In Plain Sight

White officer kneels on Black man's neck until he suffocates.

White woman calls police and tells that them that a Black man is threatening her out of resentment over being asked to leash her dog.

Police arrest Black CNN reporter and camera crew, live on air, while ignoring their White colleague.

Woman confronts Black teenager for stealing her phone after forgetting hers.

Sometimes, race relations in the United States feels like a deeply intentional farce, and no-one told me that it's all a send-up. I try to be an understanding, compassionate, person (Yes, stupid, I know, okay?) but I simply can't wrap my brain around any intelligent reason to, in effect, say, in public: "Don't mind me, I'm just going to crush this guy's windpipe until he's completely inert. I can't see how this could end badly; you guys freaking out over there are just overreacting." Okay, I wasn't in the officer's shoes, but how did he not seem to have any inkling that what he was doing carried a high risk of killing a man? Live on cell phone video? I've long said that police work doesn't pay well enough for the risks involved to attract the élite of society, but this guy seems completely unreal.

Likewise: "Hold on a second. I'm about to call the police, then blatantly lie to them, while you're recording me on a cell phone, because you caught me openly breaking the rules of the public space I'm in." Did they invent time travel to and from 1950 when I wasn't looking?

It was like someone put in a call to central casting and said "Hey, I need some people, including some police officers, who appear to lack anything in the way of higher mental functions and just can't understand how to deal with people different from themselves. Who do you have for me?"

I guess, in the end, that I thought I understood, at least generally, White people. And maybe I actually do. To the degree that someone can understand anyone else's lived experience. Maybe what I can't wrap my brain around is that it's possible to come across as that much of an outlier and still manage to function in everyday society prior to doing something that sparks widespread public outrage. I think what I'm having difficulty with is the idea that the people involved had somehow managed to never let on prior to their moments of infamy that they didn't get it.

The behavior of Amy Cooper and (former) Officer Derek Chauvin strike me as so blatantly bizarre that I suddenly find myself asking if the world around me changed when I wasn't looking, or if I never understood it to begin with. (And the implication that I don't understand it now.)

It's weird. The whole thing with the SARS-2 coronavirus, while it has people running around like chickens (sans heads), it just seems like one of those things that happens. It's to be expected, even if it can't be predicted. But even though Ms. Cooper's and Mr. Chauvin's actions fit into a broader historical narrative, they seem so out of place in the here and now that they strike me as actively chaotic. And my discomfort with that chaos prompts me to think that I'm missing something, even when I know that they were just a couple of those things that happen. I've already mentioned Ms. Cooper and Mr. Chauvin, and my difficulty with understanding them before, but it goes beyond them.

It strikes me as weird that the open public performance of "white privilege, systemic racism, and police brutality" are still things, given that they meet with clear and swift public disapproval. So when Miya Ponsetto decided that she was going to have it out with a teenager, because she just couldn't believe that he happened to have the same model cellular phone as she did, did she really think she was going to come out of that situation looking reasonable?

Maybe none of them were really thinking about it at all. And I guess that's where the disconnect is. I've come to see myself as constantly under a microscope, and so I've developed a habit of thinking about the "optics" of the things I do in public. (Which sometimes comes with its own problems to be sure.) And I guess that it's just become so natural that it surprises me that other people don't perceive the need to do the same.