Unreasonableness and the Black Profile

‘Shoot my son right now!” the neighbor screamed in his West Indian accent from the stoop of the building where Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, lived and then died in a hail of 41 police bullets. The verdict acquitting the four New York City policeman who shot him had just been read. “You may as well shoot him now!” the man continued to no one in particular, holding his naked 1-year-old child out to the cold February air. “He is nothing but a Negro in America!”

Even as aberrations of police misconduct become increasingly routine, Diallo’s slaughter in February 1999 shocked the public conscience in a way that promised a verdict reflecting a newly informed civic consciousness about racial profiling and brutality.

But the slowly emerging truth is that the profile of the black body as a simultaneously threatening and alluring object of human desire and animal rage predates the current fear of gangster rappers and street sweeps by aggressive police squads. So much of the fight for equal dignity among African American men and women has involved a corporal tug of war over representations of their inviolate flesh. Lashed or raped in slavery, lynched and burned in the decades after, blacks’ collective resistance to bodily defilement began with a Southern mass exodus in the early 20th century and has continued in various cultural and political efforts to rename that body--affirm it--by black writers, artists, lawyers, politicians and athletes.

But nothing reduces the complexity of these struggles to their essence like state-sponsored violence. Nearly every riot of the past 40 years was ignited by the breaking of a black body by a cop acting with perceived impunity. Most civil-rights struggles can be traced to routine mistreatment of bodies contained by invisible borders and insidious laws. Whether housing segregation, special-education tracking or disparate prison sentencing, racial profiling is nothing more than unreasonable racism rationalized by fear of the generalized Other.

And police brutality is its primal expression.

Thankfully, this is not all so black and white anymore. More and more Americans have resensitized their views of reasonable police conduct without the crutch of rationalized fear. News of racial profiling by police in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities is altering once-lenient perceptions of police conduct. And the outrage of Diallo’s Caribbean neighbor, like that of fellow immigrants of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sexually assaulted by New York police, suggests a further closing of the gap between African American sensibilities of reasonableness and others.

But the Diallo verdict takes us back to racially divided perceptions, when reasonableness was whatever reason the cops offered. Four undercover policemen confront an unarmed man whose presence they find suspicious as he stands in front of his house. They approach quickly, later testifying they identified themselves and commanded him not to move. He turns into his vestibule and tries to open his door. The officers get within feet of him. He reaches for his wallet. As it emerges from his pocket, they riddle him with 19 bullets, splitting his heart, severing his spine and, after 41 shots, killing him.

“Gun!” they said they said. Only one other witness heard that. Several did not.

So what if they did shout “gun”? The shooting and acquittal relocate the question of reasonable justification, and the stories to prove it, back to center stage in the historic theater of race and state power. They are stories told by police to defend varying degrees of force, even when the threat of imminent harm is tragically mistaken. Too often, as in the Diallo case, a conclusion is made that the reasonableness of such lethal beliefs should not be second-guessed by people who don’t work amid danger.

Why not? We must. Reasonableness of judgments are questioned all the time in the course of doing one’s job. Little any of us do, outside of some very private sphere, is self-validating. More often, our judgment reflects the quality of our training, our upbringing and credentials, our thinking when it counts, for which we are regularly held accountable. But when the reasonableness of our on-the-job judgments determines whether a life continues or a liberty pursues, we question it. Thoroughly, because that scrutiny accompanies a license to kill.

Like most matters of judgment, this one turns on perspective and perception. The jurors were told to imagine things from the position of the four officers. Blaming the prosecution later for its failed case, the jury, including four black women, acquitted them.

But most damaging may be the blindness to Diallo’s perspective, and how his position affected the officers’ deadly perception. Because Diallo acted reasonably.

It is likely that it was Diallo who experienced undeniable fear. Alone after midnight on his stoop, the sudden appearance of four large white men in plainclothes, approaching out of a double-parked car with hands on their holsters, would have pushed many of us into panic. Their escalation into combat poses might surely have made us turn for the safety of the door. Unable to open it, and surrounded by men shouting commands, Diallo’s reaching for a wallet to placate robbers, satisfy an INS inquiry or identify himself when confusion silenced him is, to be honest, exactly what most of us would do.

If Diallo acted reasonably, then it is more than fair to return to the question of the officers’ beliefs. After all, their judgments of Diallo and the training that informed them controlled each moment. For members of a unit whose motto is “We own the night,” it strains credulity to exonerate them because they were fearful. In a neighborhood in which tens of thousands of residents have been summarily frisked for nonexistent weapons since the unit took over, it seems unlikely that the cops’ conduct was polite or restrained. And after emptying two semiautomatic weapons into a human body at close range, how was it reasonable to fire nine more times?

It is also telling that, before the bullets hit him, Diallo was executed by a barrage of imperatives. The neighborhood must be contained at all cost. A lone man on a stoop must be confronted by suspicion. Do not move! Show us your hands! And finally, as one officer testified: Don’t die!

Of course, we must question why the cops believed what they did, and answer harshly when their justifications make no sense. When stereotypes of groups combine with stereotypes of place, the actor is mired in illusions. It is another example of how judgment can become literally colored by unexamined experience and poor training--racialized. The solution is not to pretend that racially coded perceptions don’t exist but, instead, to hold them up to intense scrutiny. That is, to try them in court.

There is nothing radical about this obligation. Every crime requires an inquiry into the actor’s mental state. Our laws are designed to ensure the possibility of something like justice. They are also a check on state power without which entire neighborhoods--like Soundview in the Bronx or Pico-Union in L.A.--and the bodies of color within them are again condemned to lives cheapened by rightslessness.