A tale of two murders

Brian Browne

I WRITE this piece on June 19th or what black Americans call “Juneteenth.” This day is of symbolic import in American history. On that day in 1865, black people in Texas were finally informed slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Lincoln. The odd thing is the proclamation was issued September 1862 with an effective date of January 1, 1863. Due to the sheer racist tenacity of slaveholders in Texas, it took over 2 1/2 years for enslaved blacks in Texas to learn of slavery’s demise. Texas had stolen another 30 months from their lives by keeping them in bondage when they no longer were. Something that never should have happened was maintained beyond its expiry date. Something long overdue was delayed out of sheer evil.

The black people of Texas were the last of the blacks to learn of slavery’s end. By the time they knew of it, the Civil War had ended. President Lincoln was felled by an assassin’s bullet. A nation was plotting new methods to maltreat this abused race. Over time, black Americans would come to celebrate this strange date as the end of slavery. We do so because of the compound irony of the moment. We were made free but were not told of it. By the time we were told, we would find that we were not really free. We were filled with the best of dreams but emptied by the bleakest of realities. Black America celebrates this day just as we remain haunted by it. If justice were truly done, this day would have no special importance except for those born on it. We celebrate that we have endured the Great Ordeal; but today we also protest the incidents of those of us so recently murdered because the Great Ordeal still tarries and refuses to leave us alone. We continue to ask why freedom delayed so long in coming and injustice has delayed so long in leaving. But we no longer seek the answer in the artificial goodness of others.

One was the cruelest of murders, the other the most thoughtless. The police murders of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks occurred under different circumstances in different places. Yet they were the same. Both tell the tale of the black man’s distressed status in America and of how death can rapidly come upon him via those claiming to be officers of the peace. The peace they protect is not a universal or equal peace. It is a peace meant for others; it is a state of existence that calls the black man to be still and obedient, to submit himself to an unfair silence. In this world, a black man’s quiet gaze into his maltreatment is the white man’s peace.

The murder of George Floyd is globally infamous. Its cruelty was incontestable even by American standards. Most sentient human beings when watching the videoed incident knew they were viewing unalloyed sadism. The killing of Mr. Brooks was equally wrong but more nuanced in appearance. Floyd seemed always compliant. He allowed him to be handcuffed and arrested without resistance. Yet, some minor hesitancy about being crammed into the back of the police vehicle landed him on the pavement which 9 minutes later would become his death mat as three officers rode his body, slowly squeezing the life out of him. Brooks’ ordeal would be more active.

Brooks was drunk yet drove his car. He fell asleep while his car was in line at a fast food drive-in. This was wrong. This also is where his encounter with the police began. Things started cordially. The officer knocked at the raised window on the car’s driver’s side. The slumbering man awoke. Police asked him to pull his car out of the line into an isolated parking space. He complied. They asked him a serious of questions. Brooks responded amicably, probably slightly embarrassed that sleep had caught him in this manner. They checked the car’s ownership. It was his and not stolen. He had no outstanding arrest warrants but had previously served a jail sentence and was on probation. He answered, “No,” when asked if he was with weapon. They searched him anyway. They found none. Even when they tested his breath alcohol, he complied.

He was legally drunk. At that point, the officers had a choice. They could have been nice and driven him home. They could have called his family to have someone sober take him home. However, cops rarely extend such kindness to black men although such mercy is regularly extended to whites. Instead, they decided to arrest him which was within their legal authority to do as he had committed a crime although minor. Events quickly took their fatal course. When the cops sought to handcuff him, Brooks resisted. Perhaps he became agitated because he knew his arrest would violate his probation meaning he would be returned to prison. Perhaps he thought that handcuffed he would be defenseless and the officers might manhandle him as was done George Floyd. Perhaps he was just frustrated that, despite his compliant attitude, the officers refused to give him a break. How come they never give me a break, Brooks likely questioned.

In an instant, he was on the ground wrestling the two officers. With desperate energy, he overcame them both while managing to strip one of his Taser. While watching the video of this encounter, I was not surprised by the deadly outcome.  The moment he resisted, Brooks entered dangerous territory; he crossed a point from which only a rare few of us return alive.

