I remember what happened to Derrick Jones.
But I didn’t remember his name. I only remembered the incident.
I had to Google him.
Derrick Jones was a barber in Oakland, California. He was a black man. And he was also unarmed when he was shot to death by two Oakland police officers. The officers who ended up killing him confronted him right by his very own barber shop. The two officers offered up a story about why they used deadly force, including the claim that they “thought he had a weapon”, and the two officers who shot him down were cleared of any wrongdoing in a lawsuit brought about by Jones’ family. There were some protests about his killing in Oakland, but his murder never really made waves outside of the Bay Area, at least as far as I remember.
With the world blowing up over the death of George Floyd, not just the rampant protesting in the US but protests and tributes all over the world, how is it that Mister Jones’ killing went by relatively unnoticed? His killing took place nearly ten years ago, but he was also shot down the same year Oscar Grant was killed, a killing that was so controversial and explosive that they made a movie about his life leading up to his murder.
Derrick Jones’ name doesn’t ring out like so many other black people who met the same fate. His killing wasn’t videotaped, no one made a movie about it, he wasn’t killed by an overzealous vigilante, and his death wasn’t at a time, a place, or a circumstance to make his murder a media storm.
But there’s also another very basic reason why his name doesn’t ring out like Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner, or Michael Brown: It’s because things like that happen all of the time.
Racist policing doesn’t always go into the spotlight when a black person is unjustly killed. It also frequently doesn’t involve murder: Police hassling black people who aren’t doing anything wrong or illegal, black people being followed around all of the time when they go shopping, black people getting arrested on trumped up or false charges, and black people getting longer sentences and harsher punishments for crimes compared to others found guilty of the same crime.
I’m no stranger to being hassled by the police. True, I was harassed by police officers far more often when I was younger. (Youth is also a police trigger, though not to the extent of dark skin.) I’ve been harassed by cops for no good reason, I was roughed up by cops when I was stopped on the street, (When I was a teenager,) I’ve been followed around stores as if I was going to steal something, (Which still happens to me a lot,) and the only time in my life I’ve ever had a loaded gun pointed at me is when a San Francisco police officer jumped out of his car and pointed a gun right in my face. (I was trying to jimmy open my car door because I had locked my keys inside. Instead of asking me if it was my car he jumped out and shoved a gun in my face.)
But if my skin was dark instead of light I would be followed more, I’d be hassled more often, I would be stared down and side-eyed much more often, and when a police officer pulled out his gun on me, he might have pulled the trigger if I was black instead of white. My white skin may very well have saved my life, the night that San Francisco police officer shoved his gun into my face.
Are people upset because George Floyd was brutally murdered by the police? Of course. But it’s about more than George Floyd. As tragic as his ending was, everyone is finally crying out, when? When will it stop? When will they finally stop the modern day lynchings and stop killing people simply because of the color of their skin? When is the deadly racism that permeates all corners of the United States going to finally, once and for all, finally stop? Will it ever stop?
Most people reading this have never heard of Derrick Jones, or maybe they knew his name once and forgot about him, or maybe they remember hearing about the barber who was shot and killed by his shop years ago, but didn’t remember his name, like I didn’t remember his name.
Because it happens all of the time. So much so that you can’t possibly remember all of them. The list is just too long.
Derrick Jones
https://oaklandnorth.net/2010/11/09/east-oakland-barbershop-owner-shot-to-death-by-opd-officers/
Thank you for sharing the story of Derrick Jones’ untimely death due to the horrors of systemic racism. It is such a sad story and I hope that as a society we can all say we have finally had enough of the hate and injustice. We need to learn to be anti-racist. Sharing stories like this is important.