The January 25 episode of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy titled “Personal Jesus” provides an opportunity for a biracial character to lecture white cops on a "lethal" bias and how it affects their job judgment. The liberal writers also cleverly (in their minds) work a real-life event into the mix by naming a 12-year-old boy after a victim who made headlines.
Twelve-year-old Eric (named by the writers for Eric Garner, the New York man who died in a police chokehold) arrives at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital after being shot by police. The boy didn’t have his house key and was trying to gain entrance into his home through a window when the police arrive and think he's robbing the house. He was shot in the neck as he reached for his phone. The boy is still in police custody at the hospital but Dr. Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams), a biracial surgeon with an African American mother, isn’t having it when a policeman tries to handcuff the boy to the bed and calls him a "perp" as the doctors begin to examine him. The cop finally agrees to uncuff him.
After the boy doesn’t survive surgery, Jackson lectures the white policemen about how to react in high-pressure situations.
Officer #1: It was a high-pressure situation. An officer made a judgment call.
Jackson: No. There's no judgment in that call. That was just a reaction. You see skin color. We all do. But the reaction that you give to a white kid versus a brown kid in that split second? That's the measurable, fixable difference. Bias is human. You have guns. You're using guns. So, yours is lethal.
Officer #2: We aren't racist. We just never know who has a gun.
Jackson: I didn't say anything about racist. I said biased. And lucky for us, bias is fixable. You have protocols in place. Those can be adjusted. You can fix it. Or you can keep pretending that it doesn't exist at all. Kids are dying. This kid is dead. For what? So many people that look just like him are dying. For what?
Eric’s death prompts African-American doctors Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and her husband, Dr. Ben Warren (Jason George), to sit down and have “the talk” with their 13-year-old son. While it is common for black parents to reference this as a milestone in a black child’s life, it seems like just common sense. Isn’t it a basic responsibility of parents, regardless of color, to teach all children how to act with the police?
Blaming white police officers for African-American deaths isn’t anything new on television. As written last year here on NewsBusters, what is sorely lacking is names and statics of white victims of police shootings in these stories.
Why didn't they name the character Dylan, after unarmed, white 19-year-old Dylan Noble who was shot by the police? Or Gilbert for white teen Gilbert Collar, killed by a black cop? Maybe Zach for Zachary Hammond? But these are not household names. They don't tell you that white people make up 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings while black people make up 26 percent. And white people are actually more likely to be shot during a police stop.
The charge of implicit bias has been debunked and psychological tests used in college instruction have been found to be flawed. But even Hillary Clinton peddled this pap on the campaign trail.
Jesse Williams is a BLM activist in his real life. He uses awards shows to spout off his opinion about bad behavior from white people. It isn’t surprising that ABC is indulging his character as this show’s moral scold. Victimhood is everything and racial division is often the tool used by Hollywood elites.
