This post was written prior to the inexplicable decision of the New York grand jury in the Eric Garner case. That event gives more force to the issues expressed below.

 Leo Casey replies again today to Deborah Meier

Dear Deb:

The events in Ferguson—and in Cleveland—have been on my mind as well. The protests against the Ferguson grand jury decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American teenager, Michael Brown, have captured the national imagination over the last week. Less attention has been paid to another tragedy that has played out in recent days, when Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed a 12-year-old African-American boy, Tamir Rice, who was playing by himself with a BB gun. Unlike Brown's death, Rice's death was captured on a surveillance tape, so there can be no dispute about what actually happened. A police car bursts unto the scene and comes to an abrupt stop right next to Rice. In a matter of a second or two at most, the car door flies open, Rice is immediately shot, and he falls to the ground mortally wounded. Neither the police officer who shot Rice nor his partner provide first aid to the fallen 12-year-old.

It is impossible for me to make sense of these two tragic deaths outside of the American prism of race. I can't read Darren Wilson's dehumanizing description of Michael Brown before the Ferguson grand jury, with its use of classic racist tropes of African-Americans as violent brutes, more animal than human, and not conclude that this way of looking at an unarmed black teenager made it all too easy to shoot him no less than seven times, with a final kill shot to the head as he fell. I couldn't watch the slaying of Tamir Rice, with its hair-trigger shooting of a 12-year-old before he could even figure out what was happening to him and not recall the powerful research of Phillip Goff on how racial dehumanization denies African-American boys "the innocence" of childhood, treating them as if they were much older—more worldly, more responsible, and more potentially threatening—than they actually are. I can't escape this bitter truth: Neither Michael Brown nor Tamir Rice would be dead today if they had been white.

Click here to continue reading.