Garretson cannot say it has many people of color in town. With regards to race, the vast majority are white, with only a smattering of people of color here and there.
As a relatively quiet small town, Garretson itself has not been directly impacted by the recent national protests and riots sparked by the death of George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who was killed by police while bystanders begged for them to reduce force. However, as a part of the nation, the effects are felt, and many local folks have had to examine their underlying thoughts and assumptions about black people and people of color.
While most Garretson residents will not say they are racist, conversations with local people of color have pointed out that incidences of micro-aggressions and small insults toward their race are high, and that the bar for expectations of behavior is set much higher.
Chef Omar Thornton, co-owner of O So Good, sat down with Pastor Tyler Ramsbey on Wednesday, June 3 for an hour-long conversation posted on the Renovation Church page about the national unrest. On Thursday, June 4, Ramsbey had a conversation with Captain Mike Walsh of the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Department on the Blue Light Podcast. Both interviews in full can be found on their respective Pages on Facebook.
In the enlightening interview, Thornton, who grew up in Oakland, California, and moved to Sioux Falls in 2000, told several stories about his experience as a Black man in this area. One story was about his experiences as a softball and soccer coach, where he pointed out how he noticed differences in reactions toward him versus other coaches.
“Part of where you could see the difference when I was coaching games, and where I would do things similar, if not the same, as the white coaches were doing, but yet the opposite team, or the person viewing it from afar, would see my body language differently for some reason…The tone was different, the looks were different. Even after the game, the non-forgiveness was different.”
What Thornton is describing is far too common, and it is the textbook definition of racism.
Racism is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as, “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” Racism is not only lynchings, or direct insults, or telling someone to move to another part of the bus. It is more insidious than that, and manifests in different reactions, behaviors, and consequences toward minorities.
During the interview, Ramsbey asked Thornton about Black Lives Matter. While Thornton said he may disagree with some of their tactics and does not condone violence in any form, the overall message is important, especially when it comes to underlying racism.
“When they’re saying that Black Lives Matter, they’re not saying that it’s better than any other life. They’re just saying, ‘When you come and you talk to me…don’t look at me as less.’ Because I’m getting emotional, don’t look at me as less. Just because my neighborhood is not as good as your neighborhood, because my neighborhood might have quote-unquote ‘more crime in it,’ doesn’t mean I’m less.”
“So then you get into these points where that voice, that black voice, gets ignored. You get into these points where when you see a black person arguing with a cop versus a white person arguing with a cop, there’s a slight difference over the reaction of it.
“People get mad at the cops all the time. I’ve seen white person after white person get mad because they got a ticket or because they got pulled over and they disagree with the cop. I’ve seen people ‘be disrespectful’ toward a police officer that had nothing to do with what color they were…They have study after study- if they have done the same crime- that the number is so big of a difference, it catches your eye.”
According to The Sentencing Project, a non-profit geared towards promoting a fair and effective U.S. justice system, 1 in 3 black men can expect to be jailed at some point in their lives. Black men are also incarcerated at a rate over 5 times higher than white men. Even though people of color make up 37% of the general population of the United States, they make up 67% of the prison population. While some of this can be attributed to socioeconomics, much of this is because black men are disproportionately targeted. An article in Nature covered these statistics: “About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.”
Thornton will be the first to admit that his record isn’t perfect. In his youth, his father lost his job and subsequently their house, forcing them to live in a motel for a year. When they were able to move out of the motel, it was into apartment housing in a rougher area of town. Thornton subsequently struggled with addiction for many years, which finally came to a head just over four years ago. He was arrested while under the influence of both drugs and alcohol, with a minor in his car.
He credits this experience with changing his life. He is grateful that his interaction with police officers during that arrest was without incident, but he noted that he was, in a sense, lucky. When they were putting the handcuffs on him, he flinched.
“I did flinch once, and I think about that. I flinched once. How many videos have you seen where someone flinches and the cop takes them down?”
A June 22, 2020 story in the Atlanta Black Star highlights a lawsuit being brought by Tyler Griffin, an Atlanta man who reportedly had pulled over after being tailed by an unmarked police car in April 2019 (no lights were flashed, and Griffin had pulled over in the hopes that the car would pass by). Despite Griffin having done nothing wrong, the officers approached him with their service weapons drawn. Griffin’s lawsuit accuses the officers of tackling him and breaking his ankle after he, seemingly by reflex, brushed the officer’s hand off his shoulder. Griffin ultimately underwent surgery to fix the ankle, which he was forced to walk on after being arrested. The officers, in bodycam footage released, are shown laughing at Griffin and accusing him of acting like a “little girl” instead of giving aid.
Thornton noted that he fully accepted what he was charged with and convicted of. However, one of the charges they laid down was ‘uncooperative,’ and Thornton contested that. He said that the cop got upset at him because he was not answering the officer’s questions, a constitutional right.
“Me asking questions, or me disagreeing with the police officer, or me not answering your particular question, is my given right. And it shouldn’t be looked upon as, ‘I’m being uncooperative with you,’” he said. The judge ultimately let the charge go.
Getting back to the concept of the Black Lives Matter movement, Thornton said, “My thing is, I believe in the concept of understanding what it means. That we’re just trying to tell you guys, listen. There’s a difference in how you react to us overall. When I get emotional versus when you get emotional, there’s a difference [in reactions].”
While officers do receive a lot of training, they’re also human, Thornton pointed out. They’re going to make mistakes.
“Just like I’ve made mistakes, just like our military, which are trained, will still make mistakes, these cops are going to make mistakes. They’re human.”
The climate that they’re in every day can get to them, Thornton said. Capt. Walsh, in his interview the next day, concurred.
