I know what I titled the post, but I’m going to do a little bait and switch with this post. I’m going to touch a bit on the protests, but the post is going to be more free-form, stream-of-consciousness about what is on my mind during these times. So, apologies ahead of time when I jump all over the place.
We need to start with Amy Cooper. She’s pretty infamous by now, but I’ll summarize. She was walking her dog off-leash in Central Park when Christian Cooper (no relation), a black man who was birding, asked her to put her dog on a leash. She refused, and he started recording. She told him to stop recording or she’d call the police. He invited her to call the police, which she did. She then told the police that there was an African-American man threatening her, and she begged them to come protect her.
There has been plenty of ink spilled about her and why her actions were so profoundly disturbing–and, yes, racist. Both Aya Gruber and Aymann Ismail from Slate wrote about it from different perspectives, and I would recommend both reads highly. The thing that stood out is that afterwards, she both ‘apologized’ and claimed she wasn’t a racist. She also said she didn’t intend to harm Christian Cooper. I call bullshit on all of that. Or rather, I’ll say that it doesn’t matter if she’s a racist in her heart or not. I don’t give a shit if she has a million black friends and listens to rap in her spare time.
I don’t care who she is–I care about what she did and to a greater extent, how what she did affected someone else. Also, I care about the broader context in which she made the decision to call the cops and knowingly use ‘African American man’ as the whip to goad the cops to racing to her protection. There’s a whole history of white woman fragility and black man scariness that Gruber touches on in the post above, so I won’t belabor the point. I just want to say that it beggars belief that Amy Cooper meant no harm. I mean, come on! If you watch the video, she was the aggressor the whole time. He remained where he was, and his voice is calm and polite. She’s the one who goes towards him and points angrily at him.
I will say one thing–people have discounted her claims that she felt afraid. They say she was angry, but why can’t it be both? I think she was afraid, but it’s because of the endemic and enduring racism that is interwoven in every fabric of our society–black men are dangerous, especially to white women, not because Christian Cooper was threatening her in any way. This is something I don’t want lost in this incident–she’s not the problem in and of itself–the systemic racism that allows her to be this way is. She was obviously also angry at being called out by a black man as well.