So, big CW for anybody who doesn't recognize his name: This is about police killings of Black men, specifically Philando Castile, who was murdered by a police officer in 2016. There is also discussion of high profile mass shootings.
The BLM movement had been around for a few years at this point. They had done a lot of work to bring attention to high-profile killings of Black people (usually by police). My family is white, and arguments about these high-profile killings became commonplace in my family's house.
The arguments we had about the murder of Philando Castile is when I realized just how racist my mom was, but also just how unthinking racism can make people.
Now, my mom was not smart. In 2013, my mom (who was from Connecticut) fell in with a Facebook conspiracy theory crowd for a bit that believed the Sandy Hook massacre was fake. My dad was more intelligent, but still your run of the mill boomer racist. Was a big "Obama is from Kenya and will enact sharia law" and "we need to glass the middle east" guy. He was also quite anti-cop, and despite all the other racism, fell firmly against the murderers/cops in all of these encounters.
My parents were also very abusive, and only in my late twenties am I coming to terms with how batshit some of my childhood stories sound. But despite all the abuse, it's these arguments I remember and which leave my angry.
My mom would always have some excuse for these killings. She always bought into all the garbage. "Michael Brown attacked the policeman first", "Zimmerman was acting in self defense against Trayvon Martin," "The cop couldn't have known Tamir Rice's gun was a toy." My mom wasn't a smart person, and I attributed this to her starting with wrong facts and ending up in a wrong conclusion.
I didn't realize how generous that was!
When Jeronimo Yanez murdered Philando Castile, the events were as follows (which we knew and had partial recordings of in 2016): Yanez pulled over Castile, who was in the car with his girlfriend and 4 year old. Castile, a legal gun owner, declared the weapons he had in his vehicle. When told to get his ID, he slowly reached for it, reassuring the police officer he wasn't pulling out a gun. And then he was murdered, with his wife and daughter witness.
Now, whenever police murder a Black man, Conservative media does their best to scrounge up every detail and facet of their life. Scour every artifact of their life for any indication of wrongdoing, anything to tip the scale of public opinion. All the wrongdoing from Philando Castile amounted to were minor traffic violations.
Minor traffic violations.
My mom, who earlier that same day was playing Pokemon Go while driving, and who had screamed at me after I asked her maybe not to drive through a school zone while catching Pokemon, told me Philando Castile deserved to die because of his traffic violations.
At that point I realized she already had a conclusion in place in her mind. She didn't arrive to conclusions by thinking about them, she started with conclusions and found reasons to a degree even worse than most people. She wasn't even responding to social pressure, because most of the people around her agreed murder was bad.
At that point, I realized she was totally unreachable as a person, and worse, that this is how so many people think.
There's not a really big conclusion to this post. I just keep thinking about this argument. After a few years of arguing about police killings, here was one where I was certain would be obvious to even my mom.
I didn't have such a cynical take of her back then, I wasn't speaking down to her, but man, it's hard to write about her with anything approaching respect here.
TLDR: My racist parents argued a lot about whether police killings were justified. The murder of Philando Castile was so blatantly and simply unjustified that I was surprised that my mom still fell on the side of the police. I still think about this all the time. I stopped talking to parents regularly after this, and cut them off entirely in 2019.
The most striking part was when my mom argued Philando Castile deserved to be killed because he had minor traffic violations. The same day she had said this, she was playing Pokemon Go while driving in a school zone.