Gene Torisky: Why I marched
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No one asked why I participated in the Greensburg and Latrobe rallies for George Floyd — not that I expected it. A few observers in Latrobe seemed to assume all 100 marchers were violent members of “the antifa.” I say this because of the matching “(expletive) antifa” T-shirts those onlookers sported.
All of us antifa? Even the minister in clerical blacks? Even the gray-haired man with the ball cap and, if memory serves, ponytail? (I was one of those gray-hairs myself, so I mean no disrespect.) Even the young mom carrying her toddler?
Brothers and sisters who opposed the marches, try to find better arguments. You make yourselves look silly advancing elementary logical fallacies (red herring, hasty generalization, abusive ad hominem) like that.
If pressed for just one reason, though, I might say it’s because my parents never had to give me “The Talk.”
Many people may not know about The Talk. For others, unfortunately, it’s a life-changing event. Every African American parent, especially of young males, has to warn their children to interact slowly, softly and respectfully, even excessively so, with police officers, especially once they learn to drive.
If you’re stopped, keep your hands in view at all times. Reach for your wallet only when the cop tells you to do so. Never raise your voice, no matter how outrageous the accusations. If you don’t do these things, it could cost your life.
My mom and dad were loving and engaged parents, maybe even a tad protective. Yet they didn’t give me The Talk. They didn’t have to, because I’m classified as white.
When I was 17, I was pulled over by an Akron, Ohio police officer. It wasn’t my fault; my dad forgot to renew the license sticker on his rusty old VW Beetle, which I was driving. I may have looked like a punk — I had long hair, a thin mustache and scraggly beard, and a hat like Clint Eastwood’s in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
The cop got on my case, probably assuming the old beater was mine and I needed a lesson, and started verbally prodding me. “What if I call a tow truck right now,” he jabbed, “and have this vehicle towed to the impound lot?” I replied, “Well, I guess I’d have to walk home, officer.”
He squinted at me in the February cold. It didn’t occur to my 17-year-old suburban self that I might sound like a smart-aleck. I thought I was answering his question honestly. It never even crossed my mind that maybe the question was rhetorical and I was supposed to shut up.
Nor did I notice that I was still seated in the car on that winter day. I hadn’t been told to stand outside as traffic sped by, much less pulled from the vehicle, slammed into the sheet metal and handcuffed. Or struck by a police baton. Or shot.
I never had The Talk, though that didn’t make much difference to my safety. But for others, “surviving police encounters while black,” as Utne Reader called it, requires that they hear The Talk and pay very close attention to its cautions. All those things that didn’t occur to me to worry about do occur to our minority brothers and sisters. All those alternate possibilities impinge on their thinking, every time they encounter the police. For those people, it’s predictably a matter of life and death.
Policing equity is a huge problem in our society. Clare Corbould wrote a cogent introduction for The Conversation web site on June 1 titled “The Fury in US Cities is Rooted in a Long History of Racist Policing, Violence, and Inequality.” Of course that history doesn’t make the Latrobe Police Department or the Pennsylvania State Police racist. That’s not why the Greensburg and Latrobe rallies were held. But the history does color (sorry) all their dealings with individual members of the public, none of whom can control their ethnic heritage.
In July 2016, during a different rash of shootings of black individuals by police across America, Vanity Fair published a story by Kia Makarechi, “What the Data Really Says About Police and Racial Bias.” Across 18 different studies, blackness was the best predictor of whether a cop would find an unarmed person who was accused of a crime threatening enough to use force against them, regardless of behavior, age, neighborhood, socioeconomic status, or past criminal record. (This turned out to be true even when the unarmed subject was another police officer.) Blackness also greatly increased one’s chances of a traffic stop, even with no discernible reason for one.
What should this country do about policing inequity? Several groups collect statistics, propose reforms, and train local police departments. It’s true that correlation doesn’t necessarily indicate causation. But white Americans need to admit there is a problem, that the best data developed over the years do in fact show troubling patterns of black and brown people suffering disproportionately from police harassment and violence, even when controlling for variables like education and earnings.
If George Floyd had done exactly the same things he did (or didn’t do), but was white and poor — or white and middle class, or rich and white, or Asian and any of those things — is it likely that a police officer would have felt it necessary to subdue him by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes? Even while bystanders warned that Floyd was dying? Even with three police colleagues right there beside him? Of course anything might have happened — but what would have been likely?
Floyd’s case is only the most recent of a very sorry lot. Would the three Georgia whites, including a former police investigator, who stopped Ahmaud Arbery in February have been likely to accost a non-black jogger in that neighborhood on suspicion of burglary? If so, would they have been armed? Would they attempt a “citizens’ arrest”?
If the drug suspects Louisville, Ky. police were looking for in March hadn’t been black, would police likely have simply shot into an apartment during a “no knock” search warrant? Is that typically done in white neighborhoods? Is such a warrant even legal? Breonna Taylor, an African American EMT serving during the coronavirus pandemic, was killed. Initially there wasn’t even an apology to her family, even though police had the wrong people. Instead prosecutors charged Taylor’s boyfriend with attempted murder and aggravated assault. He owned a gun legally and believed he was defending against a home invasion. In a very real sense, he was. It took two months for the charges to be dropped, close to the amount of time it took for charges to be filed in Arbery’s case.
There were several reasons I marched for George Floyd. Two were neatly captured on signs held by fellow demonstrators in Latrobe — “Make Mr. Rogers Proud” and “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the latter quoting Martin Luther King’s masterful “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
My own sign said “equal rights now” and “policing equity now.” Because it’s not right that African American brothers and sisters have to have The Talk with their children, and white parents don’t. It’s not right that black- and brown-skinned Americans are several (or even many) times more likely to suffer violence at the hands of the same authorities charged with protecting them.
I’m white and middle class; I’m less directly affected. It wasn’t police in my ZIP code that did those things. But I’m not just willing to say “I got mine, Jack,” and leave fellow citizens like George Floyd to suffer and die.
It’s fitting and proper that we mourn the lives unjustly lost — that we say and remember their names. It’s also urgent that we agitate for changes to safeguard the rights and lives of future George Floyds and Ahmaud Arberys and Breonna Taylors.
I speak only for myself, but that’s why I marched.
Gene Torisky is an associate professor of philosophy at St. Vincent College, Latrobe.