Dead black cops and missing the point

Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, the White Wing Rage Machine has been in full swing, minimizing white racism and highlighting black violence. The latest example is this image of four black cops who "were killed" earlier this month. Aside from the fact that we don't know how these men died, there is a more insidious message: Black people claim that black lives matter, but only when it's "thugs," but not cops.

The message works on several levels. It makes people like the post see themselves as non-racists - see? I posted sympathetically about black people! It suggests that those protesting the killing of unarmed black men have misplaced their outrage. Thugs and thieves like Mike Brown and Eric Garner aren't worth our outpouring of anger -- these black cops are! And the message also works to obscure the point of the protests: the until-now little-seen, unaccountable killing of unarmed black men by white cops.

The poster's implied logic goers like this: people protest the death of black cops very little; people protest the killing of black thugs a lot; but police officers are more worthy than thugs, so the quantity of protest of inversely proportional to the value of the individual killed; therefore, the protests are invalid. 

But the logic, as it often is in such messages, is wrong.

When it comes to dead cops, whether killed in the line of duty or not, there is a nearly universal belief that killing a cop is a bad thing. There is no debate. Everyone agrees. What is there to protest? Now if cop killers were widely admired, that would be one thing. But everyone already is on board: it's bad to kill cops.

But how about killing "thugs?" Not so much agreement. There have been too many instances lately of white cops killing unarmed blacks. Some, like Michael Brown, are murky. But other, like the choke hold death of Eric Garner are less so. Add to that the shooting of a black man shopping for a pellet gun in a Walmart in Ohio, the shooting of an unarmed black man in a stairwell in New York, and the shooting of a 12-year-old with a toy gun in Cleveland, and a picture begins to emerge of a police force, if not a nation, too eager to shoot first and ask questions later. There is widespread lack of knowledge (outside the black community) that this kind of thing goes on. And widespread ignorance that most cops are cleared of wrongdoing in such cases. Whites tend not to know what life is like outside their own communities, or , when they find out, likely to support efforts to controls the "criminals" and :Thugs" targeted by the cops and the legal structure. Where there is controversy, there will be anger, protests and demonstrations. Case closed.

I am sure that folks who post images like these are doing it for the noblest of reasons. They love cops,. They don't like racism. But they have bought into a line of thinking that buttresses a racist legal and social structures. By suggesting that only black cops are worthy of our seemingly limited supply of empathy, they allow the racist elements in our society to paint non-cops as expendable crooks and thugs whose deaths are not worth mourning.

And so, the pas-de-deux goes on -- the deadly dance of death between cops and minorities in which being black of brown means you're more likely to be shot down. With society's eager consent.