MADISON VOICES: Making sense of the Tony Robinson shooting

On the evening on Friday, Mar. 6, 19-year-old Tony Robinson was shot and killed by a Madison police officer. Mr. Robinson was unarmed, and he is African-American.  The police officer who shot him is white.

I had the honor of speaking with several members of the African-American community here in Madison days after the shooting: African-American mothers and grandmothers, who are also prominent women in our community Nia Enemuoh-Trammell, Nichelle Nichols, and Corinda Rainey-Moore; Young Black and Gifted co-founder Eric Upchurch II; and Boys and Girls Club of Dane County CEO and Executive Director Michael Johnson. We discussed race relations, criminal system disparities, and the fear that currently exists in the African-American community. 

I urge everyone to listen to the full program.  There were far too many powerful statements to include her in this article, but I will attempt to summarize some of the key statements.

Reacting to the issue as a parent / talking to your sons:

Enemuoh-Trammell: “People in our community, they want to feel safe. There’re parents out there who are fearful.  They’re fearful for their children.  And they’re afraid that their child could be next.  There are children out there who are having a hard time processing everything that’s happening in our community. And they’re worried about their interactions with the police. I have had to have brutally honest conversations with my 10-year-old son, because he sees everything that is going on on TV, they talk about it at school.  And our sad reality right now is that I’ve got to convince my son that the police are here to serve and protect.  That most of them want to discharge their duties in a way that is respectful to the communities they serve. And they want to get home safely for their families.  But I also have to caution my children, that as you grow, you’ve got to realize that perhaps because of the color of your skin, maybe your choice of dress, you may be treated differently by law enforcement. That’s our sad reality. And I have this overwhelming need to instruct my children that if you ever encounter the police, you’ve got to behave a certain way. “

Nichols: “There is genuine fear for what is going to happen to their kids when they walk out the door.  It’s not that the fear wasn’t there before, but this incident has heightened the feeling.  I don’t need to know all the facts. I know five shots to chest is all I need to know. It’s unexcuseable, Period.  And me saying this isn’t me saying I don’t have empathy or understanding for split decision making that anybody in a position of authority is faced with. I get that. But I don’t get five shots. And it is heartbreaking to be a Madison native to see where we have come, that this community is here.”

Rainey-Moore: “I couldn’t talk to one African-American parent that didn’t say, ‘That could have been my child’.”

Police implicit biases

Upchurch: “How does the narrative change? What are you telling your children or what are you telling people? How are you addressing this issue? How can you train away implicit biases? If we have top of the line training and we still have these issues occurring. And this killing is just one very, very violent and traumatic example of what happens to black men and black and brown people all across the city and all across the state and all across this nation, it’s just not as violent as a death—it could be extra tickets, it could be harsher penalties, it could be anything that contributes to mass incarceration. So how do you, in a city that claims to have this good training, change what is happening?”

Rainey-Moore: “We all carry our own biases, whether we are trained or culturally competent or educated or not, we all have our own biases. And sometimes when we interact with people, those biases come into play.  I’m not saying that might have been a factor there because I don’t have all the evidence, but we know that biases still exist, and when we interact with people, regardless of our educational level, those biases do still come into play no matter how culturally competent we try to be or how culturally competent we say we are, those things still happens, those things still exist. 

Allowing African-Americans to feel anger:

Nichols: “The conversations I’ve had with my kids when (they) have legitimately been angry about stuff, whether it was when they were in high school the way a teacher was talking to them, or even now just being out in the world. I have to be honest with myself. There is this part of me where I am afraid of your anger, baby. I don’t even know how to coach you anymore. Because I want so much for you to be able to claim your anger, and to be just downright authentic with it, and to shout out what you know is wrong. But I’m also afraid of what’s going to happen when you do that.  And so I’m stuck as a parent, I don’t really know how to support you in this process.”

Rainey-Moore: “I do let them know, to me, anger is an OK emotion. However, because he will be perceived differently when he is angry, that he needs to tailor it to accommodate other people who may misinterpret that anger. Because, just because you’re angry, does not mean you’re going to aggress against somebody.  … I just want to say, it is perceived differently when African-Americans are angry.  For example, when Chief Koval was on TV, and he did the response to Young, Gifted and Black when they made their demands, he was angry. He came across and he said, “I am sick and tired.’ Now as a professional black person, if I would have said that on national TV, the media would have pulled the plug on it for one, I probably wouldn’t even have a job for two, and I would be discredited. But we didn’t see anything in the media about Chief Koval’s response and the way he responded. But that was an angry response, but yet society perceived that was an OK response, because it was against young, black people who were protesting and making demands. Now had that been a white audience that he was making that statement to, I guarantee you it would have been a different response.” 

