You probably recall this incident: On Memorial Day of this year, a few hours before George Floyd was lynched in Minneapolis — not by a rope thrown over the branch of a tree but on the ground, where death took much longer to come — by a rogue cop that kept his knee on the neck of the 46-year-old black man for over eight minutes, another black man, 57-year-old Christian Cooper, had the cops called on him by a 40-year-old white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), in an area of Central Park known as The Ramble.
Amy Cooper hysterically told a lie to the 911 operator by stating that she was being “threatened by an African-American male,” a statement that (when made by a white woman) over the years has caused the deaths of thousands of black men, particularly during Reconstruction, Jim Crow and beyond.
Christian Cooper, an avid bird watcher, was in The Ramble, a prime location for enjoying his passion; it’s also a place where signs are posted for dog walkers to keep their pets on a leash. However, Amy Cooper, in an arrogant display of white privilege, refused to leash her dog when a black man asked her to please observe the rules in the park. Instead, she whipped out her phone, called the cops, and began lying.
“I’m in The Ramble, there is a man, African-American. He has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog,” she told the 911 operator.
But her lies soon caught up with her since Christian Cooper had a phone also and he was recording the encounter.
The day after the incident, once her lies were exposed, she issued a statement that read, “I reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about his intentions when, in fact, I was the one who was acting inappropriately by not having my dog on a leash, I am well aware of the pain that misassumptions and insensitive statements about race cause.”
She would later loudly claim that she’s a liberal — which begs the question, if she’s so damn liberal then why did she make it racial right from the jump by informing the police dispatcher that he was “African-American?”
Because she knew this bit of information, coming from a white woman, would get faster police response, and unless she’d been living under a rock or in a bubble all of her life, she also would have to know that she was putting a black man’s life in potential danger. She didn’t care.
She was eventually charged with filing a false police report and when the case came up for a hearing on Wednesday (October 14) prosecutors charged that she called the police not once but twice, first falsely reporting she had been threatened by a black man in Central Park who had asked her to leash her dog, then later claiming he actually had assaulted her.
When the story first broke, it made news around the country since “Karens” have been calling the police on blacks — men, women, and children — in increasing numbers since tRump took office. But her lies caused her to lose her prestigious job at Franklin Templeton, a brokerage house where she had risen to become a vice president. And in addition to being vilified as an out-of-control Karen, the animal rescue that she got her dog from took it back, but returned it to her less than a week later. Knowing American culture as I do, my suspicion is she’s already landed a new job, and perhaps a better paying one.
Christian Cooper, a Harvard grad with a successful career in the communications, however, refused to press charges against the liar, magnanimously saying that she’d already suffered enough.
“I’m not excusing the racism, but I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart,” he said after the video went viral. “There are certain dark societal impulses that she, as a white woman, facing in a conflict with a black man that she thought she could marshal to her advantage. She went there.”
However, Christian Cooper is dead wrong for not filing charges against Amy Cooper, who has since lawyered up and is fighting the charges, her lawyer knowing that it will be hard to successfully prosecute the case without his cooperation. Not that she should face jail time — that would be ridiculous. But she should be placed on probation for a year or so, and when she successfully completes her sentence, the case should be erased so that she doesn’t have a record.
Enabling this woman to walk away scot-free will send the wrong message to other whites who already feel as if they can play this dirty race card on any black person they choose, simply because they can — and usually do — get away with it.
Isabel Wilkerson, in her new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, explains in great detail why we — as the subordinate race in America — have to quit being so damn eager to turn the other cheek. She cites the example of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist that slaughtered nine worshippers at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015. Surviving members of the congregation were eager to forgive the bigot in spite of the fact he never asked for their forgiveness and, indeed, while incarcerated was known to correspond with other racists, encouraging them to carry out similar murders.
In the case of Americans of African descent turning the other cheek can cause us to suffer more than a slap, it could cost us our lives. Enough.
