American racism in its most common expression dictates who gets the benefit of the doubt. Thursday night, in Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black boy, mistakenly rang a doorbell on Northeast 115th Street, rather than his intended destination of Northeast 115th Terrace. The resident, whom police have identified as 84-year-old Andrew Lester, a white man, apparently didn’t consider that Yarl may have made a wrong turn or even be a stranger in need of assistance. According to a statement that police say he gave them, Lester, a white man, assumed the teenager was attempting to break in and he fired twice through a glass storm door and struck Yarl in the head and the arm.
American racism in its most common expression dictates who gets the benefit of the doubt.
Ringing a doorbell and waiting for an answer is not a crime. But the police who interviewed Lester the night they say his .32 caliber bullets sent Yarl to the hospital didn’t arrest him. They had to first consider if Lester may have been standing his ground, they said. Only on Monday, four days after the man shot the teenager, Clay County Prosecuting Attorney Zachary Thompson announced Lester has been charged with assault in the first degree and armed criminal action. Lester turned himself in Tuesday.
Racism is not just the assumption that a Black teenager is a threat; it’s the guiding spirit that prompted lawmakers in so many states to replace the “duty to retreat” language in state laws with the right to stand one’s ground no matter where you are. In a country where Black people are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, Black people in and out of legislative chambers warned that encouraging the public to shoot and discouraging them from de-escalating would lead to shootings such as what happened in Kansas City. But those warnings were disregarded.
To be clear, while Black boys and men may be among the most at risk from America’s “shoot first” mentality, we’re not the only ones. It’s been almost 10 years since Theodore Wafer, a suburban Detroit homeowner, used a shotgun to kill Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old Black woman who knocked on his door after she’d had a car accident.
In an eerie facsimile of the Kansas City shooting, on Saturday night in rural New York, Kevin Monahan, a 65-year-old white man, allegedly shot and killed Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old white woman. A car Gillis was in pulled into the wrong driveway, Monahan’s driveway, as a group she was with searched for a friend’s house. Officials say Monahan walked out of his house and fired two shots. One bullet hit the car, a law enforcement official said. Monahan has been booked with second-degree murder.
It’s unclear if the person who shot at the car Gillis was in was able to detect anything in particular about the people in the car before shooting. But, according to the statement that he gave police, we do know that Lester got a good look at Yarl. He professed to have been “scared to death” at the sight of him.
In an eerie facsimile of the Kansas City shooting, on Saturday night in rural New York, Kevin Monahan, a 65-year-old white man, allegedly shot and killed Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old white woman.
Lester blamed his fright on the teenager’s size, he told police. I don’t know how big or small the teenager is, but being big doesn’t make an innocent person less so. And whatever size a Black boy, a Black teen or a Black man is, he often looms larger in the white imagination. Almost nine years ago on the opposite side of Missouri, then-28-year-old Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson — who at about 6 feet, 4 inches was around the same height as 18-year-old Michael Brown — told grand jurors that when he grabbed the heavier teenager, “I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.” In Wilson’s telling, Brown, whom Wilson had already shot at least once, “looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots.” There are times, you see, that we don’t even get the benefit of being seen as human.
People who know Yarl have been quick to tell the world what a great kid he is: that he’s a “gentle soul,” that he’s a talented musician who’s been excelling at college-level courses and that he plans to study chemical engineering. It’s a shame they feel a need to describe his personality, his accomplishments and his ambitions in that way; it would have been just as awful if a Black teen with bad grades, less talent and no real ambition had been shot for ringing Lester’s doorbell.
Yes, the teenager sounds close to perfect, but being perfect is no protection from racism. According to Kansas City authorities, Lester said shooting Yarl “was the last thing he wanted to do.” But, according to police, he also admitted that he exchanged no words with the teenager and that he opened fire soon after he opened his main door. Being perfect doesn’t mean a Black teen who rings the wrong doorbell is perceived as anything less than a threat.