Straight Outta the USA: Learning to Listen in the Racial Conversation

The recent surfacing of the video of the 2015 arrest in Texas of Sandra Bland, who later was found dead in her cell, allegedly a suicide, re-told a too-often experienced story in U.S. life: that of police violence against African Americans. The video showed a non-violent and cooperative Bland merely trying to film the episode on her phone, refuting the officer’s version which represented her as threatening his life. The video repeats the story told in the Chicago police department dashcam video featuring Officer Jason Van Dyke’s shooting…