When one is afflicted with an illness, the first and foremost thing he or she must do to remedy themselves is to achieve a proper diagnosis. We simply must understand what is wrong with us prior to treating ourselves. Otherwise, we inoculate ourselves with medicine that either numbs us from what has deterred our health, or does nothing at all to heal us. In the worst cases, bad medicine can also exacerbate our suffering. The same goes for social ills. Unless we can properly diagnosis the origins and nature of that which is harming us as a culture, then we run the risk of being an ill society for prolonged periods of time or even of making ourselves sicker.
These were the first thoughts that came to my head on the morning of February 3, 2011, as I viewed the videotaped beating of yet another young and male African-American at the hands of law enforcement officers.
The victim in this case was a 16-year-old named Chad Holley. Holley was violently beaten by four police officers while he was being detained on suspicion of burglary. Upon encountering the police officers, Holley lied on the ground face first and put his hands over his head as if he anticipated what would happen next. His anticipation seemed astute as the video reveals the officers kicking him in the face and stomping on his head, plus kicking and punching him in his torso multiple times, often without relenting. The goal of the officers seemed to be to render Holley motionless or unconscious.
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What is customary in these cases is that it will be adjudicated in courts of law to find out whether the officers involved were warranted in their actions. It will be treated as an isolated incident involving a few officers who, as their attorneys will argue, stepped slightly out of line due to the stress of the job or also even due to their pent up rage towards criminals harming the communities they so deeply love and serve. The attorneys for Holley will argue that he is a victim of discrimination and that he was severely beaten not because of the crime that he committed, but because he is black. Although it deserves mention that the City of Houston has disciplined the officers involved by firing four of them, my prediction is that the officers will be exonerated by a court of law.
That prediction also derives from my knowledge of local history. Despite a rather pervasive legacy of police abuse towards persons of color (namely, blacks and Latinos) in Houston, it is extremely rare for any court of law to rule against an officer of the law in cases of their alleged abuse of power. The latest incidents of such was in 2008 and involved Houston police officers shooting Robert Tolan Jr. in the back as they arrested him in front of his Bellaire (an upper class suburb of Houston) house for allegedly stealing his own vehicle.
The logic waged in Tolan’s defense is that he was profiled as criminal because his family resided in a community that was implicitly understood as the home for well to do white families alone. Tolan Jr. is the son of Robert Tolan Sr., a former major league baseball player. Despite his family’s firm economic standing and good reputation in the community of Bellaire, Tolan’s black phenotype seemed to label him a criminal in the eyes of the officer who shot and severely injured him. The officer was exonerated and the bullet he discharged into Tolan, is still in his body.
In 2002, police officers in Baytown (a blue collar suburb of Houston), beat and choked a Mexican immigrant named Luis Torres to death, while attempting to arrest him on charges of loitering and public intoxication. Like Holley’s, Torres’ beating was captured on videotape and it clearly revealed an act of police brutality. The Harris County Medical Examiner’s office also declared the cause of Torres’ death as “homicide.” Caused by repeated blunt force trauma to the head, torso, and neck; in addition to mechanical asphyxiation, better known as choking. The officers who killed him argued that they feared Torres was armed with a gun and was deranged on narcotics. No narcotics were discovered in Torres’ body, thereafter, and there was no weapon. Torres’ only act of resistance was in taking a step away from the officers because he could not understand them. And yet, still, the officers involved were no billed for their actions. I could go on and on regarding such cases but will resolve to just listing the names of a few victims who have fallen victim to what can be perceived as similar circumstances since the 1970s: Ida Lee Delaney, Pedro Oregon, Byron Gillum, Tyrone Henry, Samuel Padilla, Juan Carlos Espinosa and Carl Hamilton.
On a broader scale, these incidents are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the Houston area. A study conducted by investigative journalists from the Houston Chronicle and the Detroit Free Press in 2001 found that, when combined, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department and the Houston Police Department killed more “alleged” suspects than any other law enforcement agency in the entire U.S. This suggests that Houston has been the nation’s deadliest city with regards to police brutality. A vast majority of these victims were either black or Latino and have already been “in custody” at the time of their death. Prior to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Houston was making headlines for this social disease in other ways.
The Houston Race Riot of 1917 represents one of the most violent and enduring clashes between African-Americans and white police officers in U.S. history, as blacks in Freedman’s Town took up arms against police officers that felt were terrorizing them on a daily basis. This incident took place at a time when Houston was experiencing a black population boom and were also empowered by the presence of black soldiers stationed near Houston.
