We were the awkward, loving, white, non-family guests at Sunday’s birthday party for Philando Castile, the school cafeteria manager who was gunned down by a police officer in a suburb of St. Paul, MN, one year ago, July 6th.
It was a gorgeous summer day — not too hot, with a breeze — and the park, perched on the banks of the Mississippi, looked lovely. Valerie Castile, known by Philando’s many friends as “Mama Castile,” bustled around the picnic shelter, tying on balloons, and laying out the food brought by Phil’s sister and cousins. One of the cousins was the picnic’s D.J., his music selections ranging from smart rap to the kind of low-slung R & B that Valerie, laughing, called, “hot date music.”
It felt like a normal birthday party, but the guest of honor was there only in effigy: Valerie had hauled out a six-foot painting of her beloved son, Philando, smiling, wearing a crown of St. Paul’s most beautiful buildings, surrounded by the words: Long Live The King.
As I helped Valerie tape down a table cover, we spoke about the gigantic elephant sitting at the picnic: yet another police shooting had taken place the night before, this one in Minneapolis, of a white, middle-aged woman — an Australian woman, a pretty, blonde life coach who had called 911 to report what she thought was an assault in an alley near her home, and was inexplicably gunned down by a responding officer.
“I told you,” said Valerie, her eyes angry and sad. “It’s terrible. I keep saying. If we don’t get these police trained, if they keep on the way they’re going, they’ll be coming after you and you and you and you. After all of us.”
We didn’t yet know any details of Justine Damond’s shooting. We still don’t know many, and it’s been six days. But experience has taught us not to rush to judgement. The community of protesters that was born around the shooting of Jamar Clark — a 24-year-old black man killed by Minneapolis police in 2015 — and the shooting of Philando Castile, and now of Justine Damond, has been tiptoeing around the racial underpinnings of this new tragedy — a white woman this time, with the shooter being a black police officer who is a recent immigrant and a Muslim in a time of rising hostility towards both.
Finally, on Tuesday night, the Department of Public Safety (DPS) released a statement that served less to answer questions than to pose more of them: According to a preliminary investigation, the DPS said, when the two officers arrived on the scene, and Damond approached their car, both cops were startled by a loud noise nearby—possibly fireworks. At that point, the officer in the passenger seat, Mohamed Noor, pulled out his pistol, reached across the officer at the wheel and shot Damond through the open window. She died immediately.
The DPS’ Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has said its investigation may take up to four months, and so far, Noor has declined to be interviewed by its agents, though he has spoken to friends who are leaking to the press. Why is he stonewalling? Is it because, like the police officer who’d killed Philando Castile, he’d so obviously panicked and taken a life in the process?
Although the grief being experienced right now by the family of Justine Damond is incalculable, they can take some small solace in the fact that, unlike Philando Castile, Justine won’t be dragged through the dirt. When Phil was shot, we who knew and cared about him had to stand by and watch as he was slandered and libeled the way any black man is when he’s shot by police — he was a criminal, he deserved it, he looked scary, he wasn’t responsive, he was too responsive, anything to justify “I feared for my life.”
That line of defense is now a standard part of a standard script, and it has been used successfully, time and again to exonerate police officers shooting unarmed fleeing black men; shooting unarmed black men reaching for their wallets; shooting black men on the ground, spread-eagled, hand-cuffed; shooting children holding toy guns. In fact, ”I feared for my life” has become such an effective argument that jurors cannot hear past it, not even enough to grasp the sheer speciousness of the testimony of Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who’d killed Philando. According to Yanez, the mere fact that Phil’s car smelled of marijuana (even though his partner did not mention any odor) somehow justified shooting into an automobile and killing a man, with a woman and a four-year-old in a car seat just inches away.
As with Philando’s loved ones, Justine Damond’s family will grieve her senseless shooting by what sounds to be yet another poorly trained, panicking police officer. But in this case, the victim will not be further victimized. Right-wing pundits will not claim Justine caused her own death. The police union will probably not speak out on behalf of Officer Noor. Nor will anyone try to paint Justine Damond as a drug user hanging out in an alley. No one will demonize her at all. Her attorney will claim that she is the most innocent victim—as if Philando wasn’t innocent, as if a thirteen-year-old playing in a public park with a toy gun isn’t the most innocent, as if a six-year-old sleeping in her grandmother’s home isn’t the most innocent. This is the difference between being white and being black in America.
Justine Damond died suddenly, horribly, at the hands of those meant to care for her — the hands of the law — but her memory will be honored, not dragged through the dust by trolls and pundits, while the memory of Philando Castile — and Jamar Clark, and all the others—will be subject to the same hostile shadow of bigotry that haunted them when they were alive.
