targeted in his neighborhood. As he had done before, Gray ran at the approaching police vehicles and was then arrested. To “nickel dime” detainees is to bind their hands and feet without fastening their seatbelts, leaving them unable to protect their heads. Officers proceed to make sudden stops and sharp turns to fling their detainee inside the metal cage of the police van. Within an hour of his arrest, Gray’s spinal cord was nearly 80 percent severed; essentially, he had suffered internal decapitation. A lifelong Baltimore resident, friends and neighbors called Gray “Pepper.” He had a twin sister Fredericka; they grew up in crushing poverty, just a few blocks from where he was arrested. He had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. Before being killed, he had suffered food insecurity and childhood lead poisoning so severe that a local attorney had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Gray children; medical reports confirmed that they had permanent brain damage.
Although the deaths of black men and boys often dominate headlines, black women are extremely vulnerable to police violence. In Fort Worth, Texas, Atatiana Jefferson was killed during a wellness check in 2019; a neighbor had reported that her front door was ajar and was worried about the Jefferson household. Fearing an intruder, Jefferson approached her window to inspect the commotion outside. As she appeared in the window, an officer shot her through it. He had not announced who he was or why he was there. Atatiana had been playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew, Zion. A recent college graduate, she worked in the pharmaceutical industry and was planning to attend medical school. An only child, she was the primary caregiver to her parents, both of whom passed away soon after her murder.
In each of these cases, to this date, none of the officers have been held criminally responsible. Jefferson’s killer was recently indicted, though convictions are rare. The above is just a snapshot of the many black lives lost. Each life tells a different story about the intersection of gender, class, and age in the devaluation of black lives. Like Atatiana Jefferson, African-American women are often killed by police in their own homes, including Korryn Gaines, Kathryn Johnston, Yvette Smith, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Tarika Wilson, whereas black men are often targeted by racial profiling. In building a racial justice movement, Du Bois compelled white folk to conceive the world from the perspective of African Americans, i.e., to hear as they would hear the footfall of police boots at the front door, to feel their fear at an approaching police vehicle. Such an empathetic attitude is an essential tool for preventing future violence. And yet, when vulnerable voices share their distinct perspective on police practices (or the polity-at-large), they are often distrusted and discredited.
Trust: do you see what I see?
Du Bois argued that the color line cloaked racial realities. In part, it did this by cultivating distrust of black voices across the color line. Whites often reject the testimonies of black and brown communities, as if they do not bear witness to a shared reality with them. Conversely, after enduring long-standing scrutiny and indifference, understandably, victims of racial injustice come to distrust the white-controlled polity; and they doubt its willingness to listen to them or police departments’ capacity to serve their communities, in which the police often function like an occupying military force. Mutual distrust strengthens the color line: whites refuse to acknowledge racial realities and, in turn, an interracial justice effort to dismantle the color line becomes impracticable. And yet there are moments when, as Du Bois puts it, the “veil” lifts and the black experience of the color line emerges, and is recognized, in public consciousness. The success of the Black Lives Matter movement is to have conveyed to the public the reality of anti-black violence at the hands of police and vigilantes that has long beleaguered African Americans.
Mutual trust is necessary to sustain the bounds of civic fellowship and a shared sense of political fate. Trust often mediates what one takes to be true and is ready to accept as a feature of a shared reality that binds a stranger’s destiny to one’s own. In granting credibility to an interlocutor, one takes their experiences of the world to be a true representation of the world. Yet in an age of the rapid dissemination of information through the internet and social media, the refusal to trust black voices persists. Distrust and suspicion are the cause of racial violence – a fact exemplified in the killing of Eric Garner. The moments leading up to Garner’s death were caught on cellphone video and watched by millions. A Staten Island resident, Garner was killed in 2014 in an illegal chokehold by ex-officer Daniel Pantaleo.11 Yet there remains little consensus about what the footage means. Prior to his death, Garner repeated eleven times “I can’t breathe,” a phrase that is now a rally cry of the BLM movement. Pantaleo did not believe Garner that he really couldn’t breathe; or else, he simply didn’t care. Likewise, many members of the public still do not believe that Garner’s death was avoidable, or else they simply don’t care one way or another. In effect, they just don’t trust that he really couldn’t breathe.
In an interview, Garner’s youngest daughter, Emerald Garner, responded to the news that four years after Pantaleo had killed her father he was finally fired: “We’re grateful that someone sees what we see.”12 In contrast, the NYC police union leader, Patrick Lynch, denounced Pantaleo’s firing. Lynch asserted that the firing encourages assaults on police officers. Of course, police officers’ distorted perception of their own vulnerability to attack by African Americans rationalizes their use of deadly force in the first place. Moreover, officers often fabricate police reports to suggest a victim posed a threat, knowing that they enjoy the public’s trust that their black and brown victims lack. The public’s inclination to trust police officers and distrust their victims persists, in spite of video footage of fatal police encounters. In response to Lynch, Emerald Garner said:
So, he’s saying that de Blasio [mayor of NYC] left the police officers out on the street alone. Eric Garner was left on the street to die. And that’s on video. So, if they’re saying that the mayor abandoned them and they’re so angry that a police officer broke the rules and got penalized for it, that’s really what the problem is. The problem is they never thought in a million years that this cop would be fired because of a black man. And I think that’s honestly what they thought. And the fact that he is fired, it makes them upset, because it’s like, “We’ve been getting away with it for so long, so who are you to tell us to stop doing what we’re doing?” And that’s just how I take the whole situation, because a wrong was done. Like, at some point you have to stop and say Eric Garner was killed for no reason. He could have been saved. They neglected to save him.13
As Emerald Garner points out, Lynch never imagined – and resents – the idea that officers could face repercussions for their actions, even as most assailants like Pantaleo avoid criminal prosecution. The so-called “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which appeared in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, mobilizes the law enforcement community against police “vilification.” In a press release, the “Blue Lives Matter” movement states that black rights activists “spread the absurd message that people were being shot by law enforcement simply because of the color of their skin. Even our political leaders pandered to these criminals and helped to spread this false narrative.”14 The distrust of black voices is so intense that the Black Lives Matter movement is dismissed as a cover for black criminality and as outright irrational. Equating black rights activists with “criminals,” the countermovement invokes a timeworn racist theme that holding white-controlled institutions accountable for anti-black violence means somehow harming whites. Not only does it deny black vulnerability to police violence, it treats the call for police accountability as a threat.
Just as the white-controlled polity had once rationalized slavery – and wrote it into the Constitution – as if it were consistent with, rather than a contradiction, of liberal ideals, in our white-controlled polity today, public habits of moral judgment are often shaped by the denial of the moral and epistemic value of black voices. Du Bois believed that an effect of the color line is that the white public fails to register moral injuries against African Americans as a contradiction of democratic ideals. The white public struggles to “see” beyond the color line the people who live and strive there as making a legitimate claim on their will. And this failure to “see” black humanity can be so strong that even video footage of the destruction of the black body does not shake it.