Observations: Minneapolis, a death and it's aftermath

In these times of chaos and uncertainty, the murder that happened on Memorial Day in Minneapolis exacerbated our own sense of confusion, anger, uncertainty, and fear.

Today, Friday, after days of rioting and looting, two posts from two different friends on my Facebook time line stood out.

These posts were painful to read because the writers exposed so much of their emotions, their pains, and their fears in their posts. It was a naked, honest, and impromptu exposition about how this heinous act affected the posters. One was from a white man whose name is Justin Pletcher. The other is from a black woman whose name is Deltha Katherine Harbin

Justin Pletcher’s post

https://www.facebook.com/jjp119/posts/10112579068233321

Deltha Katherine Harbin’s post.

https://www.facebook.com/deltha.scott/posts/10102862110993933

Both are heartbreaking to read, both are heartfelt and sincere. While Justin’s story ended with a sense of hope and a sign of hope and understanding, Deltha’s had a sense of desperation, lost hope, and despair.

Justin talks about his experience as a white policeman in a town adjoining Minneapolis. He briefly recites his life experience and how he came to be a policeman.  He very quickly talks honestly about his revulsion and disbelief at what a fellow policeman perpetrated and the emotions that went through his mind. He then proceed to tell of  his serendipitous  meeting with a black man named  Calvin, a health inspector who has  to walk around the neighborhoods and he didn't want people to be calling the police on him because he’s a black man with dreadlocks. Stop for a second. Think about that. He is doing his job and he is afraid of being targeted because he is a black man wearing dreadlocks. This is the United States of America in the year 2020.

Justin meets Calvin and Justin decides to walk with Calvin to get his job done, just to make sure that he was OK. The post is so deserving to be read, so I will skip much of the details, You need to read Justin’s words.

Justin’s narrative and his gesture towards Calvin was heartwarming, as it was inspiring. The story gave me, and I hope all the other readers, hope. At the end of the narrative, Justin tells us that they parted as friends and they hope to continue that friendship. Indeed, it was a bright ray of hope in a very dark time.

Deltha’s story was the complete opposite from Justin’s. She talks about her husband, the love of her life, the father of her children. She talks about all things that made her fall in love with him. She tells us about a night when he went to the gas station to fill up her tank because it was too late, and he didn’t want her to do it in the morning.

Please read Deltha’s story from her posting as well because she deserves to be read. She relates how an older white woman called the police on her husband just because he is black. She tells about how it became an instance of a white woman’s accusation against the black man, and the police believed her words against him even though she had no evidence to make the claim, just that he is a black man. It was not until another white person, a white man, vouched for her husband that he was released. Imagine that, the police refused to believe a black man they did not know but was willing to take the word of a white woman and then a white man they did not know. Let that sink in. This is the moment when all the handy disguises and camouflages disappears, and the inherent biases take over the decision-making process. Given two unknown people, one black and one white, the people in the position of authority chose to believe the white person.

I will give the policemen the benefit of the doubt, that they don’t secretly own white hoods and that they don’t, as they say, have a racist bone in their body, at least not consciously. The problem is that we are dealing with ingrained prejudices, something that is not at the forefront of your consciousness. I am very sure that if you asked the officers why they chose to believe the white people versus the black man, they would have no idea why anyone is so upset, that is just the way they see the world, and that is exactly the problem.

I implore you to read Deltha’s narrative as closely as you read Justin’s because even though both narratives are heartfelt and blunt, Justin made me feel much better about my friends and neighbors, Deltha’s made me angry and paranoid. Justin made me hopeful and Deltha made me understand the problem in a much deeper manner that I had before.

Earlier in the week, when the protests in Minneapolis for devolve into riots, a close friend was expressing his own dismay and frustration with the rioting and looting that went on. He expressed the sentiment of many people: what are they thinking? Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods? Why are they burning businesses, some of the black owned? It is the same sentiment that is expressed time and again during the rioting and protesting after each killing of black people, this happened in St. Louis, It happened in New York City, it happened in Texas. Looting and rioting are obviously not acceptable at any time in a civilized society, I am not condoning any of those actions, especially the actions of those opportunists who took advantage of the chaos, anger, and fear. But, and this is not a WhatAboutism, it is a statement of fact.

I think James Baldwin in his interview with Esquire magazine in 1968, laid it out clearly:

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.

 The underlaying assumption in my friend’s question is that the looters and rioters don’t realize that they are doing harm to their own future, to their own community, and they destroyed  any chance that they had of redemption by turning public opinion against themselves. What this also assumes is that the system of justice is applied evenly, that lady Justice is indeed blind to all the differences that defines us externally, not giving heed to the fact that justice is meted out by human beings: flawed in their thinking because of the prejudices exemplified in Deltha’s story.

