How the fear of ‘big black men’ became a death sentence

“That looks like a bad dude, too. Probably on something,” a policeman says calmly to another as they watch Terence Crutcher walk towards his broken down SUV from their helicopter. These words are uttered shortly before the 40-year-old father of four was tasered and shot dead.

It is strange that they could make such an assertion from hundreds of feet above a man they had never met or spoke to and knew nothing about. Crutcher liked to sing in his church choir. He was an active member of his church who “loved God”. He was studying music at college. In fact, he was on his way home to his family after a music appreciation class at Tulsa Community College. But, none of that matters now. Or at least it certainly didn’t matter once the force at the scene had concluded that he looked “like a bad dude”.

“That big bad dude was a father. That big bad dude was a son,” his twin sister Tiffany said on Monday, explaining that he had wanted to make his family proud by enrolling in college. She was forced to describe a life beyond the hashtag and the inevitable public scrutiny he was about to receive as some seek to justify why police officer Betty Shelby felt it was necessary to shoot and kill. And clearly, from the footage and audio available you can assume they really did think that this man was a criminal.

It is still unknown what orders Crutcher was given in his final moments, but with his hands in the air, without a weapon, walking away from the police, it is hard to understand how he could be seen as intimidating. That is until you consider that Shelby, all of the officers, and all of us have been socialised to believe that large black men are inherently scary. Black masculinity has been heavily stigmatised and stereotyped to the point where they are feared even in situations when they are the ones under attack. The video shows there are at least four officers with truncheons, tasers, guns and a helping helicopter above, yet so pervasive is the myth that black men are inherently suspect, it is decided that Crutcher needed to be subdued by four police officers rather than helped back onto the road.

And why would they? Not only was he black, which already probably had their fingers twitching on the trigger, he was big. He fits the part of the big bad black man perfectly, the type that commits crimes, takes or deals drugs, and starts fights. The type that makes people nervously cross the road and avoid eye contact when they walk past at night or hold on to their phone or handbag a little bit tighter. The type of person they have been trained to associate with criminal activity. The only way he could have looked more threatening is if he had been wearing a hoodie.

Shelby joins America’s long history of white women whose accusations based on black masculinity have resulted in racially motivated violence. White femininity has been used as a tool to justify lynchings and prosecutions since the 1800s when the paranoia around black masculinity arose. This paranoia is what drove Charleston shooter Dylan Roof, who incidentally is still alive, to massacre the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go”. Of course, it also doesn’t help that in the US and the UK people consume media that continues to under-represent black men as a whole, but when they are present they are often associated with criminality. If black people have been persistently overrepresented as the perpetrators of (violent) crime, then eventually you will develop a subconscious bias where you assume the black people you encounter have a penchant for violence and are to be feared.

“Black masculinity has been heavily stigmatised and stereotyped to the point where they are feared even in situations when they are the ones under attack” 

Remember when Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, described grabbing the 18-year-old as “like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” despite the two of them being the same height? That is a prime example of how beliefs, actions and opinions are impacted by our cultural fear of black males. And, more recently the BBC aired a documentary about the Merseyside bogeyman, Akinwale Arobieke or Purple Aki, so-called as he is “so black he is purple”. As weird as the story is I couldn’t help but notice the language used to describe him, and the normalised racism in the show. Putting aside his obsession with feeling/ measuring men’s muscles, what the BBC documentary also highlighted was the fear of a big black man in a small white town. One woman said, “he was so big and purple I’d never seen anything like it,” without any thought into how awful that sounded. Or how isolating it must have been to have that name attributed to you during your childhood.

You can see this time and time again when people like George Zimmerman are acquitted for killing young black boys. This fear of black men has permeated recent history. A fear that was used to wrongly convict black men of raping white women and justify the abuse of stop and search powers on black teens on our streets. A paranoia that explains why 17% of complaints logged about police violence came from a black person despite the fact that around 3% of the population is black, and why Air China felt compelled to warn tourists to stay out of black areas and not let women travel alone there at night. It is why since I started writing this article a disabled man armed with a book was shot in North Carolina, why nearly 400 black men have been killed by American police since the beginning of 2015. Because once you assume that someone “looks like a bad dude” based on their race, you’ve already subscribed to the mindset that has been used to kill innocent unarmed black men for centuries.