was resisting police orders just as much as Jacob Blake was; there was a curfew in effect the night Rittenhouse arrived. But Blake was killed for refusing to obey, while Rittenhouse was encouraged to continue disobeying. Blake may or may not have been reaching for a weapon. We’ll never know. Even if the Kenosha police tell us they found one in the car, we won’t know if he was reaching for it, and I will remain skeptical that it was ever there in the first place. But we do know he was not holding it, was not brandishing it, was not aiming it at anyone. Rittenhouse was brandishing a semi-automatic rifle which he was not legally allowed to carry. At the very least, that was grounds for arrest. Had he been Black, it would have been a justification for his execution. Yet he was allowed to walk past the police and confront the protesters. Then, when he felt frightened, he killed two and maimed a third. And the police decided, just as quickly as they decided that Jacob Blake was a threat, that Kyle Rittenhouse was a victim, and they let him go home and sleep in his own bed. If a Black man walked into a Trump rally with an AR-15 and then, when confronted by white people in MAGA hats, opened fire and killed two people, does anyone think the Secret Service would hold a press conference the next day in which they would justify letting that man leave the rally on his own recognizance by saying, “An individual was involved in the use of firearms to resolve a conflict”? I write science fiction and fantasy novels, and even I can’t imagine that! So before anyone asks me why I have to make this about race, let me make this clear: The police in Kenosha made this about race. Your refusal to recognize that does not change any of the facts.
When I came across the video of Jacob Blake’s attempted murder on twitter, I was already emotionally raw and vulnerable. Then I learned he had just been breaking up a fight and was returning to the car where his children were seated in the back seats. I imagined my own son when he was younger, still in a car seat, crying because he’d just watched me jump out of the car and break up a fight. As I ran back to him, someone shouted at me to stop, but I could hear my son’s wailing, so I hoped whoever was shouting would just hold on for a second while I consoled on my son. And then I imagined the look on my son’s face while he watched as seven bullets exited through my chest into our family’s car. Make no mistake; that’s the trauma those children experienced. When I pictured the look on my son’s face, I lost it. I choked up, and then I just let myself sob. Yet I knew this would never happen to me. No officer, regardless of his or her skin color, would see a white man running back to check on a crying white child and would presume I was going to get a weapon and attack them. And even if one were feeling offended that I’d ignored their order to freeze, they would not open fire on merely the presumption that I might get a weapon mixed with their irritation at not being respected. I am not expected to show deference in the same way. So I held that tension in my mind as I cried; the horror of the thing I will not experience.
And this should have been the emotional climax of the movie. We white people should all be figuring out how to hold that tension, to imagine ourselves in the places of our Black neighbors while also recognizing that our nation is not colorblind, and we are treated differently. That should get to be the moment that haunts me. But it isn’t.
Last night I went to a candlelight vigil. There, I saw this wonderful, strong, smart, beautiful Black woman speak. In fact, before I could even see her through the crowd, I could tell Taysha Hartzell is the kind of person this country needs to lift up, to protect, to hear. But this is what she was asking us: “Am I next when the cops come into my house while I'm sleeping and shoot me for no reason? Am I next to be killed while I'm walking on the street, while I'm jogging? Am I next to get shot seven times in the back...while trying to get to my car?" She was pleading. She kept asking why we hate her so much. She kept assuring us that she meant no harm, that people with Black skin have given so much. “We don’t want to destroy this country. We helped build this country!” And she wasn’t speaking softly. She was sobbing and screaming. And all her rhetorical questions about why we, yes, WE, myself included, white people have tolerated a society where Taysha Hartzell has to lay awake at night with a baseball bat next to her bed wondering when police will kick the door down and shoot her for existing-while-Black … this should be the end of the movie. This should be what we sit with while the credits roll. It should be, but it’s not.