My friend also pre-supposes that we have no precedence to reference, that the black citizens of America have always received some modicum of justice in the legal system created, executed, and operated by white people. It also assumes that legal recourse, review, and exoneration are a regular part of the black citizen’s experience with the American justice system. We know better. We have seen the results from the justice system that is decidedly skewed against all minority citizens, but especially skewed against the black citizens. Strange fruits indeed.

Returning to my friend’s question: are the black citizen’s who chose to riot and loot crazy? Do they not how the system work? Are they just so ignorant and primitive that they are not capable of understanding what is best for them? Or have they been figuratively and literally pinned against the ground so many times, had their necks stepped on by a someone’s knee so many time, and lost their lives so many times that they have lost hope of ever receiving justice from a system that is designed to work against justice for all, but actually gives justice to only those who possess less melanin? In short, have they given up on this system and they figure they had nothing to lose. Maybe they figured that destroying wealth and property, the keystone to the American soul, is the only way to get the attention of those who created this unfair system?

Think about THAT for a moment. How desperate and oppressed must one be in order to believe that their only chance for justice is to destroy whatever they had in order to make progress. It certainly speaks volumes.

Please go back and read Deltha’s post once again. If it gives my melanin challenged friends the kind of sadness and pain that it gave me, it gives me hope, just as Justin’s post gave me hope.  

One more hope is that the next encounter Delitha’s husband has with a white policeman, it is with Justin, and they can both have a laugh at the Karen that called in.

Book Review-Blood Curse By Maurizio De Giovanni

This book is the second in the series by Maurizio de Giovanni starring the protagonist Commissario Luigi Ricciardi.

The first book was a somewhat awkward and abrupt introduction to the series. Commissario Ricciardi is a unique character in the mystery novel realm because he sees dead people. No joke, he actually sees ghosts in the moments right after they die,  so he is uniquely positioned to solve murders. The fact that he Possesses this gift is both a blessing and a curse. The gift has guided his growth and maturation as person and marked his personality. He is taciturn, somewhat reclusive, and he is not very friendly. His only friends in this world are his housekeeper and nanny Tata Rosa, and his subordinate Brigadir Maione, his trusty sidekick. Ricciardi has been able to survive in the Naples police force during the fascists era mainly because he is very good at solving murders, because he was terrible at politics and being obsequious to the powerful people.

De Giovanni set the story in the Spring for a reason. He uses the season to setup the story as well as using the springtime to bring our minds to the smells, feel, and sights of Naples by following his description of the city. De Giovanni also uses the springtime to set the scene for the case. The unity of the season with the story plays a subtle but important role in the narrative. The sense of renewal and new beginnings are hinted at during the description of the investigation.

The murder takes place in a poor part of town and the victim was a fortune teller. De Giovanni’s descriptions of the hovel that the victim lived in, as well as the opulence of the other places in the book is engrossing and serves to contrast the disparity in the lives of all the characters. De Giovanni is a fantastically good writer but as impressive is the work done by the translator of the book Anthony Shugar because he was able to translate de Giovanni’s words in Italian into English so that the readers can truly engage in the fluidity of the storytelling. I cannot praise the work of this team enough.

The beginning of the story, as with all beginnings of all mystery stories, is awkward, the writer is subtly introducing the characters, the important elements of the story, and give us, the readers, an inkling of where the story is taking place and more importantly give us the correct context under which the story is taking place: how the city, the weather and the season are relevant to the story.

De Giovanni also introduced a few parallel stories in conjunction with the main murder. As all good mystery writers, he is able to juggle the important side stories so that he introduces them at the appropriate points in the narrative. It gives us a diversion so that we don't tire of the murder story itself and also to engage our curiosity about these characters, it makes us care about them.

This book was much better than the first book. Maybe it's because De Giovanni became more comfortable with Ricciardi and the complete cast of characters, or it may be that he's found the groove of the story itself. The book read much more smoothly and was much more engrossing to my mind after the initial introduction. At about the three-quarter point of the book, it became incredibly riveting and the writing got amazingly better, more clear, and much more seductive. I could not put the book down as the author drove the narrative towards the resolving of all the stories. Obviously not all of the resolutions were satisfactory because it involves the murder, but the finish of the story was as satisfying as can be. Indeed, the denouement of the book was just amazing reading.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Yes I am reading the third book in the series. I have resolved to read the entire Commissario Ricciardi series. I may even consider reading the other series that de Giovanni has written because I am so enamored with his tone, the way he handles the facts, and most of all his writing.