By Sikivu Hutchinson
Once again, white America can breathe a collective
sigh of relief that its kids are alright.
They are protected, they are innocent, they are worthy of all the
privileges that the U.S.' bankrupt legal system can offer. They are validated as human beings and as
children who should be allowed to experience life as children. When they fall, make mistakes, push boundaries,
the system is always there to catch them.
Condemning Cuyahoga County, Ohio prosecutor Tim McGinty’s decision not to indict the white officer who murdered
twelve year-old Tamir Rice, the Reverend Traci Blackmon said,
“Even in an open carry state, the
killing of a black child carrying a pellet gun is rendered justifiable”. Blackmon’s reference to open carry is a
reminder of the racist hypocrisy of the NRA’s pathological gun culture, its
role in shaping American male identity and white nationhood; and its deadliness
when it comes to the lives of black youth. Because open carry is designed
to ensure white citizens’ right to exercise violence in public space, Rice
could only have been protected by the logic of this permissive gun law if he
was white.
In the death scope of the Cleveland
police and the Cuyahoga grand jury, the state’s second murder weapon of choice,
Tamir Rice could only be a lawless criminal, junior thug and public enemy, “older”
than he appeared and hence culpable for his own murder. What he was not was a typical boy—a child
playing cops and robbers with the same toy gun that scores of white boys pick
up in the course of an average day, a child mimicking the very police officers
who assiduously protect their families and communities from the black Other
represented by twelve year-old babies like Rice.
In 2010, when seven year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones
was murdered as she slept in her bed by a white Detroit police officer during a
SWAT team raid on her home, the community marched, protested and mobilized against police terror. Because she was a black girl, Jones’ execution did not receive the same
level of attention that Rice’s has. In
January, after nearly five years of legal wrangling, mistrials and retrials,
all charges
against Joseph Weekley, Jones’ killer, were dropped and he walked free.
As
an instrument of the prosecution, the grand jury process shielded Rice’s
killers from justice. Writing in the Washington
Post, Ari Melber notes,
“Grand juries are built to be a tool of
prosecutors. They don’t hear from both sides in a case, like a trial jury
would. They hear only from the prosecutor, who decides what evidence and
testimony is presented. That’s why the
old saying goes that a grand jury will ‘indict a ham sandwich’ if a prosecutor tells
them to — because the prosecutor calls the shots…assum(ing) the prosecutor
wants to prosecute and, ultimately, secure a conviction.”
McGinty and his grand jury have blood on
their hands. And while the U.S. masquerades
as an exceptionalist beacon of democracy, smugly "superior" to other nations’ illiberal
rejection of due process, the community is calling
for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate the grand jury process
and immediately fire Timothy Loehmann, the officer who murdered Tamir. The lives
and stolen innocence of all black children demand no less.