The Atlanta police force was first established to enforce slavery. Its purpose was to keep slaves in check and hunt down runaways. While Atlanta may be a majority black city with a black female mayor, engrained institutional culture long survives and rebuffs superficial electoral change. The moment Brooks resisted, the time switch was flipped. 2020 became 1820. Brooks’ flight would be that of a runaway slave. He would either be caught or killed as there is no value in property that cannot be used as the owner wants, especially if the owner fears that recalcitrant property may one night return to slit his throat.

In this manner are the police taught to think of black men who offer even the slightest resistance. What Brooks did was more than resist. For a moment, he controlled a situation in which he was supposed to be the obedient captive. The officers would respond in an extreme way to reestablish their authority and their sense of exalted status in the racial universe they occupy. Whether he knew it, Brooks had signed and sealed his own death warrant the moment he resisted being manacled.

That he took officer’s Taser and fired it toward the officer made death even more inexorable. After Brooks’ errant try at the Taser, the pursuing officer shot him twice while missing once. With Brooks down, the officer seemingly kicked the wounded man. The other officer reportedly stood on the dying body. The 19th century slave patrollers would have applauded the officers for following in their tradition of treating a runaway black as a wild animal to be killed and conquered. Stepping on a dying man is both a conquering act as well as a sign of utter contempt. It is what big game hunters do when they bag their prey. To further signal their disregard for Brooks’ humanity, the officers waited a few minutes before calling for emergency medical assistance. They wanted him dead. Simply because he scuffled a bit and ran, Brooks went from drunk to dead within minutes.

The officer wrongfully killed the man. An officer should only use deadly force if in reasonable fear of his life. Such reasonable fear did not exist. Brooks was fleeing which means he had no intent to injure let alone kill the officer. His stealing and using the Taser was wrong, but a Taser is not lethal. Moreover, the Taser missed the officer. Having been discharged twice, the Taser was no longer operative when the officer shot Brooks in the back. The officer knew this but shot the man anyway. The officers had the man’s car and knew where he lived. They simply could have let him go for the moment.  They could have impounded his car then other officers could have later found him at home.

But officers are not trained to give leeway to a black man. Even the slightest resistance deserves severe beat-down or death. The officers knew the nation and their own city were experiencing protests over Floyd’s brutal killing and police brutality in general. This mattered nothing to them. They were too well trained to shoot a resistant black man to even doubt that their racism was anything but right and correct. They would rather flame the embers of more protests than prove unfaithful to the racial creed and social order they vowed to uphold.

When I saw Floyd’s killing, I was angered. When I saw Brooks’, I was unmoved. Once I saw him resist the handcuffs, I expected his demise. What the officers committed was murder but it was the type of murder black people have been forced for so long to accept as their place in America. Under the law, the officer criminally killed a man. Brooks’ conduct was wrong on many fronts; but nothing he did justified his late night parking lot execution. But a police officer’s crime is not a crime when committed against a black man; such a crime is deemed an implement of social and racial order. A black man knows that resisting the police is to invite death. This knowledge is deposited deep in our souls, in the very marrow of our bones. Though I knew the officer was the villain, part of me blamed the dead black man for bringing death on himself. This was shameful of me.

The frequency of this type of injustice had deceived me into seeing it as the natural order of things. Thus what the police did was nothing more than what was expected of them. Brooks was the one who sprung a surprise and such a turn always exacts a dear price. Legally, Brooks did not deserve to die. But according to American social ethos, he warranted capital punishment. Yes, this has been the order of things but it is far from natural. It is depraved.

Having witnessed and experienced so much injustice, I had been made numb to a certain extent. It is wrong for police to kill a man at the slightest perturbation but that is what they do. Thus, the black man is at fault for irking the police; he should have been well aware of the severity of their potential response. This is what society has taught. I knew this was wrong but still a part of me succumbed to the force of this sordid logic. The Brooks incident has completely chased this ill from me. Sadly, it took the murder of a young black man to free me of this servitude.

Compare this to the case of Dylann Roof. This avowed racist entered a black church in South Carolina in 2015. Upon seeing the stranger, the pastor invited him to join the prayer group. After the prayer session ended, Roof fatally shot nine people who had lovingly extended their hand to him moments earlier. Roof fled.  The pastor was one of his victims. White police apprehended him without a scratch to his brow.  They were even so kind as to pick up some fast food for him because the poor mass murderer felt hungry after his evil deed.

