Appeal to White People: Call Off Your Racist Cops

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CNN’s Erin Burnett interviewed Raysean White, the man who filmed the Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer before and after he shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man. Crucially, in addition to White’s video of this shooting, he verbalizes a blow-by-blow, eyewitness account of what transpired just before he began filming; and then Raysean White captured on film the would-be killer-cop pumping seven bullets at point-blank range into the back of Jacob Blake.

You are narrating what you saw here, says Burnett, and obviously you saw a lot that happened before that was so disturbing you decided to start filming it. Your video is the reason tens of millions of Americans now know about Jacob Blake and what happened here. I mean, how does it make you feel, as a Black man yourself, to actually see this happen? Where you were, to be the one who was able to pick up your phone and film it?

Burnett’s is perhaps the most important question as we struggle to make sense of yet another senseless black snuff video. Her question resonates because White’s answer removes a well-worn shibboleth that rabid, unquestioning boosters of police deploy even before the black victim’s wounds have been assessed, or the too often still warm but dead black body has had time to cool. It is a shameless, transparent, obvious attempt to blame the black victim for his/her…