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“I can’t get the tears. I’m too angry.â€
It was on NBC News this morning, and The New York Times confirms it: another young black man got shot to death by the police.
A police officer fatally shot an armed 19-year-old during a struggle in the vestibule of a South Bronx apartment building last night, the police said. The police said that the officer fired five shots at the man, identified by his mother as Timur Person, and that at least one of them hit him in the chest.
A friend of Mr. Person’s who witnessed the shooting, Hector Suarez, said that Mr. Person had a gun tucked into his waistband. “They were punching and kicking him,†Mr. Suarez said. “All I kept hearing was: ‘Let go of the gun! Let go of the gun!’ â€[...]
Mr. Person’s mother, Allene Person, said that Mr. Person, her youngest child, was two days shy of his 20th birthday.
“I can’t cry,†she said, banging her palms against the chain-link fence outside the hospital. “I can’t get the tears. I’m too angry.â€
So watch now as the kabuki begins. There will be somber statements from Ray Kelly and the mayor's office; outrage from black leaders, with Sharpton probably already preparing his speech; a march or two; earnest moments on television; makeshift memorials on the sidewalk; another funeral as the focus for community rage. Dollars to donuts that the New York Post will expend barrels of ink on the fact that this one had a gun; because that's a death sentence with the wrong skin color.
And then, sometime soon, it will happen again, with another victim we haven't heard of yet. Somebody else, having been entered into a lottery of sorts by being a young black man, will draw a very unlucky ticket, seemingly at random.
That's what it is: a lottery. First prize, wrong place, wrong time, and you're dead; runners-up, you're stuck in a life of bad schools, shattered homes, minimum-wage jobs, and a hip-hop culture that extols crime.
Someone please explain to me how we can be satisfied with this state of affairs, because again, I'm just not getting it.
A somewhat different view from Los Angeles
Salon.com has an op-ed piece by Jill Leovy, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times who covers homicide which tries to put a positive spin on the deaths of black males, focusing on the decrease. For my part, I had a hard time getting beyond the issues raised in the second paragraph:
The police shootings are different than the inter-race homicides discussed by Ms. Leovy. But to me they are two parts of the same equation: if your skin is dark you get killed at an alarmingly higher rate than if your skin is light, and whether that death is caused by a state-sanctioned, uniformed white guy or a state opposed uniformed black gang member still means you're dead.
Solutions? I have always maintained that political and educational empowerment were the primary paths to being socially relevant. That reflects my Jewish upbringing, I suppose. And I can't help but thinking that if we send smart, vocal black people like Eric Adams into positions of power, things will have to change because people like Eric Adams won't take shit from anybody. Beyond focusing on education and political power, I don't know what solutions will work.