Op-Ed: Tire Nichols just wanted to live but America’s racist system wouldn’t allow it

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Here we are, post 2020, the supposed ultimate judgment of racism and violence at the hands of the police begging for our humanity to be recognized by the powers that be in an endless cycle of conversation with no real action. A conversation as old as America itself leads us to the repetitive questioning of how we got here and what needs to change so that we never do it again.

But once again, we mourn the loss of a black person at the hands of the police.

Tire Nichols, a father and from Memphis, Tennessee, was brutally beaten by five police officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith after being arrested for “reckless driving”. Nichols succumbed to his injuries and died three days later at a local hospital.

On Friday, January 27, 2023, body camera footage of Nichols’ vicious abuse was broadcast on national television for the world to see. It was streamed and mined on a slew of social platforms, sparking a lot of discussion about the graphic and inhuman nature of showing a brutalized black body for some sort of profitable gain.

Whether it was a mass shooting or a hate crime resulting in the wrongful death of a white person, we have never seen a white body shown in its most vulnerable state for the good of all. visual aid.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the complexity of this tragedy.

These officers, also black men, were revealed to be involved with a Memphis police unit created to prevent violence in the city. They were charged, as they should be, with second-degree murder in the case of Nichols’ death.

At a press conference at Mount Olive CME Church in Memphis, civil rights attorney and activist Benjamin Crump said, “We have never seen justice so swift.” He continued: “We want to proclaim that this is the plan for the future whenever officers, whether black or white, will be held accountable. You can no longer tell us that we have to wait six months to a year.”

Crump is on point with this sentiment. So often, when black people are murdered by the police, we expect them to receive even a shred of just repercussions, if at all. Even more frequently, these aggressors enjoy impunity for their actions and escape unscathed. On a larger scale, this conversation is about responsibility, equivocal responsibility, regardless of the color or origin of the aggressor.

“In America, we must continue to confront the racial injustices that were written into our founding documents. That this particular case does not fit neatly into a binary narrative, victim and officers were black forces us to confront complicated truths As much as we might look for simple solutions and sharp lines between right and wrong, right and wrong, the real world doesn’t work that way,” Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner noted in an article about the tragedy. by Nicholas.

Tire Nichols just wanted to go home and live another day, but America’s racist police state wouldn’t allow it.

Since the inception of policing in the United States, there has been an almost seamless transition of power from the role it has played in our communities. To know that it began as a method of control using excessive force and a campaign of fear against enslaved black people in the 1700s is to know that the system is irrevocably tied to it to this day.

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