As Latinos experienced their first population boom in the late 1970s, they were faced with similar conditions. In 1977, Houston police officers beat “Jose Torres Campos” :http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=6125203, a Latino and Vietnam War veteran, to death and dumped his body in Buffalo Bayou. A Harris County judge punished those officers with the fine of $1 for their actions. The next year Latinos launched violent protests against police terror near Moody Park on Houston’s north-side. The violence lasted for days and counts as what is remembered as one of the most militant and violent protests in 20th century U.S. history.
These historical incidents offer us much insight into what continues to haunt us. But we should not diagnose the subjectivity, opinions, or psyches of the officers involved. I predict that the court hearings regarding this case will do just that. There will be a debate regarding the character and personality of the officers. Defense attorneys will describe how they have a racially or ethnically diverse family, how they might be in bi-racial marriages or relationships, how they have a diverse group of friends, how they might have once volunteered at a black or Latino event in schools or neighborhoods. All of these facts will be mentioned as a way to make them seem incapable of anti-black prejudices.
But what matters most in these conversations is that those officers are a reflection of the social environment and historical climate within which they work, and were possibly reared. In this sense, I see them too as victims, albeit certainly not to the extent of the boy they beat. Their own hearts have been made cold by societal forces that have been normalized as the status quo. They have been convinced to see young black men as a dangerous enemy, rather than as a population they are sworn to protect and serve. Somewhere in time, that relationship has been plagued, and it is hard to point the figure at black men for blame.
I was just reminded of this upon a visit to Houston this past weekend where I was astonished to see so many visible signs celebrating a rather violent form of anti-black racism. Confederate flags adorned vehicles about the town and neighborhoods seemed prolifically segregated along racial and class lines. As a native of the Houston area, I drove by the high school and community college that I attended and that was named after a confederate war hero, and had to pause to remind myself that this was rather normal in my home region.
An animosity towards blacks in particular seems to be engrained as a defining characteristic of the Houston area’s social climate as evident in not only its legacy of anti-black injustices, but also in the ways that it celebrates the “old south” in much of its civic iconography. Our school population is predominantly black and Latino and working class and, yet, these same children are faced daily with visible reminders of how they and their ancestors are valued in the eyes and minds of those persons in charge of educating them and shaping their futures. Those mixed messages produce confusion and often have tragic results. Black and Latino children seem to normalize oppression and lose regard for not only the lives of others, but also their own. In communities that communicate to children that their futures or well being are not held in very high regard, those children become numb, violent, and often criminal.
After visiting my old neighborhood, I walked into a tavern in downtown Houston to grab a cold beer only to find a large picture adorning the wall that glorified and depicted an old map of Houston drawn to commemorate a lynching incident there. It was a haunting reminder of where I was. Guns and violent weaponry are celebrated throughout the Houston area as an emblem of local culture. But much of the community seems to be convinced that they are due to experience an enemy invasion of sorts. To borrow a term from the political theorist Slavoj Žižek, it seems as if white men, in particular in Houston, suffer from some form of symbolic castration anxiety in the sense that they are armed and mobilized to defend themselves against an assortment of social forces that, in reality, represent no tangible threat to their existence or happiness.
The apparent fears of black and Latino criminals that seems to prevail in the minds of many police officers, seem to be as much a reflection of desire as it is of empirical reality. It must be, in each of the cases I’ve mentioned, never has an officer been attacked or threatened. The threat of attack represented by a black youth laying face down with his hands over his head, as was Holley, is therefore a symbolic truth that forces them to act out violently.
Houston seems to be a city that glorifies a particular form of racial violence as part of its “tradition,” and yet that has no clear idea of how to make sense of that history when it seems manifest in incidents such as the Holley beating. If one considers the ways that Houston’s history has transpired and has been commemorated, then there does not seem to be a clear way to refute the argument that Holley was beaten because he is a young, black male and because he resides in a region where violence towards persons like him has been normalized a just and necessary mechanism of social control.
Cities like Houston must find better ways to reconcile their historical contradictions. Ignoring or manipulating historical facts is bad medicine. It exacerbates social disease and thwarts any community’s ability to grow into a safer, more egalitarian, and more peaceful environment for families to live in. Somewhere along the line, we must learn to love one another in a deeper and truer way.