White Tears Won Again - SARN Minis #3

Hello friends, one of the things that’s been on my mind is the sentence Kim Potter got for killing Daunte Wright. I share my thoughts in this episode. Have a listen, or read the transcript.

Podcast audio is temporarily broken after my move to beehiiv (because of this issue). Please bear with me as I get it up and running again. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode transcript.

White Tears Won Again - SARN Minis #3 Transcript

Hi, and welcome to Sharon's Anti-Racism Newsletter, the mini podcast. These are short takes on issues around racism.

And today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the case of Kim Potter and the absolutely ludicrous sentence she received after killing Daunte Wright.

Now, in some ways; this was not a surprise, this often happens. And in a sense, I guess it was a surprise that the case made it to trial at all.

But the point was that there's a recommended minimum sentence for this kind of crime. And she has received so far under that minimum that it might as well be a slap on the wrist. The judge was sympathetic to her. The tears worked. And another young Black boy has been killed without meaningful consequences.

And so I keep asking myself, what needs to change? How can we solve this? And I'm not even sure that I have the answer. But it happens so many times that there's a big disparity in the way that crimes or are punished in the US justice system, so called, or as Michelle MiJung Kim calls it in The Wake Up, the "criminal punishment system". Because that punishment is more harshly applied to Black people than it is to white people. And there's really not very much doubt about that.

So, if you can imagine for a second having the tables turned and consider what would have happened if a Black person had supposedly mistaken the bright yellow taser for the black gun, and so called accidentally shot a white woman.

I mean, you probably don't even have to imagine, because you know what happens in those cases. What happens in those cases is that the Black perpetrator gets the book thrown at them. They don't get any grace. They don't get any credence given to their tears, to their expressions of sorrow. And they end up in jail for a long, long time. In fact, as we know, Black people can end up in jail for a long, long time, even when they haven't committed the crime. Because the criminal punishment system is biased against them to the extent that they are often thought to be criminals, to have done something wrong, even when they have not.

But it remains puzzling to me and deeply upsetting that white people are allowed to get away with killing Back people in America with seeming impunity. It's why we are so upset. Anytime we hear of another incident - and there is always another incident - it's why it hurts us. All of us from the Black diaspora have relatives and friends in the US. We know people in our families that it could happen to. And so we feel it, we feel it. We feel the pain, we feel the distress, and we feel the anger and the upset that it has happened again, and that it continues to happen.

I don't even know what it's possible for us to do about it. But I do know that something has to change. It is one of the urgent issues that has to be fixed as we work together to fight racism. If you have any thoughts on what to do next, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, I can recommend an article by Catherine Pugh Esq and I'll drop a link to that in the show notes (see below). This is about forcing police to have accountability for their actions. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time. Bye.

• We Can’t Fix Policing Because We Have Been Looking the WRONG WAY for Decades by Catherine Pugh, Esq.

© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2022. All Rights Reserved.

I am an anti-racism writer, a professional B2B writer and blogger, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.