Police Brutality is Not Always White-on-Black
Was anyone not shocked by the sickening video of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating by Memphis police?
Yes, observed D.L. Hughley while guest-hosting “The Daily Show”: “Black people.”
“The only people who were shocked by that are people that haven’t been paying attention,” the Black comedian said, sparking a mixture of laughter and applause in the racially diverse studio audience. “But, for us, that’s just like a flashback.”
Comedy, often called a mixture of tragedy plus time, helps bring some sense of order to our conflicted emotions at moments like this.
Bodycam video shows Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx driver, beaten relentlessly by five Memphis police officers. Each of the five officers was fired and charged with second-degree murder, among other offenses — so swiftly compared with most brutality cases that it led to a subset of gallows humor. Would justice have moved this swiftly if the perpetrators were white?
Such dark humor reveals, among other headaches, how much we Americans have come to internalize the wrongheaded notion that police brutality is a white-on-Black crime.
Video released by Memphis police of Nichols’ encounter helps disabuse us of that notion, as if we needed to be. We see police slam Nichols to the ground, kick him in the head, punch him in the face, strike him with a baton, drench him with pepper spray, tase him and constantly curse at him, while he pleads for his mother and screams as best he can that he only wants to go home.
Instead, he was taken to a hospital in critical condition and died three days later.
Seeing the faces of the five Black officers, I could not help but ask myself: How much do we Black folks hate each other and ourselves?
James Baldwin captured the tragedy in an essay about Harlem in the 1950s. “Negro policemen are feared more than whites,” he wrote, “for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”
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