Dignity for Black Men

Hélène Rainville

When you woke up this morning to the news, you might not have been surprised that another Black man has been killed by police somewhere in the United States. Freddie Gray from Baltimore was the name in the news this morning and last week it was Walter Scott from North Charleston, South Carolina. By the time we publish this article and moreover, by the time we publish The Voice in the Fall, who knows how many more will have died.

This issue has been at the forefront of the news since last summer when Michael Brown was killed in Missouri which was followed by the death of Eric Garner. All these men were allegedly involved in a minor crime. Let us assume for a moment that they were breaking the law and some were fleeing. The question of law and morality is not just whether they should be engaged by police but whether death should be a result of the attempt to arrest.

All governmental countries have a system of laws and justice. There are crimes, violent and non-violent, committed everywhere and by all types of individuals. In the United States, we do not hesitate to incarcerate. The ACLU reports that with just 5% of the world’s population, we also have 25% of the world’s prison population.

Criminals come in all genders, ethnicities and ages. Why is it that the killing of alleged perpetrators is characterized by white police officers and Black victims? Without analyzing every criminology statistic, let us look deeper. It may be that this is part of an unconscious bias. National Public Radio reported on a study of unconscious bias in relation to employment but this phenomenon is omnipresent throughout society.

Examining the ingredients in these scenarios, we can see that we have a person who often is in trouble with the law and police officers who may already have a history of aggressive behaviors. The unconscious bias plays a role because if an authority figure cannot relate to a subject and they have been groomed by society to think of a certain type of person as less than human, then they will treat them as such.

Of all advanced countries, only in the United States do we have such tragedies. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are lingering. The lives of African-American men continue to garner less value. If arrested, these men would have been tried and accorded a punishment fitting to their crime. Mr. Scott had not paid his child support. How does killing him help his children now? There are many delinquent fathers but we do not kill them.

There is nothing these men did to deserve the death penalty. Most of Africa, all of Europe (with one exception) and the Americas do not even have the death penalty (source: Edouard Salan III). African-American men have been tortured for most of the time they have been in America. When will it be time to bring dignity to their lives? One way is to continue the conversation about this brutality until it becomes just a note in a history textbook.