On the Good Ones:

I have spent most of my life as one of the “good ones”. I had a stable two-parent household, went to college, got good grades, held a stable job. I even got married before I had a child. I never got in trouble with the law. I did come close on some occasions. Like most Black people who dare operate a motor vehicle, I’ve been pulled over on numerous occasions for extremely spurious reasons. These have included turning without a turn signal (I told the officer that I did use a turn signal, and he just brushed past it), not stopping at a stop sign (I did in fact stop at the stop sign and the officer later admitted that he was just looking for guns and drugs), and being accused of running a red light (the intersection had a delayed green for opposing traffic but the officers didn’t catch that when they pulled me over).

In that last interaction, the officers had me sit in the back of their squad car while they searched my car. As they let me return to my vehicle they joked that the bright white, blue, and orange super soaker on my backseat had scared them for a second. This was back in 2010 before cell phone videos of police killing Black people in fear for their lives were released on a weekly schedule, and yet I didn’t really need that evidence to find their joke about being scared of a water gun terrifyingly unfunny. 

In 2008, my first year of college, I was walking home from the movies with a friend. A police car followed us for a block and then ordered us to stop. My friend took off running. I stayed and the police told me I was out after curfew. I showed them my college ID and they were first skeptical and then impressed. They let me go but told me to tell my friend he was an idiot for running. I was the smart one. The good one. 

Incidentally, the two officers who pulled me over for walking home while Black were themselves, Black women. 

In all my interactions with police, I have always been habitually respectful. I’ve never raised my voice or expressed visible frustration. I have provided identification and obeyed every command without talking back. I never filmed any of these interactions. I did not suggest to an officer that my race played a part in them stopping me, even though I knew that it did. And afterward, in my mind somewhere behind the feelings of relief and anger, I imagined upon driving away that the officers who stopped me thought to themselves: “Why can’t they all be like that?”

One of the “good ones.” 

With so many high-profile examples of police brutality and a massive ongoing protest movement, it feels like we may be at a breaking point. On the verge of some radical shift in the national consciousness. Then again, we have been here before and America’s ability to maintain its racial hierarchy seems to be made from some sort of low carbon alloy. Shit will bend but never break. 

It is within this flexible cage of social exclusion that I sit and ponder myself and my own experiences. This is not easy. Part of how I can talk about these issues with others is to externalize and compartmentalize the realities of living in America while Black. My white friends and family often seem to be more afraid on my behalf than I am for myself. On some subconscious level, I don’t think it will happen to me. To put myself in this conversation precludes me from that delusion. 

In the past year, I’ve had many conversations with people from all over the spectrum of opinions on police violence and racism. A common theme in those conversations is some description or testimony about the violence Black people commit on themselves. There is an implied juxtaposition between the Black people who break the conventions of the social order (the bad ones) and thus bring the violence of the state upon them, and the good ones, who have nothing to worry about because they play by the rules. This is often summed up in the question: “Why didn’t they just comply with the officers?”

We need to explore what it means to be one of the good ones. What social function does it provide? Other than keeping me alive, that is. In the wake of Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict for the murder of George Floyd, kente cloth enthusiast Nancy Pelosi took to a podium and remarked on the day's events. There were several thoughtful and important things that one could say about the verdict. Speaker Pelosi chose a different path:

“Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice, for being there to call out to your mom—how heartbreaking was that?" 

The criticism for this statement of gratitude was both immediate and immediately forgotten. It was correctly pointed out that George Floyd had no intention of becoming a martyr for this cause. He wasn’t being brave or standing up to injustice. He was just a guy. He was just a Black guy and in this country, being Black in public is a personal risk. It was also pointed out by many (including your humble correspondent) that a guilty verdict for Chauvin did not constitute “justice.” There was no systemic reform contained in his jury-deliberated affirmation of guilt. It was one instance of prosecutors and a jury doing the right thing in a long history of those groups doing the opposite. 

