Privilege
I don't recall when I first learned that DWB was a thing, but looking back, it was probably the point in time when my eyes began to open to privilege. We thought we were in the midst of a societal sea change, but in retrospect we were still in the very early stages and have yet to make all that much progress. I was born in the decade after the landmark Civil Rights Act of '64 and Voting Rights Act of '65, after the race riots, after the assassinations, after Loving v. Virginia.
Since then though there have been many reminders that the struggle is not over. I am remembering in particular the beating of Rodney King, the dragging of James Byrd, and more recently the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. I have always felt a bit remote from these events though, knowing they happened far away in very different communities than the one I grew up in and the one I have chosen to raise my children.
Last year when Doug Glenville wrote of his experience of being racially profiled by a West Hartford police officer while shoveling his own driveway in Hartford, I read his account and several responses with interest. Today I came across a mention though of a proximate event to the 1969 race riots in Hartford. I had been aware that there were riots in Hartford in the late sixties, but did not know that one of the sparks that set up one of those conflagrations was a West Hartford police officer fatally shooting an unarmed African-American teenager in the buttocks as he fled from an apparently stolen car into a park in the north end of Hartford.
I have often pointed to having grown up visiting family friends who lived in that neighborhood and wandering those streets as a young boy as a factor in my comfort walking the streets of Hartford today. I realize now that that was just another period of privilege that I enjoyed. I never had to be afraid for my safety as a white child. I never learned to be wary of the officers who patrolled those streets.
Read this summary judgement of the civil rights suit brought by the estate of the teenager.
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