Fight Or Flight

One of the things we perhaps fail to comprehend is that the shooting of POC on the streets means different things to different people.

The author here, Easy G, writes from his perspective as a White American male. An apex creature as it were, in this world in which we live. He too has experienced the unholy fear of being attacked, though not by a police officer.

In this piece, he juxtaposes his attack with the *attack* on persons such as Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles. It's an interesting juxtaposition, one I had not, myself, considered.

Consider for a moment, a whole other perspective.

Read it. Share it.

~Elle~

Protester sign from one of the many anti-police brutality marches
Anytown, USA 2017

Almost two years ago, while my wife and I were walking our dogs, her ex rolled up on us, held a .40 caliber gun to my head, and shot me in the chest and stomach with it. So I can speak to this.

I'm not Black, I haven't spent a lifetime being harassed, bullied, and threatened by cops. But I understand the profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness a person can feel when you're unarmed and have an extremely hostile, volatile person screaming obscenities at you and placing a gun to your head. I understand how instinct suppresses your thoughts and your sensory input.

"Fight or flight" isn't a choice, it's a response. Your vision telescopes, you see only your attacker's face. Your peripheral vision dims and then disappears altogether. Your hearing becomes muted, your attacker's words become unintelligible. "Fight or flight" is a response, not a choice, but with cops you aren't allowed either option.

That people keep their composure with guns pointed at them amazes me. I didn't. I attacked my attacker - not as a calculated choice or as an act of bravery but in a fit of rage. This man with a gun wants to take everything you have and everything you will ever have away from you. Forever. Every memory, every future joy, every relationship, every possession, every good work, every whimsical thought. This rage you feel comes out of nowhere and it's overwhelming. But you can't express it, can't let it show with a flicker in your face or by the quiver in your hand.

The fact that cops consistently shoot people of color who are far more composed and compliant than I was - people who show true courage - is deeply, profoundly frustrating because, among other things, holding a gun in the face of an unarmed person is an act of cowardice, isn't it? Yet time and time again, the brave person dies and the coward gets exonerated.

I can speak to this, yes, but another critical difference, in my situation, is that my shooter was NOT a cop. It was NOT his job to protect me as a citizen, it was NOT his sworn duty to treat me lawfully. Shooting me was NOT, among other things, an act of social betrayal. He owed me nothing. He wasn't sworn to protect or serve. Quite the opposite. Cops, on the other hand, those protect and serve men and women in blue, place innocent, unarmed, compliant Black people in that position of vulnerability and then shoot them anyway. 

It's obscene. It's evil.

The experiments Schrodinger should have done

Erwin Schrödinger, do you know the name? He was a Nobel-winning, Austrian physicist who questioned the commonly held view of what quantum physicists call superposition. The core conundrum of superposition is that subatomic particles exist in multiple states at the same time. Schrödinger's challenge to this view came in the form of a mental puzzle, which is sometimes called a thought experiment, which forced other physicists, including Einstein, to acknowledge that superposition did not seem to hold with observable reality with non-subatomic things, like say cats.

OK, so that’s very heavy and science-y but I need you to stay with me! The actual thought experiment (all thoughts, no actual cats were harmed in the performance of this experiment. No need to call PETA on me. Or him.) helps to make this much easier to comprehend.

Schrödinger’s experiment imagines a cat in a box with a contraption that stands a 50/50 chance of setting off poisonous gas.  (Einstein had a version in which the contraption set off explosives).  Thus, once the experiment is concluded, the cat is either alive or dead, but before opening the box, you, standing on the outside of the box, don't know which is true.

According to the accepted theory of superposition, in that moment, the cat technically, is in both states: dead and alive. Again, according to the theory, it is the act of looking into the box that forces nature's decision, in the language of the video (above) and “collapses the dual reality”. It is quite literally our curiosity that kills the cat. To be perfectly clear, Schrödinger didn't believe this to be true; he devised the thought experiment to show that superposition, at least for visible objects, is absurd.