This movie is badly written. The plot is poorly constructed. I came home after the vigil and stayed up late into the night reading people, all of them white, telling me all the things which that fictional man leaned over and whispered during the memorial service you imagined. Most of these people weren’t strangers on twitter. They were acquaintances and even friends on Facebook. They blamed Jacob Blake because of crimes he committed as a young man, crimes he likely never would have been charged with or convicted for if he’d been white. They justified their support of Rusten Sheskey’s attempted murder of Jacob Blake by citing their relationships to police officers, or their seemingly principled stance that we should presume innocence until a police officer is convicted in court, a principle they obviously are not willing to extend to someone who is the victim of that officer’s snap judgement. They blamed Jacob Blake for not obeying orders while defending Kyle Rittenhouse’s illegal activities since those might have prevented property damage, clearly revealing their preference for property over the lives of Black people. They extended self defense arguments to Rittenhouse but would not acknowledge that a community might need to defend itself when police are so obviously threatening all of them based on skin color. They blamed protesters for their presence at at unlawful gathering without acknowledging that the people declaring the gathering unlawful have lost legitimacy because of their obvious racial double-standards. They tried to divert attention away with made-up conspiracy theories. And when I posted an article pointing out that America’s uniquely selfish definition of freedom, (freedom for me, not “them”), is behind both our racism and our response to the pandemic, and it’s literally killing us, one staunch defender of American Exceptionalism took issue with the piece on the grounds that the writer is foreign and therefore unfit to point out that we have the highest number of COVID deaths in the world. This is the lingering ending of this bad movie: a bunch of documentary clips of people leaning over during a memorial service to whisper that they don’t care, can’t find it in themselves to care, choose not to care because it frightens them.
Some part of me, due to the inculcation of my Christian upbringing which dictates that all people are deserving of grace and forgiveness regardless of their willingness to give grace and forgiveness to others, prods me to justify this behavior. On some purely intellectual level, I know Isabel Wilkerson’s thesis in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is correct. These individuals are desperately trying to preserve the caste hierarchy because they see any threat to it as a one way ticket lower on that ladder. Even the most mild provocation becomes an existential threat, so a broken window a half a continent away, when combined with the implication that the caste system is unjust, becomes a personal attack, and these people are terrified. On some level they know the hierarchy grinds the people on the bottom to dust, and they feel they must quickly and even violently preserve the system because if they don’t, they assume people will treat them with the same dangerous disdain they daily show to others by not caring when confronted by injustice. When their pastor tells them we are all sinners and must change our ways, they don’t take it personally. Sin nature is inescapable and universal, so why be upset about it? But when someone points out that racism is equally ubiquitous in America, that we are all infected by it, with white people casually accepting dominion and people of color turning that racism inward to accept their own subjugation, most white people cannot tolerate this because the effects of the sin are not equally distributed. The pastor is now saying that the sins of one part of the congregation are hurting other people, while the sins of those other people are hurting themselves, and this pronouncement cannot be tolerated. Now it’s “political.” Now it’s “divisive.” Now it’s “reverse racism.” Now it’s a guilt trip, while being told they were sinners who needed to change was, somehow, not. And so they lash out. They justify any crime committed which serves to preserve the hierarchy, and they blame the victim of any crime rather than challenge the hierarchy. I understand this. I’m white. I feel it, too; this impulse to escape guilt, to refuse to change, to protect what is “mine,” and “earned.”
So maybe I should extend grace and forgiveness. But another part of me - the same part that saw how Christianity was used by well-intentioned, good people to cause so much harm and insulate itself from the kind of reflection it ostensibly demands - that part recognizes giving grace and offering forgiveness to people leaping to protect the hierarchy maintains the harm done by that hierarchy. Rusten Sheskey, the police officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back, did not wake up on a random Sunday morning, rub his hands together, and say to himself, “Today I’m going to go try to kill a Black man.” He looked in the mirror and saw someone he considered to be a good person doing an important job which helps people. And then, when a Black man didn’t obey him, a clear violation of the hierarchy, he presumed the man was an existential threat and tried to kill him. And the people telling me we should be sticking up for Kyle Rettinhouse and Rusten Sheskey and the racial hierarchy that allows them to still be walking while Jacob Blake may never walk again are committing the exact same error. If I show grace and forgiveness to them, allowing them to be the kinds of people who lean over during a memorial service and laugh at the victim, am I not contributing to the same error? And this error, this little, thoughtless mistake or cowardly decision to remain silent, multiplied by all of us every second of the day, is killing people.
