In ways large and small and constant, the Nation exhibits contempt for the lives of its subjects in the Colony and indifference to their value. This is the central component of the white fear that sustains the Colony: the simple inability to recognize, deeply, fully totally, the humanity of those on the other side. It’s why the wave of protests has come to so many white people as such a surprise. The systematic devaluation of the Colony is so remarkably well hidden, so easily unseen.
“When we are waiting for our clients to arrive from the county jail in the morning, the deputies, the district attorneys, and the judges refer to our clients as ‘bodies,’ ” Oakland public defender Seth Morris once told me. “ ‘Are the bodies here yet? We have files but no bodies.’ I once asked a deputy to call my client a human being, and I was laughed at.”
One way the state expresses value for life is in its pursuit of those who take it. Homicide is the gravest crime of all. Violations of laws against extinguishing another person’s life should be most vigorously investigated and punished. And yet the national clearance rate for homicides was only 64 percent in 2012. The rate varies by locality, however, and in many large American cities—where the overwhelming majority of murder victims are black and brown—the clearance rates are even below 50 percent. Ferguson reported clearing 100 percent of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter cases in 2012 and 2013. New York City cleared around 72 percent of cases in 2013 and 2014. Baltimore, though, averaged a clearance rate of 47 percent for 2011 to 2014.
Perhaps most remarkably, over the past several decades, as crime has declined at historically unprecedented rates, as more cops have been hired and more resources have been poured into policing, that clearance rate has actually gone down in many places. Back in 1965 the national clearance rate was 90 percent. Even as homicides decline and the number of cops rises, police are getting worse at catching murderers.
Jill Leovy, who chronicled the work of homicide detectives in South Central Los Angeles in her masterful book Ghettoside, argues that this inability to solve and punish the most serious crimes is the flip side of a system that overpunishes minor infractions. “Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
When it comes to the ultimate punishment, death, the system makes clear which lives it values: the best predictor of whether someone gets the death penalty is race—not of the perpetrator but of the victim. White lives are far more likely to merit, in the eyes of courts, juries, and prosecutors, the ultimate punishment. White lives matter, and it hardly needs to be spoken.
The disparate value of life is painfully clear to people living in the Colony. Cynthia Swann, fifty-five, a resident of Southwest Baltimore, came out to survey the aftermath of the Freddie Gray unrest the day after the CVS burned. She told me she “became civically active when the police killed another police officer and no one was indicted.” In January 2011, she recounted, William Torbit, a black Baltimore cop, had been in plainclothes outside a nightclub in the middle of a fight. Several Baltimore police officers were called to respond to the melee, and when they arrived, they shot and killed him (as well as a twenty-two-year-old civilian). “There was never any indictment. Nothing was ever done about it,” Swann told me.
She compared Torbit’s case to that of Baltimore police officer Jeffrey Bolger, who in June 2014 responded to a call where a dog had bitten someone. When he arrived, he slit the dog’s throat. The officer, Swann pointed out, was immediately suspended and ultimately prosecuted. (He would later be acquitted). There was a lesson here about how much the system valued black life. The contrast between these two cases, she said, “tells the community and the children that an animal’s life is worth more than your life.”
This is why “Black Lives Matter” has emerged as such a simple, powerful rebuke to the unstated premise of the Colony’s existence. It simply asserts a basic principle that should need no enunciation. Yet the phrase has inspired intense backlash. Opponents have attempted to twist its meaning into “Only Black Lives Matter.” But save for a few kooky Black Israelites who used to rant black supremacist sermons in Times Square during my youth, it’s safe to say that no one believes “only black lives matter.” No, “Black Lives Matter” means “Black Lives Matter, Too.”
The backlash is rooted in the way white fear operates. In the days after the Freddie Gray unrest, quite a few Baltimore residents—all white—wanted to tell me the “real story” of Freddie Gray. Like right-wing e-mail forwards, they often attributed the “real story” to a “friend who’s a cop” who was in a position to know the truth—as opposed to the “politically correct” cover story being spun by District Attorney Marilyn Mosby. I heard numerous times that Gray had actually run from the cops because he was carrying drugs (he was a dealer, all these people took pains to point out), then had jumped out the window of one of the projects in Sandtown Winchester. The fall had been what snapped his spine. “They don’t want to let that get out,” one man told me, puffing a cigarette while warily watching the protesters outside city hall, “because now it’s all politics.”