I lay all of that out to offer this for your consideration: if Schrödinger had done this thought experiment with African Americans instead of cats, his conclusion might have been completely different.    It seems that Black folk involved in dangerous, possibly life-ending encounters with the police are the proof that the dual state does in fact exist for things larger than subatomic particles. Perhaps it doesn’t for cats, but for Black, Native, and Hispanic folk? Oh yeah. That dual state, that superposition, is very real.

People of color live in a perpetual state of dual reality.

They are simultaneously guilty (& not) [Walter Scott];
They are simultaneously compliant (& not) [Mike Brown];
They are simultaneously threatening (& not) [Terrence Crutcher];
They are simultaneously fitting the description (& not) [Philando Castile];

They are simultaneously adult (& not) [Tamir Rice];

They are simultaneously victim (& not) [Charleena Lyles].

There is another important difference.  Schrödinger's cats have a 50% survival rate, but Schrödinger's POC end up dead a whole lot more often.

Additionally, the revised thought experiment confirms that it is the observation (by the police) that causes Schrödinger's POC to die.  A siren, a flashing blue light, a badge, a gun, and the observation of a POC, and Schrödinger might deserve another Nobel Prize.  Which like justice for Schrödinger's POC, must be awarded posthumously.

Which brings us to the trials………

If we extend the Schrödinger metaphor to the trials of those charged with unlawfully killing POC in routine police encounters, we find that the probabilities that ought to apply simply do not.   Perhaps, once the dual reality of the alive and dead POC collapses, bringing the officers to court further “collapses [any semblance of a] dual reality”?

With cats and poison gas (or explosives), the laws of probability apply. With Schrödinger’s Police Trials, as with Schrödinger’s POC? Not so much. When we look at the trials, probabilities go entirely out the window. Malefactors get acquitted a whole lot more than 50% of the time.

When it comes to the trials, this ain’t much of an experiment. There is no duality, there is only reality. We don't have to get to the end of the experiment to know the outcome. There don’t seem to be two possible outcomes. Probability of acquittal seems to be 1 (which if you remember from high school math, means 100% certainty). All the time, 1. Sure thing. The glove never fits. The jury generally acquits. And in the rare event that it doesn't, sentences are commuted, or charges are completely vacated. So ~1.

When it comes to POC and police trials, there is no dual reality. There is death for POC and acquittal for the POB (people of blue).

Wouldja just look at us! We are busting science wide open! POC outchere proving superposition and shit.

*shrugs*

Stop demanding forgiveness and do the damn work!

In the aftermath of the recent brutal killing of yet another Black youngster, people of color have, once again, been asked to eschew violence, omit calls for a full investigation leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer police officer, and leap directly to forgiveness.

As I discussed in Columbusing Blackness, “the colonizer mindset (or ytppul ytppuling) is Whiteness moving in the world in the way it best knows how: taking the path of least resistance, typically right through someone else's most sacred of spaces, directly to its destination.” In this particular instance, the destination is the holy space of forgiveness and the path lies directly through the heart of Black America’s grief. Further evidence of ytppul ytppuling; colonizer mindset hard at work.

Why would anyone make such a demand? Emotional survival and avoidance of the pain of their wrong-doing methinks.

Who would have the temerity to make such a demand? Why, the White colonizer of course, accustomed as he/she is to not ever having to actually be contrite for acts committed against others. (cf: the entirety of European colonizer history)

The demand for forgiveness is incredibly odious but what makes it worse is the justification; apparently, Ytppul are making this demand for my benefit! I am reliably informed by good White people that my willingness to forgive White violence and oppression without any evidence of White remorse or contrition is all for my own good! Me. Not guilty White America. No indeed! Those demanding my forgiveness are trying to help me, because I’m too [insert appropriate intellectual or emotional flaw here] to handle the horrors of processing White crimes against Black people. So thoughtful, really. [Gaslighting Level: Expert.]

When you put it that way, how could I possibly refuse? Quite easily, as it turns out.

