Daunte Wright shooting shows American sickness doesn't stop

April 13, 2021 4:01 PM PT

A year ago, as the world was coming to grips with the pandemic, many of us moved away from simply seeing masks as a necessary evil to a form of creative expression. Sometimes they would be bedazzled. Other times a team logo.

My favorite are the ones with popular TV catchphrases etched on them, like “How you doin’?” from “Friends,” which, in retrospect, took on different meanings depending on the news cycle.

When I saw a mask with an illustration of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia, I just had to have it. I mean, who doesn’t love “The Golden Girls”?

Plus, I thought it would make a lot of white people feel better.

A 6-foot-2 Black man with locs walking into a grocery store in a city that is roughly 90% white — as is the case in Scottsdale, Ariz., where I spent a lot of my quarantine time — attracts a lot of stares. Walking into that store with a mask on… let’s just say I had a better chance of finding toilet paper than making eye contact.

It was common to see women literally take their purse out of their cart and place it onto their shoulder at the sight of me. Or turn their carts around.

So, I bought the “Golden Girls” mask to protect me from COVID-19 and from…

As the Derek Chauvin defense team begins to mount its case, it is clear what the strategy is: Place the blame for George Floyd’s death on George Floyd. They will point to his heart condition. His drug use. The counterfeit bill. They’ll point to everything Floyd has ever done wrong in an attempt to minimize Chauvin’s role in his death. You know, suggest that had he taken better care of himself, Chauvin’s knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds would not have been an issue. All Floyd needed to do was be one of the good ones.

Speak the King’s English.

Have a regular-sounding name.

Avoid wearing natural hairstyles … or hoodies.

Of course, the reality is there isn’t a single thing Black folks can do to solve white racism, but the onus is placed at our feet anyway. Usually we get asked, “What can I do?” or we’ll hear someone like the founder of Papa John’s, John Schnatter, claiming he’s the victim while also sharing how he’s trying “to get rid of this N-word in my vocabulary.”

So, we code-switch. We compartmentalize our trauma. We do little things like put on a “Golden Girls” mask, hoping it brings us closer to curing someone else’s disease. But if a military uniform can’t inoculate us, what good is a 1980s sitcom?

Not long after a former enslaved person by the name of Salem Poor was recognized for his bravery during the Battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington signed an order banning the recruitment of Black soldiers. World War I veterans were greeted with lynchings and the Red Summer of 1919.

The well-documented racial discrimination and trials faced by the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.

Second Lt. Caron Nazario was in uniform when officers in Virginia ordered him to stop his car, pointed their weapons at him, threatened him, and then doused him with pepper spray.

But we’re told it’s kneeling during the national anthem that’s the problem.

Each attempt to point out this debilitating dynamic has been met with substantial legislative and cultural resistance — anti-lynching bills have been filibustered, voting rights attacked, the airwaves filled with disingenuous cries of “cancel culture” whenever someone dares to hold racism accountable.

To challenge this narrative is to be anti-American, which is how Colin Kaepernick ended up out of the NFL. Weeks before Floyd’s death, some Michigan lawmakers were literally wearing bulletproof vests on the state Senate floor because they were surrounded by armed militiamen in the gallery. And yet the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association sent its members a 176-page document in which Black Lives Matter was deemed a terrorist organization.

Make it make sense, y’all.

Please.

How were police in Georgia able to capture Robert Aaron Long alive after he was suspected of killing eight people? And yet Daunte Wright was shot dead by an officer in Brooklyn Center, a Minneapolis suburb, during a traffic stop. He didn’t kill anyone. Yes, he attempted to run away. But so did Long, lest you think a manhunt is a sign of compliance.

We are told Wright’s death was an accident.

Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a former police officer in St. Anthony, Minn., another Minneapolis suburb, who said he feared for his life.

Sandra Bland switched lanes without a signal.

Regardless of the rationale given, it just never seems to pass the smell test. How could it?

When you know police patiently pursued Long down I-75 until they were able to execute a maneuver that made his car spin out, when police let armed protesters fill a government building and threaten the governor of Michigan without bloodshed, when Jan. 6 can unfold with Capitol Police receiving the worst of it, then you know the police can deescalate a volatile situation if they choose to.

That’s why I threw away that Golden Girls mask. It is not my job to make racist people feel better about their racism. It is a positive step that Kim Potter, the officer who killed Wright, resigned, as has the Brooklyn Center police chief. But the crisis is not about one incident, one person or one city.

It is about the truth nestled in the heart of this quote from Chinua Achebe: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Chauvin’s defense team will tell his side of the story … but in this tale, the lions also speak.

@LZGranderson