Strange, how white police can treat him with such mercy yet come down so hard on Brooks.  Well, not so strange. Those white officers saw themselves in Roof. They identified with him, appreciating his overt, violent racism. They felt he was right but had gone just a bit too far. For them, he was but John Brown in reverse. Other white officers wound find little humanity in Floyd or Brooks, though neither had killed anyone. Both were to die an animal’s death. Yet, not a hair was touched on Roof’s head despite his murdering innocent worshippers in a house of God. What Roof had done was legally wrong but philosophically consistent with southern tradition.

Thankfully, the officer who shot Brooks has been charged with murder. This has prompted protests from fellow officers. They claim the officer was justified in killing Brooks; that he followed the training given him. Herein stands the problem. The police officers are likely correct in stating they are thusly trained. This means they have been trained to illegally use deadly force at the leanest provocation. So-called officers of the law have been trained to act outside the law. This means their job is not to enforce justice but to maintain social control over a hard-pressed people. As such, they have acted as a law unto themselves. This impunity is in jeopardy in some cities in America. Thus, the police now bristle and protest not so much against unfair treatment but for being found to be the dreadful henchmen they are.

I have written about the racial situation in America to make you aware of the nation many Nigerians idolize beyond all sense of proportion. One does not have to walk far before encountering someone who wishes Nigeria could be more like America. Yet, I wonder if they actually know what this means in its entirety.  Do they understand the human costs of this aspiration? America is strong and rich. This is what they want and this desire is understandable. But they must also understand that America’s attainments have substantially come at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun.

America achieved these things as a gangster would. It stole the land from its owners then killed most of them in the process as if to erase evidence of murder on a genocidal scale. While this racial cleansing was taking place, America stole people from another continent to supply the forced labor that would grow and harvest their cash crops. Slavery was so profitable that, for the period before the civil war, the state of Mississippi had a higher concentration of millionaires than anywhere in America and perhaps the world at that time. Holding to themselves the all of monetary gains earned by the enslaved labor, these owners of other people became some of the richest people alive. Just as the slaves they considered their property were among the poorest alive. For what good sense does it make for your property to own property or have money?

Once America had stabilized internally, it embarked on an imperialistic expedition to conquer other people and their resources. That journey has not ended. Thus, you must have imbibed the mead of fantasy to think Nigeria can mimic America. You cannot effectively put your foot on the neck of another when the largest bully has his foot on yours. In any case, why would you engage in such criminality?

That Nigerians so admire America means you are too willing to permit yourselves to be enticed into believing money and power signify godly blessing. Because, America is both rich and powerful you accept the myths it creates about itself. Yet, if you accept the stories it creates about itself, logic dictates you should accept what it says about you. Ah, this is the dark place your unfounded adoration of America will bring you.

I am a son of America; yet I know its henchmen will kill me if I twitch in an unwanted way at the inappropriate moment. But somehow Nigerians and Africans think America sees you as its equals. If they hate me, they doubly hate you as I am partly of them; you are not. These things you do well to remember when seeking advice on governance and economic progress from the wretched souls that pilfered your continent in the first place. I know my people in the states did not begin to progress until they stopped listening to their former owners and began thinking for themselves. This caused them to redefine the relationship they had with those once their masters. That process of redefinition continues to this very day because former masters begrudgingly put aside the lash.

Just as we deny the physical whip we must abhor the mental lash. Instead of idolizing those who have been unjust, black America is finally learning that the former masters and their henchmen should be made uncomfortable. Black Americans have made all the adjustments and compromises they are bound to make and have tossed in a few more as a sign of goodwill. It is time the master and his beneficiary descendants take full heed of the great sin committed and of the numerous wrongs done during the intervening centuries, decades and years to keep that great sin alive. Africa would do well to understand and adopt a similar process. If not, you will forever hear the clatter of those strong but invisible shackles that keep you from thinking as you should to advance Africa as is its natural right. You can try to eke out a scant life, hoping that the former masters overseas will be so content with the continent’s relative poverty and obsequiousness that they might leave it alone. That decrepit strategy offers no guarantee.

George Floyd was merely hanging with his friends doing nothing more subversive than getting high to momentarily forget their condition. Brooks was drunk, trying to buy a cheap hamburger on his way home for the night. They were still killed as if instigators of a slave revolt. If they are going to strike you down as a rebellious slave regardless of the prosaic circumstance in which they find you, then you might as well act like the rebellious slave they fear.  Might as well stand firm and let fate take its rightful course so that history records you as a full-fledged human being. Happy Juneteenth.

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