The White Gaze Quite Literally Shot and Killed Jonathan Ferrell

[This post has brought quite a few new readers to We Are Respectable Negroes from Facebook and other social media sites. As I do during such moments, I inaugurate an informal fundraising drive.

I do not advertise or monetize my work here on WARN. I also choose not to run advertisements or sponsorship because I want to remain independent. Instead, I have a twice a year fundraiser, and moments such as this one, where I extend the hand on high traffic posts.

Random monies thrown into the tip jar Paypal bucket are however always appreciated. My work here and elsewhere are labors of love. However, I never refuse encouragement.]
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 On Saturday, a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man. Jonathan Ferrell was in a horrific car accident and ran towards three police officers seeking help, just like any reasonable person in a crisis would do.

Again, a black man in America who is interacting with the police is not given the presumption of being a full citizen, innocent until proven guilty, and perhaps in need of assistance.



For the White Gaze, "black" and "male" equals threat and violence.

This is part of a historic pattern of stereotyping and threat in the United States, one which still looms over the popular imagination in the present. There, Jonathan Ferrell, we, those of us black and male, are "giant negroes" possessed of natural ill will, malevolence, and a proclivity to kill and rape as "black brutes" who must be shot dead whenever possible.

Sometimes black men are "armed" with "dehumanizing stares". In other instances, our waving empty handed at the police is interpreted as a violent act. Cans of iced tea, bags of skittles, house keys, flashlights, and other objects are magically transformed into means for legitimating our own murder and assault by the police and White authority figures. The power of our empty hands against those armed with guns is legendary.

Apparently, unarmed black men are titans who inspire fear in the hearts of the police and White America.

The shooting of Jonathan Ferrell by police officer Randall Kerrick is not a surprise. Given America's long history of institutional violence by the State and its proxies against people of color (i.e. vigilantes such as George Zimmerman), "the system" operated as intended and designed.

As a function of internalized anti-black bias, people of color are not viewed by many whites as deserving full human empathy, respect, and dignity. In a complementary finding, research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology details how the White Gaze quite literally does not "see" people of color.

The sum effect of these processes is that black and brown folks' humanity disappears when viewed by and through Whiteness and "White" eyes.

Citizenship is most fundamentally an assumption of belonging, and a sense that one's human rights will be respected in a community where your safety and security is protected by the social compact. By almost all measures of income, wealth, incarceration, health outcomes, access to schooling, and equal opportunity in the labor market, people of color are systematically denied the full rights and privileges that come with (white) citizenship in the United States.

Systematic police violence against people of color is not an aberration or outlier: it is a norm. Moreover, it is part of an interlocking system of violence that black and brown folks, because they are both racialized and more likely to be poor, are uniquely subjected to in post civil rights America.

As part of a society where there is "racism without racists", and "colorblind" racism is the new racial regime, the reaction to Jonathan Ferrell's murder by the police will likely follow a predictable public script.

There will be white folks who are so deeply in denial about white privilege and White Supremacy that they will naturally find some "reasonable" explanation for what they see as a horrible mistake and aberration. Their cognitive map cannot accept that white racism killed Jonathan Ferrell because to do so would mean to question a set of deeply held and self-serving beliefs about the myth of meritocracy, and how racism no longer limits anyone's ability to succeed and achieve in the United States of America.

The White Right will of course default to a logic wherein a black man is de facto a criminal until proven otherwise. This is a function of their (racial) Authoritarianism; Conservatives, despite all of their empty words about "tyranny" and "big government" have no problem with giving the police the right to summarily execute black and brown folks on the street.

And the complexities of a society steeped in racial inequality and White Supremacy will be ignored and overlooked by those in the public unable to reconcile how a black president, as well as black police officials and law enforcement agents at the highest ranks, and a culture of systematic violence against black and brown people, can simultaneously co-exist in the same historical moment.

In all, Whiteness considers white racism to be an extraordinary social phenomenon. Consequently, racism, as opposed to being one of the most well-documented facts of American life by social scientists, requires an extraordinary proof to satisfy those white folks who are both actively and passively invested in maintaining (and protecting) systems of white privilege and White Supremacy.

The White Gaze killed Jonathan Ferrell. He will not be the last of its victims.