They always had it coming.
After Jacob Blake was shot several times in the back by Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer Rusten Shesky, and was lying paralyzed from the waist down and handcuffed to a hospital bed, right-wing media, conservatives, and the usual crowd of other assorted racists were searching for a justification for what seemed to the rest of the world as an unprovoked assault. Some said that Blake was reaching for a knife. Others insisted he was resisting arrest. The more creative ones claimed that he had sexually assaulted a minor (something the police officer likely wouldn’t have known). And so, of course, he deserved to be maimed. The basic message was obvious: His very Blackness meant that he couldn’t possibly be considered to be an innocent victim. He always had it coming. Blake has joined a perpetually growing list of Black people who’ve been on the wrong side of a gun clutched in the hand of someone unable or unwilling to see our humanity; Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd—their stories are different yet remarkably similar. Arbery, who was shot and killed by armed white men in Georgia for the crime of Running While Black, was falsely accused by right-wing media of robbing a home. Taylor, an emergency room technician who was killed by Louisville Police while sleeping in her own bed, has been described as being involved in the drug trade, despite no evidence and her family’s insistence that this is simply not true. And Floyd, the catalyst for the ongoing protests and the uprising sweeping the country, has been described as having resisted arrest and having fentanyl in his system. But even if all of these false allegations were true, they still would not justify the killings. Police and white people with guns are not the judge, jury, and the executioner, even though recently they have done a good job of adopting all those roles. The rush to search for an excuse, any excuse, for these deaths rests in one underlying assumption: There is no such thing as a Black victim.
