By now, you might have seen videos and photographs of Dylann Storm Roof’s arrest, and read the story about how the police bought him a meal at a fast-food establishment. The arrest is peaceful; there are no dramatic throwdowns to the ground, no knee to the neck or back, no choke-hold, no red-faced, apoplectic policeman screaming orders to ‘get down and stay down!’ or anything else like that. Here is a murderer, and here is his arrest, all by the book. The prisoner is not brutalized; he is taken into custody.
Pointing out the double standards visible in this treatment is easy enough. Mind you, so are the responses to it: Storm Roof did not ‘resist arrest’; he complied with all orders; he was docile. If only all those black folks whose violent arrests we are used to viewing would be similarly compliant and meek–you know, even the ones who haven’t actually committed any crimes–then all would be good. Of course, Storm Roof’s calm also stemmed from his sense of satisfaction at a task completed, a job ‘well done’ with nine targets successfully dispatched. Why struggle when all to be done is over with? Now comes further opportunity–at the time of the trial–wax lyrical about the creed that drove him on to his killings.
But Storm Roof’s mild manners and his docility are not the whole story. The videos and photographs of his arrest are circulated to note his ‘race’ had a great deal to do with it. There is nothing outrageous about that claim. Dylan Storm Roofs looks ‘just like one of us’ to the police who arrested him. He is a young white man, and the police know many young white men. They have broken bread with them, watched and cheered for them at baseball and football games, dropped them off at proms. They know young white men with guns; they know young white men with Confederate flags. They’ve seen them before; they can ‘relate’ to them. Heck, the police in Shelby were–mostly–young white men themselves once.
There would have been no such familiarity with a young black suspect. The police would not have thought he ‘looks just like me’; they would not have found his mannerisms or language wholly, comfortably, recognizable, a reminder of their daily lives. Their most extensive contact with ‘black folk’ is in all likelihood restricted to attending a summer barbecue at a token black colleague’s home, where the white folk retreat to a group and gaze uncomfortably at all the black folk around them; these attendees serve as reminders their black co-worker lives in a world outside the precinct wholly novel to them. Their children have few, if any, black friends so they are unable to see black youngsters expressing their doubts, fears, insecurities, likes, and dislikes in a variety of domestic and educational environments. Black and white don’t mix; black remains fearful and despised.
South Carolina remains a segregated state; where segregation lives on, so does fear and racial prejudice. One is the cause of the other; they co-determine each other. If you wonder what ‘systemic racism’ is and what is its effects are, this is it.
Samir Chopra 