The reaction was similar to that generated by an emotional and profane video posted by a St. Louis-area grandmother in August, after 9-year-old Jamyla was killed. Although there was no public outcry to Jamyla’s death, people protested the police shooting of a young black man during a drug raid the next night. Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, who had no criminal record, was shot in the back after allegedly pointing a gun at two officers who were chasing him from a drug house; his family disputed that account.
In a video posted to her Facebook page, Peggy Hubbard, 52, who is married to a police officer and grew up in the St. Louis neighborhood where Ball-Bey was killed, recounted the two incidents. Then, she asked: “Last night, who do you think they protested for? The thug. The criminal,” she said, referring to Ball-Bey. “Because they are hollering police brutality. Are you kidding me?”
Hubbard went on. “A little girl is dead. You say black lives matter. Her life mattered. Her dreams mattered. Her future mattered. Her promises mattered. It mattered.”
Within days, the video got more than 7 million hits, igniting an overwhelming response. Some people called Hubbard, who is African American, a racial traitor. There were death threats. But the vast majority of responses agreed with her.
“People said that it was about time somebody said something about this,” Hubbard said in an interview. “Don’t get me wrong. There is police brutality, but it is hard to holler police brutality when so much brutality is our own.”
That may be true, said James M. Jones, a social psychologist at the University of Delaware. But, he said, it is also human nature to be less vocal when criticizing members of one’s own community than outsiders who are seen as doing harm.
The nation’s racial history makes that particularly complicated in African American communities that are hit hard by both street violence and police misconduct, added Jones, whose research focuses on race, class and culture.
“Exposing our flaws and fallibility in a public way in an environment that has always vilified us is something that we are reluctant to do,” he said. “That lady’s video suggests to me that for Black Lives Matter and others to get it right, they need to incorporate her perspective and the perspective of the newsman about the fact that we don’t respond the same way when we kill our own.”
‘A singular event’
Chico Tillman encounters that sensibility regularly as he manages a team of people who mediate disputes for Ceasefire, a Chicago nonprofit group that operates on the science-based premise that violence is a contagious disease that spreads as more people are exposed to it. The program has had success curbing violence, but its reach is limited and its victories are always fragile.
“When a police officer kills an individual, that is a singular event that brings the community together in common cause,” he said. “In other cases, the causes of violence are often internal things that divide the community.”
At St. Sabina Church, a South Side parish that hosted Tyshawn’s funeral, a large board holds row after row of photographs of mostly black men and boys gunned down on Chicago’s streets. The Rev. Michael Pfleger sees them as victims not only of violence, but also indifference from their own community and the wider society.
He noted the low-achieving schools, double-digit unemployment, large numbers of men returning to the community from prison, and easy access to guns. “A perfect storm,” Pfleger said. “Hopelessness is at an all-time high. When society tells people they are not valuable, people internalize that and they take it out on those closest to them. It is like Spike Lee calls it: ‘self-inflicted genocide.’ ”
