We Are Target Practice
Black Lives Do NOT Matter
Photo Credit: Washington Post
Issue #48 An Op-Ed
We as Black men are target practice, and objects of value are never used for target practice. It’s as simple as that.
So when Patrick Lyoya was murdered last week by a still unnamed police officer in Grand Rapids – and yes, I’m calling it murder right now prior to whatever the police investigation determines and whatever else may follow – he became only the most recent headline demonstrating the bloody and uncomfortable truth that in reality? Black Lives Do Not Matter.
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Because if Black Lives Mattered, it would not have taken a century to pass an anti-lynching law in this country. If Black Lives mattered, police killings of Black men and women for traffic stops and other minor offenses – or for no reason at all – would have stopped cold after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. That murder prompted the largest worldwide civil rights protest in the recorded history of the world.
But it took the largest civil rights protest in history, plus the bravery of a 17-year-old Black woman who filmed the murder on her cell phone, providing the one piece of irrefutable evidence, just to get Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin convicted. Imagine that for a second. Because you know good and damn well it would not have taken all that to convict a Black man even for slapping a white man, and God please don’t let it be a white woman. No, not even in 2022.
Because we as Black men are born with a target on our backs, and the one consistent sound we hear in our ear from birth until death is the sound of that clock ticking. Whenever the police are nearby, especially if those police officers are white, we can hear that clock ticking faster. Because we know the statistics. But more than that, we all know someone who was either killed or roughed up badly by the police. So what cell phone videos are showing to the world, we have known forever and a day.
In the Grand Rapids video that was recorded by the passenger who had been riding with Lyoya in the car, the officer could be seen struggling with Lyoya on someone’s front lawn, ultimately laying on top of Lyoya while he was face down before he appeared to shoot him in the head. In the moments before the shooting, Lyoya and the officer appeared to be fighting for control of the officer’s Taser. You could hear the officer instructing Lyoya to let go of the taser.
And he probably should have. And maybe it wasn’t a good idea to run from the officer. And maybe he shouldn’t have been trying to grab the taser. And maybe he shouldn’t have struggled so hard. Because no doubt about it these are all things that will be used to defend the officer who murdered him. But what will be hard to defend is the fact that Lyoya did not have a weapon on him, never assaulted the officer or even attempted to do so, could never be heard being disrespectful to the officer, and never reached for the officer’s weapon. In fact, Lyoya was probably trying to grab the taser because the officer was about to use it on him. So maybe, just maybe that can be considered an act of self-defense. Because yeah, sometimes you do have to defend yourself against the police.
Oh. And then there’s the fact that the only reason the officer stopped Lyoya was that he said the license plates on the vehicle did not match the car. Or at least that’s what he could be heard telling Lyoya on his bodycam footage.
Amadou Diallo. Sean Bell. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Philando Castile. George Floyd. Daunte Wright. Amir Locke. Patrick Lyoya. Who knows how many more Black men were murdered by police officers for practically no reason at all. Trayvon Martin wasn’t even murdered by a police officer but by an overzealous idiot who basically deputized himself to kill a young Black man just because his blackness made him suspicious.
We are still seen as target practice, and it’s just another day.
