America claims black lives matter, but police killings suggest they don’t

by Stephanie Tang             Black lives matter! To carry this message, hundreds of thousands of protesters have flooded into America’s streets, outraged by the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown and the non-indictment of his killer. We shut down freeways and bridges coast to coast, stopping traffic, holiday shopping, Grand Central Station and other business as usual.

Then came another grand jury non-indictment: Eric Garner, also an unarmed African American, with this killing by choke hold caught on video. This ruling stoked more furious protests, continual and now countless, and has sparked solidarity marches in Tokyo, London, Paris and Melbourne.

"Black lives matter!” Why must this even be said? Because these rulings declare to the world: In America, black lives do not matter.

Did you hear that? Do you not feel assaulted straight to your heart? If not, why not?

“Black lives matter!” This powerful moral message indicts these obscene grand jury rulings. Bridge shutdowns and school walkouts are inconvenient. Demonstrators refusing to disperse, even in the face of tear gas and tanks, are unruly. True. But if black lives do not matter, what are people to do?

“Ferguson is everywhere!” marchers chant. That’s true, too. During the month after Garner’s death, police across America killed 59 more people. Every 28 hours, a black person is killed by law enforcement, security guards or vigilantes. Of those killed yearly by police, most are black and Latino. Few of these killings are ever charged or prosecuted, and most of even those cases do not lead to criminal convictions of police officers for murder in any degree. But I challenge anyone to watch the deaths-on-video of Eric Garner, or more recently 12-year-old Tamir Rice on a playground in Cleveland — to disagree with my definition of these killings as murders.

What kind of society claims equal justice under the law yet produces this ghastly epidemic? And why should anyone who refuses to live like this, or anyone else with a conscience, heed “Stay calm” orders from a president who insists race relations are so much better than 20 or 50 years ago?

Between 1890 amd 1920, 2,254 African Americans were lynched, according to research by Michael Pfeifer, an associate professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Between 1976 and 1998, according to a 2001 Justice Department report, 3,696 African Americans were killed by police. Is the Jim Crow, whites-only way of life just our distant past, or do we live with it today?

And slavery itself? In its 1857 Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that black people have no rights that whites must respect. That’s not true today, right?

If anyone wants an end to the epidemic of police killings, these protests are the best news in a long time. People suffering the abuse have found a voice. People who were unaware of the epidemic now have to see it.

The protests have catalyzed more society-wide confrontation with the reality of police violence than all the reforms, commissions, elections and polite conversation of the past 20 years.

Justice is on the side of the marching protesters, the artists and athletes risking careers to speak out, and the resolute people in Ferguson, Mo., who lifted the protest lid and wouldn’t stop. 

Everyone should thank, support and join them in action — in the streets, where possible. And on campuses, in worship services of every faith, in workplaces, theaters, concert and sports arenas. And everywhere else. Let there be no silence. Be counted.

Police terror and killings is an epidemic. It must be stopped, now. Humanity demands it.