And I don't mean that as a humblebrag. After first appearance it never registered with me that Barack Obama was Black, "Black-ish." That he identified Black. Obama was so much like some of my legal colleagues that I identified him as a lawyer, not a Black man. I swear I could read Obama's mind. I knew what he was thinking and how he was thinking it because he thought like a lawyer. I had to catch myself sometime when I'd read something that mentioned his race, "Oh yeah, he's Black. 'Allegedly'. 'Sorta.' Who knew?" Not me.
Similarly, my colorblindness caused me to read entirely wrongly the reaction to the Tyre Nichols murder. I advised publicly and privately, to my family and N-1, loudly and in bold to "STAY HOME". I thought this was going to be riots like it was 1999. I was exasperated with official Memphis' unpreparedness. When I deconstructed the videos I counted the blows not the race of the cops. Never, EVER thought race was the, or a, reason for the lack of riots. Blind as Stevie Wonder.
It's race all the way down. LeBron James tweeted "WE'RE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY!" Black cops shouldn't be beating to death innocent Black civilians! Should Black cops be beating to death only white citizens? Well...If the cops had been white we could understand it. Really? I read a NYT article that quoted BLM and other Black leaders. The standard paradigm didn’t explain this. It troubled them differently that they didn’t know exactly how to react to this. If the cops had been white Tyre Nichols would still be dead. Were those 13 blows colorblind or were they because Nichols was Black? (Some say yes. I agree.) Or because the cops were Black? (I haven’t heard anyone say that.) There would have been riots if the cops had been white. There were none because the cops were Black. Really? They need a new paradigm.
It's cop culture, others said. I agreed with that. I've seen it. A particular personality is attracted to policing and police culture reinforces it. Cops, especially in street crime units like these "Scorpions" act with "implied impunity," Benjamin Crump, lawyer and spokesman for the Nichols family said. I agreed. I have seen it. They are meanest, the orneriest, the most violent and they do act with "implied impunity." Black, brown, and white.
I read Crump say that the quick firings and arrests of the cops "set a new standard." Swift action; complete transparency: release the tapes even on a Friday night; immediate, repeated condemnation of the cops by other law enforcement. I thought that was right, right-ish, in retrospect. An addendum to Crump's statement however made clear another of his points: In the future we want white cops judged just as swiftly and condemned just as vociferously. Forget poisoning the jury pool for the cops' trial. Race got folded in on itself. Had the cops been white, Crump asked, would they have been immediately fired, indicted, the vids released? We don't want these Black cops singled out! Really? Every way they looked at it, right-side up, upside-down, it was race. LAWD. I did not see that.
