THIS IS AMERICA
The Russian Roulette of Blackness
Click or bang. Black people never know how their encounter with the police will end.
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, hold 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. 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.
With the juxtaposition of the Derek Chauvin trial and Daunte Wright’s death at the hands of police 10 miles away, 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.
