A civil rights writer's initial approach to the McKinney pool party fallout presents as much opportunity as it does difficulty. Which way do you go, when there's so much to be go-ed? Is it an opportunity to talk about poor training, as overzealous officers tripped and rolled their way through a suburban neighborhood like they've just watched way too many war movies on the anniversary of D-Day? Maybe it's a time to talk about the mounting police state, where fear and intimidation greet any person who questions the thin blue line? There's certainly myriad ways one could tackle race in conjunction with what we've seen in this Dallas suburb.
For me, a sheltered white guy, McKinney and her pool party recalled too well the things I've learned about what it meant to be black in the 1950s and 1960s, and how we haven't come nearly as far as we think on race and exclusion in 2015.
In 1956, photographer Gordon Parks set out to document the black experience in Alabama during the height of racial apartheid. In Mobile, he captured mothers and daughters not allowed to shop at white stores. He put onto film paper the contrasting harshness of white-only and black-only water fountains. Most moving was a picture of six black children peering through a fence into a park - and a world - that didn't want them, refused to value them, and physically kept them out:
The world Parks captured was full of hatred, of course, but it was more than that. It underscored the entitlement of white supremacy, where the use of public places was the purview of whites, and where even black children were denied those experiences fundamental to American childhood.
Growing up in the South is about those parks and wide open spaces. In Texas where I've studied, as in South Carolina where I grew up, the summer-time temperatures climb into triple digits and pools are filled with children. At the pools in my town, friends gathered for fun, games, grilling, and to pass hours when school let out. They were also bastions of exclusion, where black faces were rarely seen and even less welcomed.
In the wake of a police officer aiming his weapon at unarmed teens and a young girl being dragged in her bathing suit along the ground, some are asking questions about what transpired. Some are scolding black youth for not keeping their cool as adult police officers escalated the situation. Some ask with incredulity why, in an era when police routinely gun down young black men for the simple crime of looking really scary, why hoards of black youth wouldn't greet running, screaming, and cursing police with the trusting eyes of an innocent four-year old.
Those questions, of course, place blame onto the victims here, relieve police officers of their responsibility, and distract from the bigger issues surrounding situations like this one. That a gaggle of local cops wouldn't be trained to handle a situation in which dozens of teens were running around should not be news. But that the culture of exclusion that's long permeated Southern life is defended by those officers should be concerning.
News reports have been all over the map, but initial reports indicate that at a community pool, a group of black teenagers had been given guest passes after they were invited to that facility by a white friend. We also know that an older white woman took some issue with the black kids being there. One report claims that she told the children to "go back to their Section Eight housing." Her specific language is not important. It's clear that this woman was not pleased with the presence of young black interlopers and instigated an altercation. Videos of an ensuing fight between that woman and a younger black girl show no sign of who threw the first punch, but some reports have suggested that the older white woman was the aggressor.
From there, what happened should be familiar to any person who's lived with her eyes open in the modern American South. Police were called, with familiar refrains populating those reports. The black youth were "disturbing the peace," "acting in an unruly manner," or otherwise doing what kids are wont to do at pre-summer pool parties. Their existence was an encumbrance to the mostly white community, and one doesn't have to look hard at this situation to see that race might have motivated the tenor of the calls to police, if not the calls themselves.
It's not troubling that upper-middle class whites in places like McKinney would think to call the police on a bunch of black teenagers. That's predictable. What's troubling is that police would arrive, sirens blazing, in support of racial exclusion. It's an excellent reminder that the purpose of police in many communities is to protect white people and their property from the perceived danger of black people, and in particular, black youth.
Police arrived on the scene not intent on discovering the facts of what had occurred. They came running, nightsticks exposed, in a scene that recalled the 1960s. Then, of course, it was routine for police officers to be called about "disturbances" outside of white establishments. Those disturbances were often little more than a few black people congregating, but in the exclusionary South, those congregations are seen as an imminent danger. The officers escalated the situation because they, like those who had called them, saw in every black teenager a threat. It's what caused the officer to handcuff and unlawfully restrain young men who tried to respectfully explain what they were doing in the area. It's what caused that same officer to clumsily draw his service weapon on clearly unarmed people.
If you need more evidence of the role that race played in this situation, look no further than the way in which white onlookers were treated in comparison to black onlookers. The bulk of the problems came when, like in most altercations of this nature, the people involved failed in some way to respond to the white officers quick enough or in the exact way the officers demanded. The youth justifiably dispersed upon sight of the charging officers, many thinking that they'd be better off taking their chances on the run than staying and expecting the officers to act reasonably.
The investigative area was populated by black and white alike. One man seemingly stalked the police officers as they man-splained some false version of the law to restrained young people. The teenager who filmed the primary video was also white, and he remained within a few feet of the "investigation" for at least seven minutes. Another couple of white men stepped into the picture a few minutes later to explain to one young woman that she needed to be quiet, even as she rightly shouted to them that she "ha[d] free speech."
These men and boys, it seems, were wearing a cloak of white invisibility. As they themselves populated the scene, the officers didn't see them as a threat. Responding to calls about people being out of control at a pool party, the officers didn't think to scream obscenities at the white onlookers. They wouldn't dream of throwing to the ground the young white man with the camera phone, and never would they drab by the hair the white man who was given unprecedented ability to stand wherever he wanted during the course of the discourse. As the worst offending officer screamed to various black girls to "get their asses out of [there]," he allowed each white person present to go about their business unencumbered.
This makes sense, of course, when you understand the way in which officers, and the law, view white people in comparison to black people. The law is a bear trap, set conspicuously to catch offenders. It's designed to protect some version of life and property, and to set one class of people in their place. As white people, we wear a cloak of invisibility that allows us to avoid this trap unless we commit the most obvious and egregious of offenses. Put more specifically, this cloak of invisibility is truly the assumption of lawfulness and goodness. It's a police reflection of a societal understanding that we are mostly law-abiding and unproblematic until we prove ourselves otherwise.
And this isn't a bad way to view or treat people. Most people are good. Most teenagers attending a pool party are not a problem. The treatment of the white people involved reflects what policing should be. They did not have their first amendment right to film the police restrained. They weren't told to leave a public street or sidewalk in which they had a right to be. They weren't brutalized on the assumption that if they were scared by screaming, out of control police, then they must be doing something wrong. No. The white people surrounding these police officers were seen as being a part of the team. And as it turns out, that's the right way to have treated these white folks.
The problem here is that the black youth weren't afforded the same assumptions of lawfulness. Rather than the assumption of goodness, they were greeted by pre-conceived notions of criminality. The law itself was not hostile to any particular action by these young people, but rather to their very presence in a public space that's long been for white people. Just as the law, in its de-valuing glory, stripped black youth of their innocence in 1950s Alabama by exposing them to the harsh realities of exclusion and hate, the law in 2015 strips them of their humanity when police officers treat them like second-class citizens not worthy of the rights that we enjoy as white people. And that's more than a real shame.