Complex issues tend to annoy and bore people. So they come up with easy, schematic, comfortable narratives and try to massage reality into these simple and accessible patterns. Any aspect of reality that can’t be fit into the easy scheme is excised and ignored.
Look what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow it morphed into the easy narrative of opposition to police brutality. Of course, in order to make it a story of police brutality, we need to dismiss Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride. They don’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck them, I guess.
The narrative of police brutality needs further sacrifices. The horrible living conditions in East St Louis, West Baltimore, etc are being excised from the story. When I write about the horrifying death toll in St Louis, everybody is bored and downvotes the story. Effective segregation doesn’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck it, too. All of the people who donated money to the killer of Michael Brown are similarly neatly deleted from the narrative because they don’t fit. Dylann Roof doesn’t fit in either, and neither do those who believe the same things he does.
The narrative of police brutality is very convenient because it’s all about a limited number of “bad apples” whom we can all joyfully despise without ever needing to do anything. A story of a deeply racist society becomes substituted with the narrative of a few flawed individuals. This is akin to treating a pimple on the nose of a man who has AIDS. Sure enough, the pimple is probably a symptom of Kaposi sarcoma but it can’t be cured without addressing the underlying condition.
I’m a foreigner, so I don’t need to play the weird games around racial relations that people around here so love. Yesterday on the news I saw a bunch of comfortable white folks eagerly massage the story of Sandra Bland, a depressed, unstable woman devastated by a recent loss of her baby, into the convenient narrative of police brutality that lets them off the hook.
These regular oohings and aahings about evil police are a comfortable, easy way of letting off steam and never really change anything. “It’s them, not me, they are the evil racist ones, and I’m all good, warm, and fuzzy.” Of course, everything stays exactly the same but that’s the whole purpose of the narrative.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t understand what you are trying to say about Sandra Bland. That the officer was right in stopping her? That he was right to order her out of the car and arrest her? What is your point?
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First of all, I’m not “trying to say.” Vagueness is not my thing, and anybody who reads my blog knows it.
Of course, he was right in stopping her. The only time I was stopped by police on the road was for an identical reason. Failure to signal a lane change is a very very serious infraction, and an officer who doesn’t stop a driver doing it is extremely remiss in his duties.
The officer was also right in not letting her proceed on the road once he saw that she was in a bad emotional state. There are other drivers on the road, they deserve not to have people in an agitated state sharing the road with them. Actually, the driving rules do specify that people should not get on the road when they are in a highly emotional state. And I hope that any police officer who sees a driver in Bland’s state will prevent them from going on until they recover.
I hope Bland’s death gets investigated and we discover what really happened. However, I was hoping that we’d abstain from rehashing the details of a single story and turn to something bigger for once.
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If a lady can be drugged and raped, she can also be calmed straight to her hanging. This lady was in jail long enough to eat from the hands of those cowards that also cuffed her and rocked her. You think they would hang her with evidence of a fight, black eye and blood marks? Creeps, that’s what they be.
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