CHARLESTON, S.C. — “You know North Charleston policemen, so just do whatever they say.” That’s what Judy Scott says she told her son on the phone in the last moments of his life on April 4, 2015, as he grappled with North Charleston police officer Michael Slager in a sad bit of scrubland next to an auto parts store.
Moments later, as her son, Walter Scott, half-ran half-staggered away, Slager fired eight shots at his back and hit five times. Scott was black; Slager is white. The basics of the story aren’t unique.
Judy Scott testified Thursday in Slager’s murder trial at the Charleston County Courthouse. That’s about 20 minutes’ drive from the scene of the shooting, but it might as well be on a different planet.
Unlike North Charleston, the city’s historic downtown is affluent, impossibly beautiful and remarkably comparable to antebellum photos — which makes it all the easier to recall just how much slave labour, skilled and unskilled, built and enriched the city and its state. It’s very, very awkward.
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Next week, across the street at the federal courthouse, Charleston will deal with one of recent American history’s most ghastly single events: Dylann Roof’s slaughter of nine parishioners at a Wednesday-evening Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in hopes (he told police) of provoking a race war. It could hardly have been a better target for his brand of terrorist: for 200 years, since before black congregations were legal, the church had a symbol of resistance and refuge from oppression, to say nothing of more mundane spiritual comfort.
The survivors’ stories, never mind the victims,’ are multifariously awful — not just the immediate trauma, but the inability of some to venture back into their historic sanctuary. Friday the church was locked up tight, but a sign outside still offered the same Wednesday-evening Bible study of which Roof took advantage. I found it heartening, but it’s easy to be heartened when no one has tried to murder you because of the colour of your skin, on a continent your ancestors never asked to visit.
Superficially, at least, Charleston seems to be handling these twin horrors with aplomb. Start with Feidin Santana, who witnessed Slager’s initial altercation with Scott and bravely followed and filmed it as it escalated. (Poking around the scene on Friday, I was amazed to see how far out of his way he went.)
The video did not match police descriptions of the incident — notably, no one performed CPR. And when it came to light, North Charleston police chief Eddie Driggers declared himself “sickened;” Slager was fired; and Mayor Keith Summey simply said, “when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
Reports indicate some peaceful protest outside the courthouse on Thursday, the first day of the Slager trial, and rightly so. But on Friday, I wandered into a preventive “safety zone” downtown and found nothing but some smiling police officers drinking coffee. Charleston is a long way from North Charleston, but it was sorely tempting to believe people actually had confidence justice would be done — that they saw no need to camp outside and demand it, despite the jury including just one African American.
“It doesn’t matter what colour they are because they have eyes that can see that video tape,” Scott family lawyer Chris Stewart told reporters. “They know that there’s no explanation at all for shooting at a man eight times while (he is) running away.”
The advice Judy Scott gave her son in desperation is advice many black parents give their children as a sad matter of course. “Don’t wear a hoodie. Don’t try to break up a fight. Don’t talk back to cops. Don’t ask for help,” as Jazmine Hughes wrote on Gawker in 2014. “Don’t give them an excuse to kill you.”
It’s a sickening reality — not that black men and boys are at significant risk of being killed by a police officer on any given day, but that they feel they are. Anyone in the same situation would feel the same way, knowing how disproportionately that violence is meted out. If that doesn’t evoke an empathetic response, you’re made of stone.
Indeed, the prospects for mass empathy as Charleston dispenses justice in these two cases should be boundless. Mass shootings are a leading American preoccupation, as much among those who believe guns cause them as among those who believe guns solve them. A mass shooting at a place of worship, committed by a stranger welcomed without suspicion into the fold, is an almost unthinkable violation.
And while Black Lives Matter has uncompromisingly taken the lead in demanding an end to police shootings, American police kill about twice as many white people as black. In the first six months of this year, The Washington Post reported, the total body count was an astonishing 491. Few, I’m guessing, were affluent, urban, well-educated BMW-drivers.
If there’s a populist revolution afoot, Americans of all creeds and colours should be marching together. But when they turn on their televisions, what do they see? They see Donald Trump appealing to downtrodden, less-educated white voters with, among other things, a revanchist cry to support police officers no matter what. They hear Trump insisting African-Americans “live in hell.” And Americans who do live in something approximating hell hear Hillary Clinton and her surrogates and supporters insisting things are pretty bloody OK in America.
It’s awful. I don’t know what else to say about it.
• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley
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