As more details of the tragic Tyre Nichols case become clear, actual facts militate against the view that radicals prefer.
As more details of the tragic Tyre Nichols case become clear, actual facts militate against the view that radicals prefer.
T he mainstream media, almost with one voice, recently made a claim so bizarre that it is worth unpacking in some detail. Following the beating to death of a black Memphis man, Tyre Nichols, by five black Memphis police officers, major news and opinion outlets rushed to declare that the real problem was white supremacy.
Congressman Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) told the news outlet TheGrio that the beating, and indeed all of American policing, was “rooted in white supremacy,” and this was reported with a straight face by Yahoo! News. The Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed under the headline “What finally sunk me on the Memphis videos? Five Black officers’ embrace of racist depravity.” The equivalent in the Boston Globe was “Tyre Nichols and America’s Systemic Failure” (italics mine). On the more underground side of things and close to my old stomping grounds, the well-regarded Milwaukee Independent offered analysis of “How the Culture of White Supremacy Killed Tyre Nichols.”
And so on. In reality, of course, all of this is nonsense to a remarkable extent, so nonsensical that we should do something polite upper-middle-class Americans almost never do when minority radicals say things: try to figure out exactly what the hell they are talking about. Can it be argued that white supremacy existed here because anti-black bigots were involved, who provably treated black suspects differently than they would have any white guys? Well, no.
All of the officers involved in the beating are black men, and so far as we can tell they were proud black men. Black Americans generally have higher levels of racial pride and of overall self-esteem than white Americans, and Jelani Cobb notes in the New Yorker that three of the officers involved were part of the pro-black African-American men’s fraternity Omega Psi Phi — the “Que Dogs” (which obviously also has a long positive history). For good measure, Memphis is a 61 percent black city that has long been fairly well integrated — Elvis Presley was a Memphian — and has a black chief of police; its previous mayor was black. Nothing here indicates self-hatred of any kind.
All right. Could a serious argument be made that “the institution” of policing itself is somehow an instrument of white supremacy, as Congressman Frost and more than a few Twitterati attempted to claim? Again, this frankly strikes me, an adult human who has been to countries other than the United States, as a bizarre or even stupid claim. So far as I, Google, and Lexis-Nexis can tell, police currently exist in every nation on earth. Nigeria, a rising black African power, boasts a highly regarded (if allegedly corrupt) national force “with a staff strength of about 371,800.” Police very explicitly also exist in states never conquered by Evil White European Colonizers: Policing in Japan is handled by the FBI-like National Police Agency (NPA) and six tough regional bureaus; Ethiopia has multiple regional agencies and has boasted the Ethiopian Federal Police since at least 1995, and so on down the line.
Are radicals, then, arguing that American policing is somehow different from policing literally everywhere else in the damn world — perhaps because it evolved from slave-patrolling in the antebellum South? Well, at least a few definitely are. Activist Bree Newsome drew some attention — and briefly argued with yours truly — on social media after asking why her countrywomen were so “COMMITTED TO SAVING THE SLAVE PATROLS!”
But again, this is a claim utterly unsupported by the facts — and one that has always struck me as too zany for anyone to seriously believe. Casual policing of the “king’s guard” or “city watch” variety obviously dates back at least to ancient Rome, and northern U.S. cities with no slaves did not simply let thieves and pickpockets run free from the Holy Year of 1619 until the Civil War in 1861. If we are speaking of more formal Robert Peel–style policing, the first American police departments were in fact all located in the North: Boston came first in 1835, with New York City following in 1845, and both Albany and Chicago in 1851. While hardly free of bigotry by today’s standards, many of these first northern policemen in fact targeted Irishmen more than members of any other group: “Paddy wagons” acquired their name quickly and for a reason.
These silly arguments (“Driving laws themselves are racist”) could go on and on, but the rebuttals to them are equally simple. And, as more details of the tragic Nichols case become clear, actual facts militate against the view that radicals prefer — pointing more to mundane realities of policing in the post-BLM era than to grand wicked social forces as drivers of the killing. Affirmative action, specifically, may not have played a huge role in the selection of the officers responsible, but most of them were onboarded under “dangerously low” standards of selection in a . . . tough hiring market for policemen.
Their entire unit, furthermore — edgily named “SCORPION” and assigned almost entirely to potentially risky cases in dangerous neighborhoods — was largely a response to the post-2020 rise in violent crime in the U.S. For that matter, a “rumor” substantiated enough to be presented at article length in Newsweek indicates that the uniquely vicious nature of Nichols’s beating may have resulted from a uniquely personal conflict. The Memphis Police Department has launched a formal inquest into claims that Nichols may have been involved in a romantic relationship with the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend of one of the officers. Far from hating blacks or indeed all whites, the men swinging the clubs in Memphis that night may simply have had a beef with this guy.
All this said, there are depths to be plumbed here someday. Many wokeist intellectuals probably do feel that the mere existence of law and order is white supremacy, in the same way that black folks’ being expected to be on time to meetings or go to work at all apparently is. But back in that slightly less crazy space where netizens were simply arguing that the particular Memphis cops who made up the Nichols Five obviously hated black people, the likely endgame of this case provides a useful reminder: Racism can be one of the many reasons that human beings do things, but there is no reason to assume it, absent evidence, in any particular situation. Just as, though cancer takes lives, and does so dreadfully, it is not the first cause of death you assume when someone is hit by a bus.
I will make one final point about highly politicized cases that involve a killing or a death: Whatever the eventual political outcome, the victim remains dead. It is a tragedy no matter the motive. Tyre Nichols’s family is collecting donations, for those inclined.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this piece erroneously stated that the current Memphis mayor is black.