Opinion
Tamir Rice was killed by white America’s irrational fear of black boys
Armed white militiamen roamed Ferguson without police intervention this year. Ellen Rothenberg, a white woman in North Carolina who pointed a BB gun at a police officer and told them to shoot her, survived. Dylan Roof, a white man who shot up a church full of black people, got taken to Burger King after he was caught. Robert Dear, a white man accused of shooting and killing 3 people (including a police officer) at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado was taken in alive. And so on.
But an unarmed black male burdened with the incorrect assumption that he is armed with a legal weapon in your pants? Not only can it kill you, no one will be punished.
With this lack of indictment in his death, the only person who will pay any material price for Tamir Rice’s death is the dead child himself. Like Mike Brown last fall and Sandra Bland last week, little Tamir joins the pantheon of dead black souls whose deaths go without accountability.
If white Americans need black villains to feel superior in their decline as 2015 closes – and as the leading demagogue Republican candidate for president can confirm, they do – then innocent victims like Tamir Rice will continue to be killed, and those who do so will be rewarded with acquittal, fame or even promotion. It is the American way.
This article was originally published in the Guardian Newspaper.
