Different Strokes

 

Philando Castile

In his most recent column, Leonard Pitts writes chillingly about the visceral impact of actually watching the video of Philando Castile's execution instead of just talking about it. He also points out a couple of interesting issues that I hadn't considered:

I thought of the NRA, which supposedly exists to protect law-abiding gun owners from government overreach. Obviously, that extends only to law-abiding white gun owners, because it’s been nearly a year since Castile’s death and, at this writing, the group has uttered barely a peep about a black man who was martyred for that cause.

I thought of all those people who assure me, with a smugness found only in the profoundly ignorant, that if black people would just treat police with respect and obey their commands, they wouldn’t get hurt. I would ask them to tell me which of those things Castile failed to do.

I thought of that time Sean Hannity explained how, when he is stopped, he informs the

officer that he has a legal firearm and it all goes smoothly after that: “ ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ writes me a ticket, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and that’s it.” I thought of the frequent inability of white men to recognize privilege even when it’s shooting a black man in the chest.