Kohen Wiley

:Overzealous Law Enforcement, Harrowing Racial Narratives and the Ongoing Disregard for Black Lives!

Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old child from Mississippi, is dead because of a dispute about diapers. Let that sink in for a moment. Again, a child who was only a year old is no in essence, executed due to a dispute over a box of diapers! His mother had held the child up in the direction of the police officers who fatally shot him to ensure that they could see him. She wanted them to show grace and deference to this newly arrived human life that was so innocent and vulnerable. Her efforts were in vain. The trigger-happy police officers fired anyway and one of them shot the young child in the ribcage while he was still in his mother’ s arms. The offcier’s name has yet to be released.

The murder occurred on Sunday, June 14, after police in Senatobia responded to a reported shoplifting at Walmart. According to the authorities, police officers tried to block a vehicle connected to the call. They claimed the driver moved toward them, and then one officer fired into the car. Kohen was pronounced dead at a hospital, and another adult driving the car was critically injured.

This lack of humanity in regard to a Black infant is shocking yet routine. The usual suspects, racially motivated people who hate Black and other non-White children because of their own sadistic value systems, have wasted no time saturating social media with perverse justifications for comparing the child’s life with a box of diapers. Social media users have contested the official version of events. Some bloggers claim that Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, had a receipt and was not shoplifting. Understandably, Kohen’s family and friends are demanding that Walmart release its surveillance footage and that police provide body camera footage.

Their skepticism is well founded. Too often, police narratives about Black people are viewed as authentic without evidence. The United States has a long and sinister history of official misconduct, from false testimonies to suppressed or forged evidence to coercion, which has upended and decimated Black Americans’ lives and livelihoods. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Ms. Wiley had stolen one, two or 100 boxes of diapers, as well as bottles of milk and baby food and other items, police officers had no right to shoot multiple bullets into her vehicle with the full knowledge that there was a child inside. Clearly, therefore, this was an act of sadistic violence.

The killing of Black children is nothing new in the United States. Black infants and toddlers have been shot out of their mothers’ arms, fed to alligators and other animals, murdered by White supremacists, used as target practice during race riots, killed while sitting in their parents’ laps, and shot during police raids while sleeping in their homes. Many were not even given the opportunity to be born because their mothers were lynched or physically assaulted and murdered by police.

Ever since Black people first stepped foot on the country’s shores, their lives and bodies have been routinely scrutinized, objectified, sexualized, and racialized. Black people, whether children or adult, have never been seen as fully human but as largely primitive and invisible creatures who are to be denied any degree of humane acknowledgment from mainstream society. Kohen Wiley is another addition to this gruesome historical list.

Black people never appear to be granted the “benefit of the doubt” that so many privileged Whites are in police confrontations. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that any other racial group in America has to expend so much intense energy navigating its interactions with law enforcement in an effort to prevent deadly encounters or loss of life. It is disgraceful that the presumption of “guilty until proven innocent” that many police officers hold with regard to Black Americans does not conform to the notion of equal justice or “color blindness” in law.

Would the average White person be the victim in a random act of violence committed by police officers? Absolutely not. If White people were routinely and randomly subjected to police violence, including being gunned down in the street, at the rate that Black — and increasingly Latino/a people — are, there would be calls for congressional demonstrations and cries of protests so loud that a politician or police officer who ignored it would be committing political or career suicide. When will this become a reality for people of color?

The death of Black people at the hands of law enforcement has become so commonplace that many Black people are simultaneously outraged and psychologically numbed. Over the past few years, Black people have been front-row spectators of grainy, and, in some cases, graphic footage of police officers engaged in horrifically violent behavior toward people of African descent. White denial, resistance, and other factors notwithstanding, Black people are human beings and deserve to be treated with as respect and dignity as any other group of people. PERIOD!

Elwood Watson Ph.D. is a professor of History, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is a cultural critic, syndicated columnist, and author of the books,: Talkin’ To You, Bro!: Liberate Yourself from the Confusing, Ambiguous Messages of Contemporary Masculinity (Lasting Impact Press, 2021) and Keepin’ It Real: Essays on Race in Contemporary America. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/K/bo40060337.html (University of Chicago Press 2019)