When Black Is White and White Is Wrong
Sometimes Boomer logic has a kind of beautiful simplicity. And occasionally, despite its blinkered and blithe takes, it’s even spot-on.
Take the gruesome murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers. (Nota bene: I’m using the m-word deliberately, not lightly or for provocation’s sake, as I’ll soon explain.) The brutal episode was yet another viral riot-kick-starter over police abuse, egged on by the rage-click media. But the racial component was different: the usual white-cop-kills-cherubic-unarmed-black-man narrative didn’t apply. The five officers who savaged Nichols to death matched his melanin.
Cue the golden-years memes: it’s not racist if the cops were black! Why don’t the lives of the black police officers matter? And the pièce de Boomer résistance: America is beyond racism if black cops can commit extrajudicial manslaughter!
(Sure, I may have spun that last one out of whole cloth. But can’t you imagine your MAGA uncle all-capsing it on Facebook?)
For once, the post-war generation is right. The Nichols killing puts paid the liberal catechism of police-as-paddy-rollers. All the Kendi tropes — racial essentialism, black solidarity, the all-encompassing evil of “whiteness” — weren’t present as five badged men punched, kicked, and bludgeoned a man dead who “looked like them.” It shows the savageness in men’s hearts has nothing to do with skin color.
At least, it should demonstrate that. That’s plain enough to see for the demo who can’t open a PDF file and installed George W. Bush in the White House. But for younger leftists, that’s just a mirage. Nichols only died by the peaky palm.
“The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism,” argued CNN’s resident race-monger and former solar-panel flogger Van Jones. Over at The Independent, a female editorialist with an archive of black sleb-gossip wrote, “Pointing out that the officers involved in Tyre Nichols’ death were [b]lack is a dangerous distraction.” Newly minted congressional Rep. Maxwell Frost tweeted, “Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-[b]lack and the result of a system built on white supremacy.” (OK, Zoomer.) Mondaire Jones, head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, tweeted, “If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-[b]lackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.”
The last one is a real doozy coming from a tax-dollar-funded commish. Not only did the College Board heed Governor DeSantis’s proscription of the loaded course, but actually removed the offending material, including the woke racialist sophistry. The College Board backtrack was a rare instance of common-sense in public pedagogy. Telling teenagers with developing minds and fragmented attention that, to paraphrase the befuddling woke theorem, black equals white therefore black can’t equal black will only engender confusion and angst.
Or it will reinforce the devotional-esque prior that America is an irredeemable racist nation — which is, of course, the point. But the hard-prog takes on the Nichols slaying stretches the point so preposterously that only an Oceania propagandist could dream it up.
The entire tragedy is, in the left’s hands, abstracted away from a father unjustly killed by five free-thinking, free-fisted lawmen. Explaining it, or “contextualizing” it, to use the liberal fave phrase, is now an academic exercise, drawing through lines from tangential history. Americans, like all people, once practiced slavery. Therefore, therefore, therefore, and then therefore, black fuzz was really white in the dispatching of another unarmed black man. Ta-Nehisi Coates was awarded a “genius” grant for the same gappy logic.
This deliberate dissembling distracts from the more salient causes that led to Nichols’s death. Police critic Radley Balko draws attention to the violent, escalatory nature of elite patrol brigades, such as the Memphis SCORPION unit which killed Nichols. These squadrons operate with near-plenary power in crime-ridden areas, which we know from Lord Acton already embolden aggressive impulses. After Nichols was subdued and fatally ravaged, medical personnel on the scene inexplicably waited 15 minutes to administer first-aid.
Then there’s that whole “monopoly on violence” thing the police exercise. Good luck getting a liberal to question that.
Outstanding evidence still abounds over the case: the autopsy report, the arrest report, a full breakdown of the officers’ experience. But it’s 2023. Why let patience and documentation get in the way of a good racialist tweet? Better yet, why let those pesky, Anglo-Saxon holdovers like due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty stop anyone from looting a CVS in the name of black justice?
“Agency-removal is a popular tactic of the compassionate,” wrote Ed West. In this case, the compassionate are those wailing and holding vigils for the Nichols family, while casting blame not on the culprits but on an invisible idea. Meanwhile, the five officers who beat Nichols lifeless with the fists and feet, and not Audre Lorde textbook excerpts, have been charged with murder.
American policing is far from exemplary, but the rule of law isn’t broken yet. At least the Boomers got the cruciality of colorblind justice right. Oh, to be thankful for not-so-small favors!
Now about that pricey housing market…
