"Were the Cops Who Killed Tyre Nichols Racist?" Is the Wrong Question

Getting hung up on who's racist and who isn't is a distraction from the crisis at hand.

“People have a story to tell, why not capture it?” 

Tyre Nichols wrote that for his photography website. It’s a gracious, lyrical observation; a humble way of seeing his own unique talent as a gift for everyone else. He could not have known that it was also darkly prophetic; a foreshadowing of the awful events that would lead to his killing, and how the horror story would be captured. 

The details are no less terrifying for being so familiar. Nichols, a young father who loved skateboarding and Starbucks, was pulled over for some sort of unexplained traffic violation. The videos show Nichols being compliant, if confused about why he’d been stopped. He never got an explanation. Memphis officials were loathe to release the footage of the ensuing brutality, in which Nichols is mercilessly punched, kicked, tased and maced while he yells for his mother. His limp body is propped up next to a police car while the cops celebrate. A stretcher doesn’t arrive until over 20 minutes later. He died in the hospital.   

Whenever an innocent Black person is killed by police, a coterie of well-paid men and women get to work explaining why this is not about what it is plainly about. From Brietbart to the New York Times, Americans love to hear that while the victims of police brutality may be disproportionately Black, this should not lead anyone to believe that America is disproportionately racist or that any of these events are anything besides unfortunate but isolated tragedies. These cops, we’re told, were just bad apples. The lesson of that particular phrase’s origin  — that bad apples spoil the whole barrel — is not invoked and certainly not useful for the people most inclined to deploy it. 

In this case, these pundits’ work was pretty easy. The five Memphis cops who beat Tyre to death are all Black. How could they be racist? 

CNN’s Van Jones tried to head this question off at the pass. “Racial animus can still be a factor, even when the perpetrators are all Black,” he wrote. “It’s a sad fact, but one that’s old as time itself: People often oppress people who look just like them. The vast majority of human rights abuses are committed by people who look exactly like the people they are abusing.”

Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterwon Williams couldn’t have rolled his eyes any harder. “What if, stay with me, these five men were actually agents responsible for their own reprehensible actions and not merely hapless puppets being manipulated by the invisible hand of inescapable and omnipotent white supremacy?” 

What strikes me here is the false binary being offered. In Williams’ universe, we can either see each other as unmoved movers free of any outside influence or robots programmed by societal and cultural forces beyond our control. And, he implies, we need to stop treating people as if they are the latter and start acknowledging that we are all the former. 

But this is a dumb, simplistic way of looking at people. “Responsible agents” and “hapless puppets” aren’t our only two options. They’re extremes on a long and complicated scale. All of us are shaped by myriad internal and external forces, and while we are certainly all responsible for our own actions, it is probably impossible to be even cognizant of, let alone responsible for, all the invisible hands that are molding the thoughts and opinions that lead to those actions. 

This is all further complicated by the systems we’re all a part of. This is a hard thing for Americans to grasp. We like to think of ourselves as individuals responsible for our own actions instead of groups of people who have to rely on each other. Sociologists call this “individualist” versus “collectivist” ways of thinking. A few years ago, I interviewed a researcher who studies the differences between individualist and collectivist countries, and his work was complicated by the U.S., where we are so individualist that we throw the rest of the international scale all out of whack. 

But just because Americans don’t think of ourselves as part of collectivist systems doesn’t mean we aren’t. This is what activists mean when they call American Policing racist. They are referring to the collective system of policing. This doesn’t have to mean that every individual cop is themselves a racist. It means that a vast institution crafted many years ago by known racists which has historically opposed racial equality will deploy its people towards racist ends regardless of those people’s personal beliefs. If the American Policing Institution itself is biased against Black people, then it doesn’t really matter how the individual cops feel. The race of the aggressor isn’t particularly relevant as long as the race of the victims continues to be disproportionately Black.

So, “were the five cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death racist?” is both unanswerable and irrelevant. Racism isn’t a club. There’s no membership card. Racism is something you do, and you do not have to think one race is better than another to do it. As Ezekiel Kweku writes, “Racism functions quite smoothly without racists.” He goes on to say: 

The entire exercise of binning people into the categories of ‘racist’ and ‘not racist’ is not useful, and is a basic and pervasive misunderstanding of what racism is and how it operates …Racism is a material concern, not a spiritual one — it is about works, not faith. There are lots of people who will supply societally acceptable answers to questions concerning race, but will nevertheless do racist things.There are lots of people who will say that blacks are no more inherently criminal than white, but will nevertheless move into gentrifying neighborhoods and immediately start frivolously calling the police on people who have lived there for years. There are plenty of people who will pay lip service to the importance of diversity, but will nevertheless move their children out of schools with lots of black children, regardless of the quality of education the school provides.

So yes, as Tyre Nichols observed, people have a story to tell. And a people have a story to tell too. America is not only 330 million individual stories. We are also one interwoven story. Nichols was a part of this story. He still is, as more pages are written by protestors chanting his name in the streets; by his mother weeping into a microphone; by his four-year-old son, growing up without a dad. The part of his story that was captured by police body cameras is now part of our story too. It’s part of your story, and the ending has yet to be told. What comes can be better than what came before. It just depends on what kind of story we want.