Daily Archive

Fear is so subjective. Three men, laughing loudly and jostling each other, walk towards you on a nighttime street–does it make you smile, make you nervous, make you cross to the other side? A kid brings an electronics project to school–do you applaud his initiative and skill or call the police? An armed group gathers in a department-store parking lot–do they make you feel safe or threatened?

because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying

–from Citizen, Claudia Rankine

When the people with the power and weapons are deeply afraid of you, your life is in danger. That’s why so many civilians are dying at the hands of police, isn’t it–because the police find them frightening? Isn’t fear the reason police perceive that there’s a “war on police” even though officer deaths are, thank goodness, steeply down this year?

If we can acknowledge that our perceptions are not always accurate, and start acting on reality rather than on our fears, then we can get closer to our ideal of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Men armed with semiautomatic weapons in a Target parking lot, Irving, Texas, 2014. Irving is the Dallas suburb in which Ahmed Muhammad was detained yesterday after a teacher was afraid his electronics project was a bomb. Screen shot from KDAF-TV.