Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: "The Violence Is Not New, It's the Cameras That Are New"
I would add that it is the cameras that take the issue off the back burner for lots of white people. If it ain't in your face, it's much easier to ignore.
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32284-ta-nehisi-coates-on-police-brutality-qthe-violence-is-not-new-its-the-cameras-that-are-newq
TA-NEHISI COATES: This book proceeded from a notion, and there are a couple of main notions that are really at work here. And one of the dominant ideas in the book, Between the World and Me, which is, you know, effectively an extended essay told in a letter form to my son, is the notion of fear, because I think like when people think about African-American communities, there are a lot of things that come to mind, but one of the things that does not come to mind, I think, enough in the mainstream conversation is simply how afraid we are of our bodies, how afraid we are for our children, how afraid we are for our loved ones, on a daily basis. And, you know, I understood this as a very, very young person, as I talk about it in the book. You know, from my earliest memories, I was talking to Dad about this a little while ago, and I think about my first memories, my first memories of going—my first coherent memories of going with my mother and father to see Marshall "Eddie" Conway in prison, and understanding that there are black men—you know, are in prison. That was like my first memory. He had done something, or somebody accused him of something. Something had happened where he did not have the full freedom and control of his body, and that was something that happened to people who look like me, even though I didn’t quite understand how and why that happened.
And then, as you grow up in the community, and you have to go out into the world and navigate—you know, I’ve said this several times in many places—you know, I have my memories of going to middle school here in Baltimore, and I think about how much of my mental space was possessed with keeping my body safe, how much of it dealt with how I was dressed, who I was walking with, what neighborhood I was walking through, once I got to school how I conducted myself in the school, and not so much in such a way that would be obedient to my teachers, but in a way that would keep me safe from the amount of violence. I mean, I was talking in this interview the other day; I was saying that any sort of policy that you think about in this country that has to do with race ultimately comes back, for black folks, to securing our bodies, the physical safety of our body. And so we have these kind of high and abstract debates about, you know, affirmative action. And in the minds of certain people, we think those conversations are literally just about "Is my kid going to get into Harvard or not?" But behind that, for us, as black people, is a conversation of "Is my kid going to be able to have the means to live in a neighborhood where he or she walks outside the house and they’re not looking over their shoulder, and they’re not watching their back, and they’re not—they don’t have to do the sort of things that I have to do, the threat of violence is always there?"
Now, one of the horrifying things—and this is what, you know, I’m going to read about tonight—even for those of us who escape those neighborhoods, even for those of us who make it somewhere and are able to do something and live in better places, the threat never quite leaves us, because once we’re no longer afraid of the neighborhood, it turns out we actually have to have some fear for the very people we pay taxes to protect us. And that’s what we’ve been hearing about for the past year over this country. We’ve been seeing a lot of that. And it seems like there’s a kind of national conversation going on right now about those who are paid to protect us, who sometimes end up inflicting lethal harm upon us. But for me, this conversation is old, and I’m sure for many of you the conversation is quite old. It’s the cameras that are new. It’s not the violence that’s new. We are not in the midst of a new wave of anything. We’re, you know, in a new technological wave, you know? And this is not unprecedented. You know, the sort of violence that folks saw in the 1960s, in Selma, for instance, or on Bloody Sunday, that sort of violence was not, in fact, actually new. That’s what white supremacy, what racism is. It is an act of violence. What was new was the cameras. There was certain technology that was able to take that into the living rooms of America. And we’re going through a similar thing right now, but the violence is not new.
When I think about the first time I really, really became aware of this, beyond theory, it was in the instance of the killing of a good friend of mine—a friend of mine, I should say to clarify our relationship, a friend of mine by the name of Prince Jones, who I went to Howard University with.
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