"God gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water; the fire next time." - James Baldwin
(Oscar Grant III, the unarmed man murdered by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle)
Yesterday, a Los Angeles jury found police officer Johannes Mehserle guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting and killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III. They had a choice between the involuntary manslaughter charge and second-degree murder and chose the lesser of the two.
Not one member of the jury was black.
You'll remember the heartrending video of Mehserle shooting Grant while he lay face down and handcuffed on the ground. Mehserle claims he mistook his gun for a taser. I wonder if anyone asked why he felt the need to "taser" a handcuffed, compliant man in the first place.
In any event, this is just the latest incident in the long history of blacks executed by white law enforcers. Whether it be by the hands of the overseers, regulators, posses, lynch mobs, Ku Klux Klan, Tuskegee scientists, sherrifs or police officers, one thing is clear: Black life is thought to be of lesser value; perhaps, not even a full three-fifths of white life.
I don't think rioting is the answer. But if the citizens of Oakland chose to burn that baby to the ground, a part of me would completely understand.
Adam Serwer of the American Prospect: Liberal Intelligence blog had this to say:
Fear is at the core of questions of justice involving the deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities in the United States of America, dating back to when Toussaint L'Overture put the fear of G-d in slaveowners by revealing that their "property" might someday rise up against them. L'Overture still has that effect on some people. Following emancipation were the days when "justice" was meted out in the South by terrorists posing as vigilantes. Even then, when such atrocities were an accepted part of black life, people inside and outside the South found ways to sympathize with the anger and fear white Southerners felt toward their black neighbors -- The New York Times editorialized in the 1890s that no "reputable or respectable negro" had ever been lynched.
Even decades after the civil-rights era, a cop shooting an unarmed black man is barely a crime -- a 2007 ColorLines investigation of police shootings in New York City found that in 12 instances when the victim was unarmed, only one officer was found criminally liable. There hasn't been a murder conviction on a police shooting in Oakland since 1983. As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, "American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries. ... We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns." Mehserle is profoundly unlucky to be punished at all.
Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proved to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people -- it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not "unreasonable."