April 14, 2021
Daunte Wright. We are numb. Angry. Sickened by the reason that another name has been seared into our collective consciousness. In pictures, Daunte looks like a baby, our baby. Imagine your son, or little brother, or nephew at 20. On the cusp of manhood, but still a baby. Imagine a sweet young man who doted on his two year old son and was working hard to take care of him. Imagine that you were the family who rewarded that sweetness and industry with the gift of a new car just two weeks ago. Think about how Daunte was treating that gift, making sure it was clean inside and out. Imagine he had borrowed $50 from you to take it to the car wash and that inside, he hung new air fresheners from the rear view mirror.
We all know those air fresheners. They were probably those ubiquitous, heavily scented pine tree shaped air fresheners that hang from rear view mirrors of countless young men. Imagine those air fresheners being the “reason” that your son was pulled over. The absurdity of that pretext boggles the mind. We know that the real reason is that far too many police officers are offended by Black joy. Why else would you use such a flimsy excuse to stop a young man and his girlfriend on a Sunday afternoon? Too many officers are incapable of straying from the police forces’ roots in slave patrols and believe that it is their job to hunt down, criminalize and terrorize Black people.
Does that sound like hyperbole? Take a look at the footage of the arrest of Lt. Nazario, an Afro-Latinx Army officer who was arrested in uniform while driving his brand new car back from the dealership. The pretext was missing plates, but Lt. Nazario had a temp tag affixed to the window. Nonetheless, the officers screamed at him and pepper sprayed him, telling the Lieutenant that he was “fixing to ride the lightning,” (Source: ““Black Army Officer Pepper Sprayed in Traffic Stop Accuses Officers of Assault,”by Mike Ives and Maria Cramer, The New York Times, 4/10/21). This appalling incident of police brutality occurred on December 5, 2020, but the officer was not fired until this week, once the video became public (ibid).
The pattern is soul crushingly familiar. Police officers harass, debase, assault and kill Black people routinely with little or no consequences, while our grief and protest is criminalized. Kim Potter, the 26 year veteran officer who murdered Daunte Wright, claimed that she had mistaken her gun for her taser. It strains credulity to believe that a veteran officer would mistake two weapons of different weights and colors.
As of this morning, Kim Potter has not been arrested. She resigned yesterday and issued a statement that she had “loved every minute of being a police officer,” and expressed no remorse for Daunte Wright’s death. Conversely, the citizens of Brooklyn Center who took to the streets in a paroxysm of grief and rage were met with an authoritarian, heavily militarized response. Police officers were supplemented by escalating numbers of the National Guard, which doubled from Monday to Tuesday night. A draconian 7:00 p.m. curfew imposed Monday night gave the police an excuse to arrest scores of people exercising their First Amendment rights.
If you’re tempted to lecture long suffering Black people who have been the victims of unchecked state sponsored violence about looting or property damage, don’t. Instead, I challenge you to look at that picture of the skinny kid with the goofy smile wearing a Chicago Bulls cap that was two sizes too big and imagine he was your son. What would you do?