The recent body-cam revelations of Memphis Cops fatally beating a skinny, young Tyre Nichols has touched collective nerves across the nation. How could this ‘inexplicable’ mauling have occurred? Simply inexplicable? Nope! Cops own power; in two words I’ll explain. “Power corrupts.” Big-City cops operate within power havens, islands amidst concrete jungles. They deal with danger, ordinary people, and lowlifes. Sooner or later, power engulfs them. Rogue street-cops generally see people as the‘other,’a lesser species. Rookie cops absorb this power culture, join the club.
The human brain runs on an obsolete operating system generated 3-5 hundred thousand years before now. Struggling for survival, primitive kids that bonded tightly with family-clans lived to become our deep, deep ancestors. Cops (all of us) inherit this genetic packet. The earth has changed, but not Homo sapiens. Our primitive need for ‘safety’insures bonding, bad company or not.
Bonding is universal. My childhood (nonfamily) group was our little, Steel Hill Church of Christ. While the religious part didn’t stick, everyone became to me a sort of extended family, lifetime. We seldom realize the ‘ties.’ Kent County farms operated with two central species. Males and females—males worked outside, females inside. Males spoke‘roughly,’...bawdy, raciest, rowdy, and sexiest.We fished, hunted & caroused together. Consequently, most farm boys (I damn well did) and girls grew up without learning‘easy’communication, comfortable interaction with the opposite gender.
Our great problem is that ordinary black Americans are trapped by skin color and lack of family wealth; actual and inferred slave ancestry often shadows‘otherness’ over black communities. This is an onerous burden because, instinctively, ‘others’ lack standing outside the clique. While status is easily earned, it’s not conferred by birth. “Born into Old Money,” in reference to black Americans, you’ve likely never heard. America’s others (white, brown, or black) have zero ‘get-out-of-jail’ cards.
In this Memphis case, I’m not unbiased. I harbor deep-seated prejudice against authority. This has been a lifetime problem. For me, contact with authority in uniform or power-position instantly raises my hackles. I read power as injustice. I despise authoritarians—the Trumps and Putins of the world. In the abstract, I abhor cops…dictators…generals…corporate CEOs… any person with the power to hurt. So I’m automatically excluded from jury duty when those Memphis cops come up for trial. My attitude always has to be suppressed, and has never served me profitably… highly confident people I’ve worked under loved me, less confident people labeled me a‘loose cannon’… It shows even when I keep my mouth shut…Traffic cops give me tickets, never warnings…were I black, and had been in Tyre Nichols’ shoes, I’d ended up dead. All of us imprint our culture; we live in the immediate but are better fitted to the unaltered planet. Cave men on Madison Avenue. Human biology can’t be changed, but how to gain more self-understanding could be acquired. Better education helps; some (like me and the Memphis cops) missed the train.
J. T. Wyatt 2651 FM 836, Spur
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