The Russian Roulette of Blackness
Click or Bang. Black people never know how their encounter with the police will end.
This is a re-post of yesterday’s essay, which unfortunately did not go out to all subscribers. If you received yesterday’s post, please pardon the duplicate email.
I saw a movie once called The Deer Hunter. Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken starred as childhood friends who end up as prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. Russian roulette was one of the forms of torture used by their captors.
In the film, the Viet Cong forced their prisoners to play the game against one another, making them spin the barrel of a pistol, to it to their temples, and pull the trigger. Their captors gambled as the prisoners played until finally, a “bang” replaced the “click” of the empty chamber. Christopher Walken’s character is so traumatized by playing Russian roulette over and over that he continues playing once he’s out of the military and back home in the states.
As I watched the juxtaposition of the Derek Chauvin trial with Daunte Wright’s death at the hands of police ten miles away when something occurred to me. When Black folks have an encounter with the police, we may as well be playing Russian roulette. Each interaction with law enforcement is like a proverbial gun to our heads, an event that could end as uneventfully as the “click” of an empty pistol or the destructive “bang” that signals a bullet in the chamber.