In America, we routinely witness white police officers murdering Black people, though these crimes are rarely called murders. Thousands of people may spend months, sometimes even years, protesting and demanding that officers be charged for the killings we saw them commit. But those officers are very seldom prosecuted or convicted, and even when they are — even after they’ve been convicted — some segments of white America will still find a way to defend them.
We recently saw five Black Memphis police officers get charged with murder just 19 days after they killed 29-year-old Tyre Nichols — before we saw the video footage, before we protested and marched all over the country. This time, many in the media insisted, the footage would show the most brutal police assault we’ve ever seen. Everything that played out before — and after — authorities debuted the video of the vicious attack that led to Nichols’ death heightened anticipation, as if it was the long-awaited release of Dr. Dre’s Detox, and is a testament to several things most Black people have long known.
First: There doesn’t need to be a white person in the room for white supremacy to function. Second: Although white supremacy wholeheartedly welcomes Black cops (and any other Black person who wants in) to be its agents, it will never protect you as it protects its own. Third: Diversifying police departments doesn’t address the fact that policing is as systemically racist as it is innately violent. All too often, hiring more Black and brown officers just provides us with the privilege of being brutalized by people who look like us.
As James Baldwin wrote, “Black policemen were another matter. We used to say, ‘If you must call a policeman’ — for we hardly ever did — ‘for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.’ A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform, whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.” Or in the words of N.W.A, who put it simply: “But don’t let it be a Black and a white [cop], cause they’ll slam ya down to the street top, Black police showin’ out for the white cop.” The danger posed by the Black police officer is well known and documented across the Black community.
The debilitating truth is that there is nothing new about how Tyre Nichols was senselessly murdered in America, a country where the police killed 1,192 people in 2022, according to the Mapping Police Violence Project, and the Los Angeles Police Department killed three Black men in the first days of 2023.
But people are too willing to act as if Nichols’s death is something new. Why? Because there are a few things America does well in the wake of routine tragedy, and that’s feign ignorance, scapegoat, and deflect by condemning a part to preserve the whole.
Five Black police officers brutalizing and killing a Black man provides a unique opportunity for America to do everything it does best all at once. Because the officers in this case are Black, people get to feign ignorance about the meaning of systemic and institutional racism in policing as though activists haven’t been screaming about it for years. Conservatives can condemn the “evil” of these particular officers, who, as Rep. Jim Jordan said, “did not have any respect for life.” We can focus obsessively on the race of these officers, making five Black men the face of police brutality, proof that “racism has nothing to do with it,” all while still denying any overarching issues with policing. For a discussion about the officers’ race in The Nation, Anthony Conwright wrote, “Americans are all anti-Black, because anti-Blackness is the governing force of the country’s interests.”
We didn’t see this kind of response when white Colorado police officers injected autistic 23-year-old Elijah McClain with ketamine while he was handcuffed, or when Indianapolis police shot Sean Reed and then stood over his dead body cracking a joke. During Derek Chauvin’s trial for kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, suffocating Floyd as he pleaded for air, an expert testified that Floyd’s health was to blame for why he couldn’t breathe. After Pace University student Danroy Henry was fatally shot by a white police officer, the police union gave the cop an officer of the year award. But we’re supposed to believe that this video is different, these police officers are different, their actions were especially egregious, somehow especially brutal.
Despite the quickness and willingness to fire, charge, and condemn these Black officers, many don’t want to refer to them as police officers, but as thugs. Instead of recognizing this tragedy as police brutality, they’re calling it “black on black crime” — because when the cops are Black, there’s no more “blue lives matter”; they no longer struggle to concede criminality.
I’ve even read a few far-right conspiracy theorists on Twitter who said they don’t believe the Memphis officers were cops at all, but Antifa agents hired to make police look bad — as though we haven’t seen police brutalize and kill people on camera many times before; as if these officers weren’t intentionally selected by their police department for the special “anti-crime” SCORPION unit — which was abruptly disbanded after the footage of Nichols’s death was released.
I’m not defending the Memphis officers; I don’t sympathize with them. I, like their police department and the media, wish to make an example of them, but for different reasons. I want to offer them as proof of this very simple truth: You can choose to align yourself with your oppressors and help them oppress your community; they won’t stop you, they’ll even welcome you, but they will not protect you.
As a Black person, you can choose to work against your own community to your perceived advantage, but you must always remember that the white supremacists you may think are tokenizing and validating you are really just using you to legitimize their power over you. For that reason alone, you are allowed to act. In their eyes, you are no less inferior, and you are no more deserving. You are a tool, and should you cease to be useful, you will be discarded — just as these officers have been.
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