Pelosi’s statement gets at something that lurks in the background of liberal discourse on Black liberation. America loves itself some dead Black people. Conservatives love dead Black people because the elimination of the dangerous “other” makes them feel more safe and secure. That’s the result of centuries of colonialist propaganda at work. Progressive liberals love dead Black people because, in their death, their life can be edited and packaged for liberal consumption. George Floyd’s death allows America to flatten his existence to the one horrific moment where it ended and use it as a fetish object for its own guilt, as well as use the trial of his murderer to sate its need for absolution. We don’t need to talk about the rest of his life. We can elide all of the poverty, substance abuse, and the history of violence. Those things would make Floyd a human being. America has little use for Black people as human beings. We are to be symbols. Either for all that is wrong in the country or all that could be right. 

In this way, George Floyd posthumously became one of the “good ones.” Even though his life leading up to the encounter with Derek Chauvin would not have met the qualifications to be considered as such. Every time a Black person dies at the hand of the police (or a concerned white civilian) there is a rush on both sides to characterize that person's life in a way that best fits a narrative. Conservatives are eager to produce “He Was No Angel” reports. Where every single misdeed and foible that can be found is brought forth as an argument that death was understandable, if not outright necessary. For those nominally on the side of social justice, there is a reaction urge to show the human side of victims of police violence. To show that they were loved by their family and community. We see pictures of them with their kids or if they were kids themselves, we see pictures of them smiling and just being kids. 

Personally, I’m more partial to the latter framing as it more accurately presents the reality of human existence. Everyone has faults, everyone has done some sort of harm to someone else. None of those personal failures warrants summary execution at the hands of the state. But we should understand that both of these narratives fit under a larger umbrella of social discourse where negative outcomes are the result of individual interactions. For conservatives and (ahem) classical liberals, when a marginalized person has a bad interaction with the police, it’s that individual's fault for not following the agreed-upon rules of society. For left-leaning liberals that same negative interaction is the fault of the individual police officer for failing to recognize the humanity of the person, they are trying to subdue. And here we find the purpose of “the good ones.” To individualize a systemic social issue. To attribute disparities in outcomes to choices of individuals rather than the natural inclination of unfair systems. 

In America, Black people are not allowed to tell their own stories on their own terms. You are only allowed to live within the bounds of our capitalist, imperialist, and exploitative social order and in doing so your life becomes a testimony to the inherent meritocratic ideal of America. Or you can die and have your life remixed to better fit the beat. You can either live long enough to become Lebron James and use your massive platform to speak out against police violence while helping to end an NBA strike in service to that cause on behalf of rich white owners. Or you can die and have your face on a tee-shirt. If you chose neither of these options you can at best be dismissed as naïve and foolish, at worst you can be branded a dangerous radical and an enemy to America. 

Perhaps this dynamic is best exemplified by the egregious historical rewriting of the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement was a decidedly radical one. Informed and influenced by the socialist victories and reforms that took hold in post-war Europe. Eliminating de jure legal discrimination and segregation was but one of the goals of the movement. Martin Luther King called for a nationwide, government-funded jobs program. Free college and healthcare were important policy goals for those activists as well. But in our current context, we find ourselves separated from that history by time and death. And in death, the lives of those radical leaders of the movement can either be changed to fit a narrative of individualist merit, (i.e. that all King wanted was a colorblind society) or be written out of history almost entirely like A. Philip Randolph and Lucy Parsons. 

We know how this plays out with conservatives. Subtlety is not their strong suit. One of President Trump’s most pressing priorities before leaving office was to produce a rewriting of American history that all but elided race from the conversation. The 1776 report is more than just a response to the New York Times' 1619 project, it’s the apotheosis of the conservative impulse to flatten American history into a series of easily identifiable heroes and villains. It presents an uncomplicated account of the founding and preceding development of the America we have today. And it must be uncomplicated because as we all know, talking about complications is a well-known Marxist plot to destroy America. And so the report ends on a quote from a Frederick Douglass speech extolling the virtues of the Declaration of Independence while leaving out the vast majority of that same speech where Douglass proceeds to rip America a whole new asshole over its massive hypocrisy and promulgation of evil around the world. They can do this because Frederick Douglass is dead, and in death, he can be seen as one of the good ones. 

