Cobb writes: "There is an irony at the heart of these incidents, one that is difficult to notice beneath the din of decibels with which we discuss race, crime, and fear in this country. African-Americans are both the primary victims of violent crime in this country and the primary victims of the fear of that crime."
Siwatu-Salama Ra, 22, of Detroit speaks to the crowd during a rally to protest the shooting death of Renisha McBride at the Dearborn Heights Justice Center. (photo: Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press)
The Killing of Renisha McBride
18 November 13
mid the commemorations of the first anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, rich with progress reports on repair and rebuilding, there was an overlooked moment—one for which ribbon cuttings and indexes of municipal development are no salve. On October 29, 2012, as the storm ravaged New York’s coastal areas, Glenda Moore struggled to free her two young sons, aged four and two, from her flooded car, only to see them swept from her grasp and drowned. When Moore, a five-three African-American, sought help from nearby residents, they turned her away.
Two weeks ago—a year and four days after Moore’s children died—Renisha McBride, a nineteen-year-old African-American woman, was involved in a car accident in a Detroit suburb at around 1 A.M. In the hazy series of events that followed, McBride, who was intoxicated, knocked at the door of Theodore Wafer, a white homeowner who fired a shotgun through his screen door and killed her. It had been less than two months since Jonathan Ferrell, a twenty-four-year-old African-American, was killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina, after crashing his car into an embankment and knocking on the door of a nearby home, whose owner called 911 to report a robbery in progress.
On Friday, the Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, announced that Wafer would be charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Worthy discounted the role of race in the events of that night in Dearborn Heights—her decision to bring charges, she said, had “nothing to do whatsoever with the race of the parties.” But for McBride’s family and many observers in Detroit and beyond, there is a lineage of suspicion that binds the disparate events listed above.
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