By David K. Shipler
The
murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has opened a window onto the complexity of
race as a factor in policing. A conventional assumption has been disrupted—that
racism alone drives police brutality against Black citizens. Yet it would be a
mistake to use the tragedy as an excuse to discount racial bigotry’s role in
police behavior nationwide, and perhaps even in this case.
Unlike many other police killings
of unarmed Black men, there was no frightened, trigger-happy white cop. There
was no white-dominated “law enforcement” apparatus structured to keep Blacks
down. Nichols was a young Black man beaten to death after a traffic stop by
five Black officers in a mostly-Black police department headed by a Black
police chief in a Black-majority city.
It’s a rare lineup of elements, and
it has forced questions that seem to have nothing to do with race: about how
police recruits are screened, how they are trained, how they are socialized once
they’re in uniform, and how rules governing the use of force are designed and
enforced.
Yet none of those areas is
impervious to insidious racial stereotyping. They are all vulnerable to subtle
interactions between race and power. Even Blacks, in keeping with a pattern
seen broadly in multiracial settings, may internalize the negative stereotypes
of themselves that are taught by the larger, white society.
Therefore, when America’s longstanding images of the Black man as aggressive, violent, and dangerous are lodged in any officer’s expectations, high anxiety can provoke preemptive force—by Black cops as well as white. The nervousness is enhanced during traffic stops, which cops are trained to believe are more life-threatening than the data show.