This plays out a bit differently with progressive liberals. The liberal inclination is to adapt to and consume dissent rather than forcibly suppress it like conservatives are wont to do. And so liberals can acknowledge the stats demonstrating the disparity in the application of police violence. They can call for body cameras and release footage of police shootings. They can proudly proclaim Black lives matter and Joe Biden can use his bully pulpit to say that Derek Chauvin should be convicted of murder. The problem is that this acknowledgment of the realities of living in America while Black has a limit. We can talk about George Floyd, Duante Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, and countless other dead Black people because they aren’t around to tell the story of their lives up to the point they became famous for dying. We don’t need to talk about the state of foster care in this country or the emotional damage that many Black kids carry with them as they develop into adults. We only need to litigate whether an individual cop could stop Ma’Khia Bryant from stabbing her attackers without shooting her. We only need to be concerned with whether it was justified or not. Was Ma’Khia Bryant one of the good ones? If so, then we can mourn her and throw her body onto the furnace that drives the engine for social justice. If not, then we can move on until we find the next example of injustice. 

For liberals, the criteria for being one of “the good ones” have relaxed a bit. This is a good thing. As I’ve said before, one need not be perfect to not deserve to be killed by police. You no longer need to be an exemplary member of a productive society to be counted as human. But what remains is the need to reduce the life of Black people to a simple token to best fit a positive narrative about America. The liberal narrative is that police are necessary for a just and orderly society, but they need to be held more accountable for the individual transgressions that occur within their ranks. This is why the police reform bill passed in the name of George Floyd contains more funding for police, in direct opposition to the call for defunding that was inspired by his murder. This is why Joe Biden still refuses to consider legalizing drugs nationwide, despite the drug war being a principal driver of violent police interactions. And this is why the liberal discourse around race in America still requires “good ones,” made good either by their ability to positively navigate the American social context or by their death at the hands of individual bad actors. 

We can celebrate the living so long as they do not seek to fundamentally change the social structures of America and we can thank the dead for inspiring us to achieve a more perfect union. And I play along with this dynamic. My life can be seen as an example of Black resilience. I played by the rules (for the most part) and as a result, I’m moderately successful (compared to those who exist at the bottom of the social hierarchy). If I were to die at the hands of the police, my status as one of the good ones would be permanently cemented. My radical inclinations would be relegated to the back pages. All that would be known is that I didn’t deserve to die. Maybe there would be a congressional bill in my name that provided funding for Police Athletic Leagues or some such shit. 

There is optimism to be had. People are becoming more aware of the nature of systemic injustice and subsequently rejecting the good one/bad dichotomy. It’s becoming harder to use inner-city violence as a rhetorical bludgeon against police reform. It’s becoming easier to recognize crime as a failure of society and social infrastructure rather than racially coded cultural deficits. Left-leaning liberals even seem to be more willing to put Black uprisings in their proper social context, rather than uncritically condemning the violence. But we still have work to do. For all of it’s very real flaws the 1619 project attempted to tell the story of America uncoupled from the myth of American exceptionalism and meritocracy. However, in trying to attribute the positive aspects of America to the Black Americans who overcame racism and violence to achieve equality, the project still falls into tropes about the “good ones.” 

My hope is that we can progress as a society away from talking about individuals, good or bad, martyred or alive, and have deep conversations about systems, about how history informs those systems and how we can use that history to transform those systems. I’m tired of being a “good one;” it’s a heavy burden. And I’m also tired of seeing a parade of dead bodies, honored for their sacrifice in service of mild reforms and the nebulous concept of accountability. George Floyd was not a hero. He was not one of the good ones. He was a person, with all of the good and bad that entails, and that’s all that should matter. 

Solidarity forever.