The sin is not in talking without knowing what it is you’re talking about, but in seeking out someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about with a camera and a microphone, as if what he had to say mattered, or as if him offering his hard truths could deliver a kind of absolution. In giving Barkley and those like him a platform out of some sense of fairness, some sense that the natural counter to a fully justified rage is a lecture about how bad things happen when you don’t submit to an arbitrary authority, some sense that there are hard truths that need to be spoken about how the problem with black people is black people, the media is allowing for the possibility that, maybe, Garner’s video doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe you didn’t see what you saw, and by extension, black and brown men and women really are somehow to blame for their deaths. Maybe the solution to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and hundreds of years of state-sanctioned genocide is to just sit down with an old basketball player and talk a little bit more about all the ways in which black people are in the wrong.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:05:02 +0000
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