I certainly appreciate that forgiveness helps me. I get that. I even agree with it. What I do not agree with is any suggestion that I owe anyone my forgiveness on some timeline that works for them. That’s not how this works. Forgiveness is an inside job, worked out according to a timeline determined by the forgiver not the forgivee. External pressure – whether social or emotional – is wholly inappropriate bullshit.

For every NWCL/G (nice White Christian lady or gentleman) who demands that POC forgive yet another murdering police officer I have these few questions:

First, were the late Jordan Edwards a blond, blue-eyed girl, would you demand forgiveness of her friends, her family, and her community before you demanded accountability of the police and a complete explanation of how this dreadful outcome came to be? This is not a rhetorical question.  None of these are.  So, would you?

Second, were the late Jordan Edwards an F student and a general pain-in-the-ass White child, would you say his life should be forfeit before you demanded accountability of the police? A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice.

Third, were the late Jordan Edwards a grown White man with two families and multiple children, a general lay about and drain on the taxpayer, would you say, "Let's wait until we have all the details!" before you demanded accountability of the police? I'll wait.

In any instance where accountability is secondary to the psychic comfort of the perpetrators’ group, privilege is at play, and needs to be called what it is - self-serving bull.....When another Black child has been murdered by the police, and White police at that, White comfort is not the goal of Black forgiveness. Well, to be clear, it’s not the goal for us. Though it obviously is for you. Even as we face the brutal death of one of our children at the hands of your police, in your view your feelings are still the most important thing. Why is that do you think?  

Indeed, if you really gave a crap about the humanity of those who are repeatedly harmed by colonizer Whiteness, you would lean all the way in to the discomfort of my unforgiveness. It might actually change you. But the truth is you have no interest – either real or feigned – in changing yourself. Rather, you want me to change – to contort myself emotionally and spiritually for your comfort. I am resolute however; your comfort is not my concern.

Your adjurations that I forgive may be couched in Biblical terms, but I see them for what they are: a salve to your conscience and an avoidance of the discomfort that the ugliness of racism brings you. You fear a retaliatory response. Welp, you could do something about that couldn’t you? You could learn and behave differently but nope, instead, you demand my silence and my complicity with your violence.

It is the ultimate exercise of White privilege to claim the right to decide who has to forgive and who must be forgiven and worse still, to establish the timeline for same and I am loudly going to call that rubbish out.

Don’t bother to clutch your pearls, reach for your emotional fragility, and wail, "I didn't mean it the way it sounded!". Yeah, you did. You just didn’t think I’d call you on it. Assuming that overly generous Black people will let you off the hook will not work here. Some few may forgive on demand, but many of us are onto your shit now. Many will refuse to allow you ease this time or the next.

Y’all need to sit and stew in your ugliness for a while. Y’all need to worry about backlash, rage and riots. Y’all need to have a come to Black Jesus moment. Y’all need to suffer the torments of the damned and then you need a real repentance moment, not some performative contrition nonsense of the “I’m sorry if anybody was offended” variety.  Nuh uh. The real thing is required.  

Until ‘you people’ are required to experience consequences of your vileness there will be no change in that behavior. The too-quick forgiveness that you invariably demand virtually ensures the behavior will be repeated. If folk walk around feeling like, “Hey, no harm no foul right?!”, “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it!” what impetus is there to do or be better next time around? None.

In the Caribbean, children who suck their fingers are discouraged from so doing so through the liberal application of raw aloe on the offending fingers. Aloe tastes vile and so children learn real quick to stop sticking those fingers in their mouths. America needs some raw aloe.

Don’t demand my forgiveness. Ain’t no Biblical basis for such a demand. Put some aloe on yuh damn fingers and stick them in your mouth. Deal with the bitter taste. Recognize the vileness of your skin kin’s actions. Learn. Grow. We’ll get to forgiveness eventually, maybe right around the time you get around to treating POC like they are equal human beings to your good selves. Here’s an idea: we gon’ follow you there. Lead the way! We will be right behind you.