First on Twitter and then in The New York Times, black columnist Charles Blow raged against a policeman at Yale questioning at gunpoint his son Tahj – who attends Yale. But Blow never mentioned in all this fuss that the cop was also a black man. Wouldn’t that fact matter as you tell this tale as some sort of racist horror story?
Eddie Scarry at The Washington Examiner reports “Blow did not return a request for comment on why he omitted the race of the officer in his column or whether the race of the officer matters.”
Here’s a snippet of the column, pretending that he had to instruct his son how to behave with (ahem, black) cops:
This is the scenario I have always dreaded: my son at the wrong end of a gun barrel, face down on the concrete. I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance, intergenerational stories of joining the inglorious “club.”
When that moment came, I was exceedingly happy I had talked to him about how to conduct himself if a situation like this ever occurred. Yet I was brewing with sadness and anger that he had to use that advice.
I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out — earn your way out — of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you’ve done matters less than how you look.
There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun’s barrel. All of our boys are bound together.
The black website The Root reported Yale officials put out a campus-wide e-mail announcing the police officer was black. Yale’s president, dean and (black) police chief announced:
Let us be clear: we have great faith in the Yale Police Department and admire the professionalism that its officers display on a daily basis to keep our campus safe. What happened on Cross Campus on Saturday is not a replay of what happened in Ferguson; Staten Island; Cleveland; or so many other places in our time and over time in the United States. The officer, who himself is African American, was responding to a specific description relayed by individuals who had reported a crime in progress.
The suspect in the “crime in progress” was apprehended by Yale police nearby a short time later.
