Of all the things that President Barack Obama said during his acclaimed speech this week at the Democratic National Convention, there’s at least one remark that isn’t playing very well among some Black scholars who deal with police use of excessive force.
“I think it is a dangerous false equivalence,” said Dr. Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she is also affiliated with programs in law and public affairs.
“Police officers are agents of the state, they are given incredibly wide berth to do their work violently and with impunity as evidenced by how rare it is for a police officer who kills an unarmed civilian to be convicted of a crime,” Perry said in an interview with Diverse via Twitter.
“On the other hand, Black parents, like me — the mother of two sons — know that there is virtually no recourse if our children are murdered by police, no deterrence to police officers because they don’t get punished for it.
“Moreover, police officers choose a job that makes them vulnerable to violent encounters,” Perry said. “We do not choose to have our flesh treated like it is a weapon.”
Perry was by no means the lone person in Black academe who had a blistering critique of the president’s remarks concerning the purported parallels between the prospects of being killed in the line of duty versus being Black and getting killed by police officers who are ostensibly acting in the line of duty.
