MEDIA / SOCIETY
Objectivity Is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists
Under the banner of diversity, racialized people are told to bring ourselves and our perspectives. But, if we bring too much of them, we get held back

BY PACINTHE MATTAR
ILLUSTRATION BY NATALIE VINEBERG
Updated 11:24, Aug. 21, 2020 | Published 9:58, Aug. 21, 2020


IN APRIL 2015, Baltimore was burning. A twenty-five-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray had died after a week-long coma following his violent arrest and “rough ride” in the back of a Baltimore Police Department van. Anger at police brutality had spilled out onto the streets.

I flew to Baltimore to cover the city’s history with police brutality for a documentary I was making for CBC Radio. I arrived the day after Baltimore state attorney Marilyn Mosby announced charges against the six police officers involved in Gray’s arrest. (They were never convicted.) The charges were considered so rare a sign of accountability that they prompted celebration in Gray’s West Baltimore neighbourhood, the first place I headed with my recorder and notebook. It was a partly cloudy day, and a block party was alive with music blaring from massive speakers. DJs, parents, and youth held signs in honour of Gray. This past May and June, I watched more sombre versions of this scene play out with crushing familiarity as, in all fifty US states, crowds of protesters took to the streets with signs commemorating more victims of police brutality.

I stayed till night fell, keeping my eye on my watch. The city was under a 10 p.m. curfew, and helicopters were beginning to circle overhead. Just as I was heading into the subway station to go to my hotel, a young man stopped to ask me what news organization I was with. He seemed keen to talk. I turned my mic on, asked him what his name was—Lonnie Moore, I jotted down in my notebook—and asked him about his own experiences of police encounters in Baltimore.

As we talked, another man walked up and, without missing a beat, joined the conversation. I asked him his name and spelled it out loud to him as I put it in my notebook: J-A-R-E—“No,” he corrected me, “J-A-R-R-O-D Jones.” These two men were strangers to each other, but as they shared stories, they were soon completing each other’s sentences, saying words in unison, and mirroring each other’s accounts, including incidents of being called the n-word by various officers. Jarrod Jones recounted unwarranted personal searches. “The police will grab you, make you pull your pants down in front of people,” he said. “You know? They tell you, ‘Lift your sack up.’” He also said something prescient, though I wouldn’t know it until I returned home: “I think that people think we’re making this stuff up.”

https://thewalrus.ca/objectivity-is-a-privilege-afforded-to-white-journalists/

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.
But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.

1. People who are either pathologically or willingly unaware of his general ridiculousness and unfitness. His madness represents some type of normality in their eyes. To these people, he can do no wrong. He has all successes and no failures to be held accountable for. Anyone not will him is against him and those are all the "bad" people. His every word is like manna from Heaven. Trump is the God Emperor and the first and last word. The sun rises and sets upon his wheat hued head and casts him in a perpetual golden glow and his enemies must be purged.

Basically, this is his cult, people who are too stupid and hateful to know just how stupid and hateful they actually are.

2. People who recognize his incompetence and silliness and can't or won't see anything prohibitively wrong with it. These are people who don't think that he causing irreparable harm to the nation. Sure, he's silly or whatever, but in the end to these people, they believe he's doing the ultimately right thing for America. In this group, people who oppose him are simply not giving him a fair chance. Sure things make look bad, but that "opinion" is only coming from biased sources. All is good within their narrow purview and won't change unless they're personally affected by Trump's detrimental actions. For this group, the jury is still out. They're unable to support anyone else other than a Republican, no matter what. "The Democrats, if they get in, will make things way worse."

To these partisans, things will be just fine in the end, just as long as the Republicans are in control... You'll see.

3. People who do recognize his general ridiculousness and unfitness for office and all the harm he's doing. However, for this group, the Republicans and Democrats are nothing more than both sides of the same coin and with the destructive course that Trump is taking the nation, they're willing to let him burn it all down. They want a new start, they want to rebuild their own utopia from the heap of ashes that Donald Trump will leave in his wake. They're hoping that their savior of choice will come in, riding on a white horse and lead us all to glory. The Republicans and Democrats are to be rejected and a new order is ready to replace them.

These are political serial arsonists. People who have the hardest time accepting the world as it exists. They all live at the farthest edges of the spectrum.