And it's in that vein that we arrive at today's awful story about oppression. The USA Today reported today that Timothy Loehmann, the officer who shot and killed 12-year old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park, justified his behavior by saying:
"He gave me no choice. He reached for the gun and there was nothing I could do."There are many reasons that the officer is wrong, of course. Even giving his statement the absolute benefit of the doubt that it has not earned, and accepting it as true, the officer is still in the wrong. Because even if Tamir Rice had lifted his toy gun at the officer in that moment, the officer had many choices, especially before this situation ever got to that point. He could have, for instance, done anything other than pull his police cruiser within feet of the young child, provoking a situation in which he could justifiably slaughter a 12-year old.
And it's in that that my own experience - my own white privilege - informs my writing. You see, I was Tamir Rice, as were my friends, except that we were older and far worse. It's the type of story I never thought I'd broadcast, but at 29, I'd hope that I've transcended my adolescent stupidity in a way that Tamir Rice will never have an opportunity to.
Reports indicate that Tamir Rice was playing with a very real looking toy gun in a public space. This is not a smart thing to do in a culture where people are fearful and willing to shoot 12-year old black kids with impunity. But how could Tamir Rice grasp the hundreds year-old history that might lead a white person to see him as an imminent threat rather than how he probably viewed himself - as a kid playing around with a toy gun? Nothing indicates that Rice decided that day to do anything sinister. At the very worst, his was a crime of childhood innocence, not understanding the adult implications of childhood behavior.
What we did was worse, and worse, we were older. We were 16, a few years and developmental steps older than young Tamir Rice. We called ourselves the "Weekend Warriors," and occasionally we descended on neighborhoods with our paintball guns full of air pressure, intent on inflicting maximum terror on the poor people we might find. It was, of course, very stupid. We didn't intend to hurt anyone, quite obviously, and we didn't comprehend the harm, including property damage or even heart attacks, that we might bring on an unsuspecting populace.
One day, in a fit of true stupidity, we attacked a stopped car sitting to our left at a traffic light. It was the middle of the day, in one of the busiest intersections of our small city. Not with the sanction of any of the rest of us, but without really the chastisement either, one of my friends pulled from beneath the seat a paintball gun that, to the casual observer, might have looked like a very dangerous weapon. He pointed it at a white sedan. In that sedan was an older white woman, and she was driving on the right side of her vehicle. We later learned that the vehicle used to be outfitted for mail carrying. The sheer audacity of this woman in driving on the wrong side of her car apparently motivated my friend to fire a paint-based projectile at her window. The rest of us shook our heads and called him a real moron, as the gravity of what he'd done hit him square.
There we were, this woman's car painted in red paint, and she probably thought she'd just been shot. The people in cars around her, who undoubtedly couldn't see the paint splatter, might have pulled their guns to mow us down. And we sat for a couple of uneasy seconds, waiting for the light to turn green. We sped ahead, as the woman turned left. She'd gotten our license number, of course, and the police were immediately called.
Then something amazing happened. No blue lights showed up in back of our van. We weren't corralled in a hail of civilian or police gun fire. Rather, we made it back to my friend's house, and we were playing X-Box when the driver's parents called to say that the police had shown up at their house. It was all very civil from there, of course. We were handled as white kids in the justice system tend to be handled. They asked us nicely to come to the driver's home. I didn't go because I had a hair appointment with my mother, and despite the fact that the gun used had been mine, I didn't feel responsible for what had happened.
A short time later, while sitting in my chair at the hair cuttery, my mom's phone rings, and her face turned ghostly shade. It was my dad, who'd been called by some combination of parents and police. My haircut was over, and away we went to the local police station. After a few uneasy moments, an officer came out, chastised us for our stupidity, told us to go clean up the mess we'd made around town, and said that we should never do it again.
Our parents punished us, but we weren't booked, handcuffed, finger-printed, or otherwise hassled. We certainly weren't thrown to the ground. And despite pulling a gun on a real person in a busy part of town, we hadn't been killed or maimed. Boys will be boys, and all. We learned - we truly did - from this stupidity, and each person who was in that car has found some modicum of adult success today.
Oh, and we were all white.
I often think, when seeing stories about police firing on an unsuspecting and unarmed citizen, that "it could have been us." But I scold myself for that thought, because that thought suggests that there's a randomness to what happens in cases of police brutality. It is true that sometimes white people are killed by police just as black people are, but the propensity for young black people to be treated as dangerous by police, while young white people are not, is no accident. It's by design, and is a feature, rather than a bug, of a justice system that's more than willing to grant the presumption of goodness to young white kids like me while granting the sanction of criminality to young black kids like Tamir Rice.
We were Tamir Rice, but much worse and far less defensible. Our intentional actions far outpace the seemingly innocent conduct of a child much younger than us. And as often happens in the South and as we've seen, in Cleveland, we were allowed to outlive our misgivings, while Tamir Rice was not.
It's not a shame that my friends and I were spared. As it turns out, it was probably for the best that we weren't maimed or ruined over what amounted to teenage hideousness. What's a shame is that kids like Tamir Rice aren't allowed the same ability to outlive any situation where their conduct is less than perfectly perceptibly innocent.