The
flames of racial unrest are burning in localized pockets across the United
States right now. In three separate incidents—Ferguson, Missouri; Staten
Island, New York City; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live—white police officers
have shot unarmed young black men. Wait; you haven’t heard about the Tulsa one?
I guess I will have to tell you about it, since Tulsa has no violent protests
such as in the St. Louis suburb and no Al Sharpton as in New York. You expect
this sort of thing once in a while, but three at the same time seems a bit
unlikely.
A
Tulsa policeman, Shannon Kepler, and his wife (also a police officer) adopted a
girl with a troubled past. After many years, the girl’s troubles were
apparently too much for the couple to handle. They took her to a shelter for
homeless adults and left her there. Things like this happen sometimes. But what
happened next was astonishing. The young woman went the house where her
boyfriend, Jeremey Lake, lived. What would you expect her to do? And if you
have just kicked your adopted daughter out of the house, you at least need to
let her decide where she is going to live.
But
Shannon Kepler did not do this. He drove over to Lake’s house and shot and
killed 19-year-old Jeremy Lake and then shot in the general direction of the
young woman also. Was Lake’s killing murder or was it manslaughter? And was
Kepler actually aiming for his stepdaughter? That is, was there premeditation?
Police investigators found that the step-parents had, in their home, a copy of
Lake’s arrest records, on which they had written his address. This would seem
to be premeditation. Kepler’s defense attorney said that the shooting was
understandable because Lake was a sexual predator, which as far as I can
determine was not the judgment of any court. So the defense attorney asked for
a bail of only $50,000. The prosecutor asked for a bail of $1 ½ million. The
prosecutor’s request that Kepler be fitted with an ankle bracelet for
monitoring his location was denied by the judge, who imposed a bail about
halfway between the two requests. The judge must have considered that this
police shooting was not much of a continuing danger to the community. This
decision was issued August 22, the same day that Staten Island and Ferguson,
Missouri were in the news.
What
the Tulsa World newspaper article of August 22 did not mention—and which I had
to locate finally in the New York Daily News—was
that Jeremy Lake was black. The Tulsa newspaper article did not mention this, nor as
far as I could find did it print Lake’s photograph.
Whether
this conclusion is justified or not, I know that if I were a young black man I
would be worried right now, especially if I lived in Oklahoma, where police
shooting young black men does not get much noticed by national media.
When
are we going to stop thinking of white police shootings (or, in Staten Island,
strangling) of black men as normal? (The authorities seem to have thought that
the Staten Island victim was manifestly guilty of a dangerous, dangerous crime:
selling untaxed cigarettes. That deserves getting someone killed, they seem to
think.)
As
most readers of this blog will know already, there is no biological basis for
considering one race inferior to another. Pseudoscientific claims of black
inferiority have been repeatedly discredited. And even if there was such
evidence, it would not justify members of one race killing members of another
and having it treated lightly by authorities.
I
wonder what Jesus would have to say about this, especially since much of the
racism in Oklahoma is reinforced by fundamentalist Christianity.
No comments:
Post a Comment