This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
When a young black boy is shot by the police in the United States, we begin writing a math equation.
On one side of the equation: the shooting. On the other side, we stack whatever details we can find or imagine in an effort to make the two sides equal. We investigate the boy's character and past, scrambling for something big enough to equal bullets flying from a police pistol. How "thuggish" was the black boy? How many run-ins with the law did he have? How many broomsticks, toy guns or swords did he carry?
We really want to understand: What did this boy do to deserve such a thing?
One side of the equation is already known beyond a doubt: The boy was shot. Our equation does not question the authenticity or justice of this event. Working backward from this given, we pull and stretch at a boy's life until we can feel at peace with the mathematical logic of its ending.
A Tribune article from March 5 focusing on 17-year-old Abdi Mohamed, who was shot three times by Salt Lake City Police last month, begins writing this cruel equation. The piece delves into Abdi's past, adding up each transgression from the age of 12. "He spent time in juvenile detention centers for theft, trespass and assault, most recently in September." This litany was reproduced word for word in the New York Daily News the next day. The press makes it clear: like Michael Brown before him, Abdi was "no angel."
Still, say the articles, "[n]one of that prepared his family for the news that he had been shot by police." In other words: he was a bad kid, but his family didn't expect him to be so bad that he would evoke the bullets from an officer's gun. The subtext reads, "They should have seen this coming." They should have done the math.
The story written of Abdi delves into scorpions and toilet pits and family woes, but still it only conjures a caricature without a context. Meanwhile, the press never turns its curious eye to the man who shot Abdi three times. What was he like as a 12-year-old? And what about an Islamophobic, racist culture that teaches us to fear black bodies?
This equation of Abdi's life only displaces the focus away from all of us. This equation isn't clarity. It's mud over the undeniable: A 17-year-old boy was shot three times by the police.
Can't we just mourn a boy being shot? Can our calculated emotions afford Abdi a presumption of innocence? Or have black boys lost that at birth? At base, we are asking: Can we believe that black lives matter, without qualification?
But the reasonable proclaim: The world is tough. We must use force. The police must shoot to protect themselves and others. It maintains order. We all benefit. They should be thanked. We should be thankful. It's too bad that a boy got hurt, they concede, but that's the price we pay for our collective peace.
But this city is aching for a wider conception of peace, and a less cynical idea of what's reasonable. Too long has violence toward black and brown bodies been the foundation for our collective "peace," justified by the minute circumstances of a "riot," a "threatening" movement or a crime against property. In this country, the "reasonable" logic has always served the safety of the status quo, whether it be slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration or the shooting of black boys. "Sad truths" about the grittiness of our world have always been unevenly applied to black and brown bodies rather than white privileges.
So we'll embrace our own sad truth: The life of Abdi Mohamed was almost taken, and that life is incalculable, invaluable. The lives of Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Corey Kanosh and Walter Scott and Darrien Hunt were all invaluable, and are now lost. No list of naughty behavior will justify the act that ended their lives.
Instead of hounding down a boy's past to justify a brutal equation, our police departments, politicians, newspapers and daily conversation should try out a different axiom, one that goes:
Black lives matter.
Black lives matter.
Black lives matter.
Abdi matters. Each story we tell of Abdi should hold this truth at its heart. Black lives matter. We need to say it until black boys in Salt Lake City aren't shot by the police and the media stops digging desperately for justification. We need to say it until we believe it.
Easton Smith and Kate Savage are members of Showing Up for Racial Justice SLC, a Salt Lake City based group focused on mobilizing white people for racial justice.