“What you have to remember is, when I have contact with my fourth person of the day, I might have just come from a bar fight, I might have just come from doing CPR on a baby, I might’ve just come from doing a death notification, I might’ve just come from doing something. That’s not an excuse to treat anybody poorly, what I’m saying is that if I’m going from call to call to call like that you might not get happy, smiley Mike.” The job, and getting their honor called into question, he said, can be very disheartening.
Despite that, Capt. Walsh said he and his force do their best to treat every situation as professionally as they can. He said that, especially in the case of George Floyd, deadly force was not authorized.
While other direct incidences of law enforcement overstepping boundaries were not brought up, Capt. Walsh pointed out that no other citizen protects Americans’ civil liberties more directly than law enforcement officers. Regardless of whether a person “likes” them or not, they’re out there, answering every service call, protecting protesters, and the like.
Thornton agreed. He said he respects and loves the police force, and is behind them 100 percent. He stated that he does his best to treat them with respect, and is intentional about using “Sir.”
However, every black parent has a conversation about law enforcement with their child. Part of that conversation includes the words, “Don’t give them a reason.” The underlying stipulation is, don’t give them a reason to react. Keep hands on the steering wheel, don’t make any sudden moves, make sure every sentence ends in “Sir or Ma’am.”
Most parents of white children never have that conversation, and don’t even have to think about it.
While the expectation is that people must treat law enforcement with respect, people within the Black Lives Matter movement say the respect must be returned.
Negative interactions with law enforcement are higher for people of color. In California, a 2015 bill was passed to help reduce racial profiling incidents. In order to comply with that bill, a study was undertaken from July to December 2018. It found that in traffic stops, African Americans were only 15.07% of all stops, versus 39.78% of Hispanic/Latinos and 33.21% of Whites.
However, potentially negative interactions with law enforcement were substantially higher for people of color. When they were stopped, African Americans experienced a search of their person at a rate of 17.11%, while Whites experienced only 5.96%. In that same study, rates of handcuffing and curbside detention were also substantially higher for African Americans, with 12.12% of blacks being handcuffed versus 5.71% of whites, and 9.74% versus 4.43% experiencing curbside detention.
Other ethnic and racial groups were lower, with Asians experiencing handcuffing only 2.92% of the time, 7.5% for Hispanics, and 9.09% for Native Americans.
Studies for South Dakota are lacking. An Argus Leader story released in October 2019 found that diversity is nearly non-existent within the Sioux Falls Police Department, but rates of traffic stops and interactions are not necessarily released to the public. However, the recent protests in Sioux Falls showed high restraint among the officers involved in incidents at the Empire Mall as rocks were being thrown at them.
When it comes to accusations of law enforcement misconduct, Capt. Walsh said, every complaint is taken seriously. He said body cams have been extremely important with regards to producing evidence when complaints differ from police accounts. If the complaint is such that further action needs to be taken, a full investigation is conducted, sometimes internally, and sometimes given to an outside agency. According to Capt. Walsh, this allows them to have full transparency.
He also talked about the importance of community policing. This encourages officers to walk the sidewalks, interact with people in the community, and to connect. He pointed out his position on the board of the Multi-Cultural Center of Sioux Falls. According to Capt. Walsh, the overwhelming goal of his force is to help people.
Capt. Walsh said that he’s more than interested in working with people who want to be part of the solution. Thornton said the action-takers are most important, as well. He pointed out how 99% of people are at home, living their lives, or working hard toward making improvements in their communities, but that many factors have worked hard, over many years, to keep Black people on a lower tier.
He said to Ramsbey that Malcom X, for example, had many views similar to the values espoused by conservatives in his later years. He encouraged his fellow Black man to quit looking for a handout, and instead to work on giving a hand up. And that’s happening, said Thornton.
“That’s happening in Black neighborhoods constantly,” said Thornton. “They are fighting like heck to make that happen.”
He pointed out similarities to how a large corporation reacts to a smaller, up-and-coming corporation.
“What if O So Good was a corporation in the Black neighborhood, and I was trying to make this corporation bigger? Well, what do you think the other corporations are going to try to do? Shut me down, keep me small. Well, that’s also what is going on here. So now, you have these Black neighborhoods that are like, ‘Hey, we want to develop our own banks.’ Well, what do you think those other banks are going to want to do? Keep you small. Not necessarily because they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, those Blacks over there are doing something, we gotta shut them down.’ They’re not saying that, but what they’re doing is, they’re looking at you as a business.
“Well, there’s that racist economics thing that’s going on, because that’s keeping the exact same thing White Republicans keep saying, ‘Well, you need to do more to help yourselves out.’ Well, we’re trying to, but every time we get a little bit bigger, some other company- unfortunately, that happens to be majority White- is shutting it down. Well, how do you think Blacks are going to look at that? We keep trying, you guys are the ones that keep shutting us down.”
Instances of redlining, which was a practice in the mid-20th century of only giving mortgages to people of color if they were looking to move into certain areas of a city, are well-documented. So, too, is the Tulsa Race Massacre, where in 1921 a very up-and-coming area of Tulsa, Oklahoma known as “Black Wall Street” was set aflame by a white mob. Reconstruction efforts to those affected were denied, and the area never recovered.
Thornton wanted people to see that Black isn’t just a skin color, necessarily, but a culture. And that culture is important. He doesn’t necessarily want people to be “colorblind,” but to recognize the beauty in the different cultures. The whole concept of “colorblind” technically erases that acknowledgement.
Thornton said he’s always extending the offer to talk in person, and that people must listen to each other. Conversation is the most important thing one can do to help reduce divisions and preconceptions. Unfortunately, only a handful of people have taken him up on that offer.
“If I have to scream in order for you to hear me,” that’s what he and other Black people will do, he said. “I tried talking softly.”
