An Open Letter To Chris Rock

In this interview, Chris Rock said he wanted to know how white people view the events in Ferguson.

Dear Chris Rock,

You’re right, we do need to own not only our actions but our ancestors’ as well. This country was built, in large part, on the backs of people who were neither given credit nor received any kind of compensation. We all benefit from those people’s work.

First of all, I’d like to see our criminal justice system revamped so we aren’t putting so many people of color in jails and prisons. If we could spend a tenth of what we spend incarcerating people on helping them (and we should spend more than that, our country would be a far better place.

Now, I am not a spokesperson for white people but I’ll tell you what I thought about Ferguson. I was horrified by what I saw. Truthfully, I was never entirely sure what happened between Michael Brown and Darrell Wilson. It didn’t look good (for the officer) and at first I assumed it had to be a racist cop shooting a black guy (that’s still what it was) but then I thought, really what happened between them is such a small tip in a larger iceberg that it ALMOST didn’t matter. What mattered was how EVERY.SINGLE.THING. the police force did once Brown was dead was wrong. They left him in the street, for what, five hours? If that happened to a white kid on Long Island where I grew up, the shit would have hit the fan.

But you know, I lived in NYC under “America’s Mayor” Giuliani. Police brutality was up by like 30 percent. A man named Amadou Diallo was shot 42 times when he went to get his wallet out. He was unarmed. Abner Louima was sodomized in police custody. A grandmother’s door was busted down in the Bronx (she was bathing her mentally disabled grandchild). The cops got the address wrong, they went to 215 instead of 512 or something and the mayor’s response? “If you want to make an omelette you need to break some eggs. WTF? I was more scared of the police than the criminals.

Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown, Eric Garner. I went to look for the name of the kid killed in St. Louis when he had a toy gun and I found a story from around the same time of a kid killed for holding a sandwich. Killed for holding a fucking sandwich. And then there’s a recent case in Baltimore. And these are the cases we know about. I hear Jacksonville, FL has a huge issue with cops killing black men and boys but the media hasn’t been there.

So you wonder how white people feel about racism. I think it is an endemic disease that has yet to be studied. I like your analogy — isolate it, bring it to a lab and study it. Like Ebola, it is deadly. Unlike Ebola, no one wants to acknowledge it (though we were slow at caring about Ebola, I suspect because it was killing brown people in Africa, the minute it threatened a white person from the U.S.WE WERE ALL OVER IT. THE OUTBREAK WAS LIKE EIGHT MONTHS OLD).

I write satire and I wrote this piece. A lot of people were mad because they said I was wrong. Sometimes, you can say more truth in a lie than in a truth. The truth is I think black lives matter. The sad reality is that our system does not.

Wow. That was longer than I expected it to be. Here’s my satire piece for those who missed it.

By: Alyson Chadwick

Alyson Chadwick is a political/news junkie and New Yorker transplanted to Washington, DC and currently working in Florida. Her career has included work on five presidential cycles, both sides of Capitol Hill, the 2012 Democratic Convention, Clinton White House, United Nations and multiple local and statewide campaigns. She is also a sad Met fan, which could be the most redundant sentence ever.