More than Three-Fifths Human

Approximately two times a week in the United States, between 2006 and 2012, a white police officer killed a black person.

On August 9, it happened again. That day, Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, unarmed black teenager, as he was walking home from a convenience store with a friend. According to a private autopsy report commissioned by the family, Brown was shot four times in his right arm and twice in the head.

None of those shots appear to have been taken at close range.

Brown’s body was left in the street, uncovered, for four hours, reminiscent of the days when black men and women were lynched and left hanging—a signal to the rest of the community to stay in line and remain conscious of their oppression. Witnesses have reported that Brown’s hands were in the air, and that Brown was unarmed, at the time he was killed.

As of yet, Officer Wilson’s police department and friends of the officer are the only individuals who have challenged this narrative given by several eyewitnesses. They claim Brown was aggressive and reaching for the officer’s gun. Following his death, community members have had to defend Brown to the public as a nice, black teenager, and not a dangerous black thug; that he was fully human and whole, and not three-fifths of a person; that he was somebody’s son, brother, and nephew, despite how anonymously black he may have appeared to Wilson.

But the Ferguson Police Department was not going to stand by as Brown’s achievements and humanity dominated reports of the shooting. On the same day he released Wilson’s name, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson released a video to reporters implicating Brown in a strong-arm robbery at a local convenience store just before his death. In the press conference, Chief Jackson claimed that the tape was released “because the press asked for it” and that the initial contact between Officer Wilson and Brown was not related to the robbery. Wilson was not aware of the robbery when he confronted Brown.

But in doing this, Chief Jackson minimized Brown’s position as the victim and distracted from his department’s failure to release a thorough police report connected to Brown’s shooting.

In this way, Brown was put on trial for his own death—Wilson supporters argued that Michael was a thief and an aggressor, while Brown’s community and family reminded the public that he was friendly, non-threatening, and college-bound to justify his right to life.

Though these traits and accomplishments have nothing to do with Brown’s humanity and his right to live, because he was a black man they seemed necessary for others to empathize with him as a victim. No person should have to rationalize his or her own right to live—whether rich or poor, white or black, college-bound or dropout.

Recognizing this, a few days after Michael Brown’s death, black Twitter users created the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Along with the hashtag, users typically uploaded two photos of themselves—one in which they appeared respectable, usually flaunting a ceremonial graduation robe or dressed for a professional occasion, and another in which they came across as what some would deem as thuggish or unclassy.

This Twitter campaign raised serious questions about how the media chooses to portray black victims, and particularly how they chose to portray Mike Brown following his death. The trend of dehumanizing and striking black victims of their innocence was evident in the media’s coverage of Trayvon Martin’s death just two years ago.

Because of this pattern, black youth question how the public measures their humanity. “What if I didn’t have a respectable photo to effectively cancel out my thug-esque photo, and which would the media use if I was gunned down in the streets?” “Do I need evidence of my success to justify my right to live?”

Unfortunately, based on recent cases, it appears that this evidence is a necessity. That there is a need for black people to display a degree of success before being deemed fully human in America is insulting and indicative of an extreme lack of progress.

However, even when this evidence of success is present, to some, black youth will never be deserving of sympathy or grief. Since Michael’s death, a “Support for Officer Wilson” Facebook page was created and supporters have rallied and gathered on Wilson’s behalf. The creators of the Facebook page also set up a GoFundMe account for Wilson, raising over $200,000. Donations for Wilson have surpassed donations for Brown’s family. These donations were often accompanied with racist and offensive remarks. One user wrote, “Thanks for taking out the trash”, with his $15 donation. Another person noted they would have donated more if Wilson had also shot the friend who was walking with Brown before Wilson killed him.

While a family and community are mourning the death of a young man, others sympathize with the killer and laud the death of the slain.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unfamiliar. The refusal to fully acknowledge black victimization is ever-present in our sociopolitical discourse. Consistently, black people are blamed for and told to take responsibility for their own poverty, poor education, and general oppression in the United States, an argument that altogether ignores the reality that there were never adequate programs and provisions to put blacks on equal footing as whites after slavery and Jim Crow.

Moreover, the continued refusal to criminalize white people for black death continues to suggest to black people that there will never be any justice for them in the United States. Officer Wilson will likely be absolved of wrongdoing, and substantive policy changes to prevent further shooting deaths of black youth will fall to the wayside.

Some detractors who speak out against protesters of the police’s handling of the Michael Brown case say that we should wait for the investigations (one by a grand jury and the other a federal civil case) to be completed.

In the United States, local law enforcement kills approximately 400 people per year. The majority of individuals targeted and killed in these altercations are minorities, and police are rarely indicted or convicted in the following investigations. Despite this pervasive use of deadly force in the line of duty, little has been done. Darren Wilson will likely walk free, and attempts to prevent future cases of deadly force will continue to be ineffective.

This denial of white criminality and black victimization, unless the black person displays some tint of exceptionalism, places black people in a double bind—they are told that they have to be successful in order to be deemed fully human but often aren’t given the resources they need to accomplish this success.

You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you never had shoes to begin with.

Temitope Agabalogun ’15 is a human evolutionary biology concentrator in Dunster House. Amanda D. Bradley ’15 is a joint sociology and government concentrator in Dunster House. Jasmine S. Burnett ’16 is a government concentrator in Lowell House.