Politicizing Black Death

   The damnable killing of Jordan Edwards, a 15 year old black male shot by Officer Roy Oliver of the Balch Springs Police Department after leaving a party Saturday, April 29th reintroduces age old discourses about the politicization of black death. The notion that Jordan Edwards was an honor student with a 3.5GPA, exceptional athlete, ‘good’ kid, reared in a two parent household, and unarmed at the time of his murder does not undermine the fact that he was black. It actually confounds the fallacious, parochial narrative that to be an exception is to be exempt from such travesties. This reality is a farce. 

   At the epicenter of national dialogue about Edwards’ death is the notion of respectability politics–the idea that if one comports themselves in such a way that appeases and assimilates to whiteness, that they will be absolved from the grotesque realities that perennially victimizes black people. Race and class, then, function as social signifiers, which are emblematic of a broader cultural milieu that venerates respectable lives over others. Had Jordan Edwards not been an academic or athletic standout, his death still would not have been justifiable.

   To assert such claims is to perpetuate insidious narratives of exceptionalism. Utilizing this logic to legitimate police misconduct is fundamentally flawed. One’s positionality does not grant them immunity from micro–aggressions and state sanctioned violence. Social performance is not the grounds upon which black women and men are killed by policing institutions, their blackness is. Meaning, regardless of one’s social location amongst racialized hierarchies, they cannot escape being black. Blackness has been historically corroborated as criminality and is implicated today as being inherently suspicious. This has been demonstratively visible by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice.

   Countless media outlets incriminated Trayvon, Michael, and Tamir for their own deaths–all of whom were children. Their humanity was demonized prior to legal proceedings beginning; and what is worse–their blackness was put on trial as the cause for their deaths, not the officer’s embedded biases. America has a habitual tendency to vilify black people to the degree police mistreatment is scarcely interrogated or reprimanded. This has been a recurring trope throughout the politicization of black deaths. 

   A common mischaracterization, however, about black death and policing personnel is that it is merely reducible to a male gaze. Black women suffer equally at the hands of police brutality. Thus, it is necessary to disrupt heterosexist and hetero-patriarchal conceptions that sensationalize the death of black men, while ignoring the plight of black women. The normative ideal that black men are primary targets of law enforcement activity more so than black women is problematic and must be dispelled. It re-inscribes ahistorical depictions that black men have always been subject to police violence, and not black women.

   Hence, problematizing the death of Jordan Edwards requires us to re-think how black deaths are politicized. Furthermore, it implicitly suggests that black people cannot evade the ills of white supremacy. To itemize one's death with social markers and discredit one’s blackness, labeling them as respectable citizens, is reprehensible.