Note: This essay was first published in The Filipino Press on March 5, 2021.
When I saw the CNN headline of February 24, “Man dies after police kneel on his neck for nearly five minutes, family says in wrongful death suit,” I knew immediately that the man was not Black.
If the man was Black, the CNN headline would have said so.
If the man was Black, the story would have likely been the website’s headline.
If the man were Black, hosts on MSNBC would already be talking about him.
But none of that was happening.
The man’s name was Angelo Quinto. Was he White? Hispanic? Should that even matter?
I read the CNN story and to my surprise, Quinto’s race was not noted, no doubt because it could not yet be verified. After all, pretty much everything these days is seen through the prism of race, or if not race then gender, or sexual orientation, or some combination of the three.
The very notion of color-blindness as championed by Martin Luther King is now widely regarded by the most prominent anti-racists as naïve and/or unattainable. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character…” said King. However, we currently find ourselves in a social climate in which we are continually being told that the color of one’s skin is of primary importance in all aspects of life.
Some questions: Is the merit of this essay in any way contingent on my race? What is the relationship between my skin color and the soundness of my arguments? Would knowing my race make you more or less likely to agree with my point of view?
To get back to Angelo Quinto: The details of his death are disturbingly familiar. He died after a police officer (or officers) knelt on his neck for nearly five minutes. According to Quinto’s mother, who began shooting video after her son lost consciousness, he pleaded with the officers, “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.”
Quinto, a Navy vet, had reportedly been exhibiting signs of anxiety, depression and paranoia. On December 23, he suffered an especially acute episode which frightened his sister, Isabella. Out of concern for herself and her mother, she called the police. What happened next is unclear.
Isabella told Mother Jones that when officers from the Antioch police force arrived they found Quinto and his mother on the floor. She had him in a bear hug, “as much to comfort him as to restrain him,” according to Isabella. She accuses the officers of pulling Quinto from his mother and taking turns kneeling on his neck. Quinto died on December 26. Two months later we still do not know if the officers were wearing body cameras or had them turned on. While authorities have yet to announce an official cause of death, he obviously died in the same grisly manner as George Floyd.
Nevertheless, there have been no protest marches inspired by the death of Angelo Quinto. There are no public memorials for him. There are no activists raising their fists and shouting, “Say his name.” Black Lives Matter has said not a word about Quinto, who was a Filipino-American. The death of an unarmed man who was not Black caused by police kneeling on his neck does not qualify for a mention on the Black Lives Matter website or in its Twitter feed.
Arguably, I am holding Black Lives Matter to too high a standard. After all, the National Organization for Women does not issue press releases about the plight of men, nor does the Jewish Defense League call out discrimination against Scientologists. Everyone is looking out for themselves, which is just human nature. That said, given Black Lives Matter’s overwhelming reaction to the death of George Floyd, one would think that the Quinto incident would have inspired a meaningful response, or at least an empathetic acknowledgement. But since it hasn’t, I am asking: Why not?
I fear the answer is that the Black Lives Matter movement is suffering from an acute case of tunnel vision by framing the killings of unarmed Blacks by police solely through the prism of race. Here are the facts: About half of the unarmed people killed by police officers in the past year or so were White, while Whites comprise about 60% of the population. About 35% of the unarmed people killed by police officers in the past year were Black, while Blacks comprise about 14% of the population. But that itself does not constitute proof of racially motivated killing by cops.
Writer and podcaster Coleman Hughes is among the prominent Black voices pushing back against the ultra-woke anti-racist worldview. He notes that almost all of those unarmed killed by police in the past year were men, while men comprise about 50% of the population. Does that prove that cops have an anti-male bias?
To reach a clearer and deeper understanding, Hughes writes, “You must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this…and none of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.”
Whether you agree with Hughes’ assessment or not, the fact is that it has been nearly universally accepted that racial bias was a motivating factor, if not the dominant factor, in the killing of Floyd. But there is no conclusive proof of that, any more than there is conclusive proof that racial bias was a motivating factor in Quinto’s death. Simply put, we don’t know.
The common theme in both cases is bad policing that should concern us all. But the next George Floyd turning out to be Asian does not further Black Lives Matter’s preferred narrative. Ironically, according to the anti-racist paradigm that so many Black Lives Matter supporters embrace, the movement’s silence on Quinto could arguably be cited as evidence of unconscious racism toward Asian Americans. That is if you buy into the binary anti-racist worldview which claims there is no such thing as a non-racist and that anyone who isn’t actively anti-racist is a racist, or at the very least harbors racist views.
For the record, I do not believe that Black Lives Matter is anti-Asian any more than I believe that all Whites harbor anti-Black resentment. What I do believe is that Angelo Quinto’s life was every bit as precious as George Floyd’s life and his death was every bit as tragic. Sadly, one would never know that from the media coverage or collective response. And so, it must be said:
Asian lives matter.
Of course, we all have a perspective colored by race and more. All of us, to one degree or another, suffer from tunnel vision. That being the case, the undeniable truth is this:
We share a common humanity and are all in this mess together.