It’s not just killing the Black men who are disproportionately targeted by police. It’s not just killing the undocumented workers who aren’t given the protections of law because we don’t want to create a humane immigration system for fear it would challenge the racial hierarchy. It’s not just killing Trans women for daring to be themselves, or other LGBTQ people for daring to be themselves, or children who commit the crime of being born to parents suffering from poverty, or women for committing the crime of being women. The caste system isn’t just race, it’s every characteristic we’ve arbitrarily chosen to rank ourselves, and any one of the individuals in any of these groups should be enough reason to question it, but now it’s killing all of us. Do you know about Jared Kushner’s pandemic plan? Way back in March, the White House chose to ignore the comprehensive plan left for them by the Obama Administration, probably out of pure spite. But the President did task someone to create a new plan, namely his completely unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner ignored all the experts and put together a team of his buddies from college, but what they were doing wasn’t really rocket science; lots of other countries were already implementing plans that were curbing the spread of the Coronavirus, and the plan Kushner’s team put together was, by most accounts, pretty decent. They were all set to reveal it at a big White House Press conference back in early April. And then they got together and decided to shelve it. Why? Because the virus, at that time, was hitting big cities in blue states. They made an intentional decision to preserve their place in the caste hierarchy, specifically to maintain their place at the top. The people who would die would be people lower on the ladder. Big cities have more people of color, more LGBTQ people, more working women who challenge the social order. They would die, their Democratic governors would be blamed by the President, and he would coast to reelection, mostly thanks to his base which most fervently wants to preserve the caste system (Make America Great Again?) but with the additional help of people made acutely anxious by the horror of the disease. This was a conscious choice to do nothing. And I predict they will never be held accountable. They will live out their lives in the lap of luxury, surrounded by people offering fawning adoration, because they are white, they are men, they are rich, and they are powerful. And we have always allowed powerful, rich, white men to decide when our neighbors die. Because we were taught that’s the way it ought to be. And we believed it.
Of course, now, as the virus spreads most quickly through rural, white, Republican areas, we know this was monumentally stupid as a political strategy. A virus does not target humans based on their political leanings, nor does it observe state boundaries. But the abominable immorality of the calculation is a function of the caste hierarchy. The exact same impulse that makes a dozen white people tell me Jacob Blake should have been shot and Kyle Rittener should be walking free also made a bunch of wealthy, powerful, white males decide that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans were acceptable losses in the name of preserving their power. We, too, make the conscious choice to do nothing when we see some friend trying to justify racist murders and decide not to start an argument. We let our friends do it. We let our President do it. And “it” is killing us. Is this getting too “political”? Too “divisive”?
I did not go to a memorial service for Jacob Blake last night. I returned from a vigil for him, and I came home to a memorial for the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently being killed by our desperate need to maintain the hierarchy. I honestly don’t know how to relate to the people sitting around me at this service. I can block and unfriend the worst, of course, but that’s not a strategy for living in community with other people. A community is founded on some bare minimum level of mutual respect. I want to be able to say, “Happy birthday!” to everyone I know once a year. I want to be able to smile and greet my neighbors as I walk the dog. I want to be able to cry, shoulder to shoulder, with all my fellow Americans when any one of us is murdered by our own government, whether through a police officer’s pistol or an unqualified, immoral bureaucrat's choice to withhold the kind of healthcare poorer countries offer for free. I want to maintain my prejudice that everyone I meet exhibits basic human decency. I want to love my neighbor. But how can I, Dear Reader? Please tell me, how do I respect people making excuses for racist murder? How do I engage politely in the future, as though I never witnessed their reaction over the last few days? Am I the one who is being uncivil when I turn to the person next to me in the pew and hiss through gritted teeth, “You are at a funeral. Act like it!”?