The racial divide in Madison and the need to engage the whole community:

Upchurch: “I think people are hurting, people are angry.  Of course, when you hear someone say ‘Let’s be peaceful,’ I think that’s an effort to get to a solution and not distract from the issue by creating more issues.  So I can definitely recognize that.  But we’re human and we have feelings, and people express those.  I think that fear is a very real reaction to these things.  My heart goes out to all of the families that have been and are, even more so now, afraid that their children are next, or afraid that they could be next. You had many of the students that were out yesterday expressing their fear that they don’t feel safe, the police do not make them feel safe. And this is something that black and brown communities have experienced for quite some time.  Our experiences have been different. And I think that a big part of the issue is that there is this inability for people to understand that life just might be different for someone else than it is for themselves. And because we can’t see that, people make their judgments. They say, ‘Oh there must have been a reason, because it couldn’t possibly be that a 19-year-old boy without weapons was shot five times.’ But that’s exactly what happened.  And still people are saying, people who look differently and have a different life experience, they’re looking for a reason, and they believe that there must be a reason. But for us, it’s like a sad expectation. It’s like, ‘Oh, another black boy was killed, this is really, really sad’. But it happens for us every 28 hours.”

Nichols: “Part of the reason why we’ve decided to show up and to just lend our voice to this conversation, is that a lot of us are having these sideline conversations, we’re having these conversations in the side room of a church.  It has to come out. … This is a community issue.  I want white parents, who have teenage kids, who have best friends that are black, multiracial, whatever. Talk to your kids, about, ‘When you are hanging out with so and so and so and so, things are not the same for you all.  It may feel like it when you’re driving down East Washington Avenue in a car, it may feel like it when you’re showing up at a mall, cause y’all are not seeing the color lines the way we know they exist.  But when somebody gets pulled over, your friend, your best friend, the one that’s the kid of color, is going to be the one that’s going to be looked at differently.’ I feel like white parents have the same obligation to talk with their kids as black parents are feeling like they need to talk to their own. About how to survive and how to deal with this system of injustices.  And I feel like when we start moving in that direction, all of our kids in this community, it will be a small movement towards transformation.  Because the communities of color alone can’t own this. We can live it, we can breathe it, we can give voice to it, but there’s got to be some other pressure and there’s got to be some other allies in the system to help actually move things to a different place.”

Enemuoh-Trammell : “I, myself and many others in the community, have been grappling with this. We’re searching to find the appropriate words to express the anxiety and the pain that I think many of us are feeling in the community right now.  We’re hearing many voices, people are demanding to be heard, they’re demanding for something better for our community.  There is also plenty of sharp rhetoric to go along with it as well.  But I think when you strip all of that discourse down, I think you will find that many of us in this community are saying the same thing and want the same thing.”

Rainey-Moore: “When we were suggesting training, one of the comments that I heard was that. ‘Our officers here have some of the best training in the country’.  And yet, even though we have some of the best training in the country, incidents like what happened (Mar. 6) still happen here.  And my response to that is ‘Yes, we may have some of the best trained officers in the county, but are there things that we could still could be doing differently?’  And yes, Chief Koval — I would agree with Michael Johnson that Chief Koval is competent.  But as we know from being cultural competence, does not mean that that continuum of learning stops because somebody says I’m culturally competent. That is an ongoing process that needs to continue.”

Johnson: “Madison is a good city for the most part. However, if we’re truly going to be a progressive city, I would argue that we’re not.  We’re not a progressive city if our kids are not graduating from high school.  We’re not a progressive city if there’s a class of people who are being locked up at larger rates than their other counterparts.  There’s unemployment issues here.  And if we don’t begin to address those disparity issues, we will never ever fulfill our potential at being one of the best cities in the United States.  And we have to address these critical issues that are hurting our communities."

--Carousel Bayrd is Vice Chair of the Dane County Board and hosts "A Public Affair" Tuesdays at noon on WORT (89.9 FM). She lives in Madison with her husband and two children.