The Haunting.

A Moment of Clarity.

words. 

"There is an irony at the heart of these incidents, one that is difficult to notice beneath the din of decibels with which we discuss race, crime, and fear in this country. African-Americans are both the primary victims of violent crime in this country and the primary victims of the fear of that crime. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing, defenders of George Zimmerman pointed defiantly to statistics showing that African-Americans committed a disproportionate share of violent crimes—damning stats, wielded like a collective bad report card, that no black person in this country is ever in danger of forgetting, if only for the sake of his or her own safety. But those numbers are mute on matters of actual human experience; they have nothing to say about the blink of time in which a petite grieving mother registers as a threat, or an inebriated nineteen-year-old motorist intimidates a fifty-four-year-old man who has a shotgun. There is almost a sense that McBride’s death is not news; it’s a case study—a cliché with a casualty.

It is entirely reasonable to be alarmed by an unexpected knock in the middle of the night, and it’s not difficult to imagine someone nervously answering the door with a weapon nearby. But the Rorschach moment is what happens next: is it possible to look through a cracked-open door and register Moore or Ferrell or McBride as something other than an amalgam of suspicions?"

THE NEW YORKER: THE KILLING OF RENISHA MCBRIDE