This is the fifth of a nine-part series exploring conversations I’ve had with my cousin about racism. Ben and I are both white; I’m progressive and he’s conservative. We’re trying to listen to each other with respect, even as we try to change each other’s minds.
Tony Timpa was a white man asphyxiated by police.
In the previous segment of this series, I shared my cousin Ben’s views on racism, and in this post I’ll begin sharing my own views. I’ll start with a personal story.
Earlier, I described Ben’s Facebook post questioning whether George Floyd’s murder was due to racism. Ben thought the incident might have been due simply to gross incompetence on the part of the officers, and he wanted Americans to wait till we had all the evidence before making a judgment.
Needless to say, after he wrote this, a heated conversation ensued in the comments.
One of the commenters wrote:
Let’s just be honest, when is the last time you’ve heard of a cop accidentally killing a white guy because he had his knee in his throat and the guy was pleading for his life???
The question was rhetorical, but another commenter took up the challenge. Siding with Ben, he posted a 2019 article from The Dallas Morning News: “‘You’re gonna kill me!’: Dallas police body cam footage reveals the final minutes of Tony Timpa’s life.”
Here’s one, this commenter wrote. Not an identical situation, but not far from it.
Tony Timpa was an unarmed white man who was asphyxiated at the hands of Dallas police. I had never heard of him. That was this second commenter’s point—police brutality doesn’t only happen to Black people, even though police killings of Black people are the ones that make national news.
(Statistically, there are differences between police brutality towards white and Black people; I’ll talk about that next time.)
When I saw the article about Tony Timpa’s death, I decided to watch the footage. This was a careful decision—whenever a video of a death is made public, I take seriously the decision of whether to watch it. I sat and breathed for a few minutes, paying silent respects to Timpa and sending compassion to his family. Then I turned the video on.
Tony Timpa’s footage helps illustrate the role of racism in George Floyd’s death.
Ben’s friend had shared this article and video to demonstrate the similarity between white and Black people’s deaths at the hands of police, but that was not what I saw. For me, watching this video had the opposite effect. I was immediately struck by the difference between how the officers treated Floyd and Timpa.
I’d seen the silent security footage of Floyd’s arrest, on which we watch from across the street as the officers stand around him, talk to him, and handcuff him. To me, on that silent footage, the police seem casual to the point of indifference. This is a routine call.
When Floyd drops to the pavement in some kind of distress, four officers kneel on him—again, slowly and casually. Now a bystander begins taking a cell phone video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and the audio starts up. The whole time, Floyd is in great distress. He shouts that he can’t breathe. Bystanders grow increasingly alarmed and yell at the officers to check on him. Still, Chauvin and the others are casual. Floyd’s distress is irrelevant to them; the shouting crowd is an irritation.
In a way, to me, the most sickening moment of Floyd’s video comes after he has already asphyxiated. He’s lying unresponsive and handcuffed on the hard pavement and needs to be moved onto a stretcher. For some reason, the stretcher is a couple feet away, and to get him onto it, the officers and paramedics scoot him across the pavement with a roughness that fills me with dismay. They move his body like a sack of potatoes. George Floyd is cargo to them—an object, not a person.
I had seen all that already when I watched Tony Timpa’s video. And Timpa’s video was different from the very beginning.
The scene begins when Timpa is already lying handcuffed on the ground. Several officers are standing around him and talking to him, and we can hear what they’re saying. Timpa is a big, scared white man. He’s on drugs and is having a mental breakdown, shouting that the officers are going to kill him and begging them not to.
The officers talk to him soothingly. They say his name a lot.
“Tony. Tony, look at me, bro. Tony. No, you’re fine. We’re not gonna hurt you, bro.”
“Tony, Tony, Tony.”
“Relax, man. We’re gonna get you some help.”
At one point, Tony lurches as though to stand. The officers quickly roll him onto his stomach and subdue him on the lawn. But even here, as these officers wrestle with giant, white Timpa, they seem gentle with him. They are taking care not to hurt him. They try to calm him down.
Gently, they place Timpa face down in the grass. This is how he will eventually asphyxiate—they will not notice when his face remains pressed too long into the earth. But for now, at first, one officer kneels on his back between his shoulder blades to hold him here. All the while, the officers are practically crooning to him. We see the hand of one officer resting on his shoulder blade, looking for all the world like the comforting hand of a friend.
“You’re gonna be alright, Tony,” says an officer four minutes in. “You’re gonna be alright, buddy, okay? We’re gonna get you some help.”
Timpa calms. Roughly twelve minutes into the tape, he stops shouting and squirming. The officers are still attentive. “Tony, you still with us?” one says. They talk to each other: “I just want to make sure he’s still breathing. His nose is buried in the [grass].”
They examine him closely. He is breathing.
The officers stay in place while they wait for more help. It’s this waiting that will kill Timpa. Just as too much time under similar pressure killed Floyd, these officers will get distracted and wait too long without checking on him.
But the whole process feels so different.
The dehumanization of George Floyd
In August, bodycam footage became available for Floyd’s arrest as well. I hadn’t seen this footage when I formed my impression of the differences between Floyd’s and Timpa’s arrest. When I saw it later, though, it confirmed what I’d felt.
Now we can see and hear all the officers’ interactions with Floyd up close, just as we can with Timpa. And from the outset, Floyd’s arresting officers treat him callously.
Floyd is already begging for their sympathy at the beginning of the footage. “Please, man,” he repeats, like a chant, over and over. He tells them he is scared, that he has anxiety, that he is claustrophobic and terrified of getting in a police car.
When an officer tries to walk Floyd to the sidewalk, Floyd’s knees buckle. “Stand up!” says the officer in an irritated tone. “Come on! We’re trying to get out of the street so you don’t get hit by a car.” There is no sympathy in his voice. He moves Floyd to the sidewalk.
“Take a seat,” he says, placing Floyd against a wall. “Sit down. Sit all the way down.”
Minutes later, as Floyd again collapses outside a police car, an officer says, “Man, you ain’t listening to nothing we’re saying, so we’re not gonna listen to nothing you’re saying.”
The officers forcibly wrestle Floyd into the car. Terrified, he wriggles out the other side and onto the pavement. Soon he is lying pinned under four officers, saying “I can’t breathe” over and over.
Still the officers’ response is impatient. “Relax.” “You’re doing fine, you’re talking fine.”
Not a single officer says George to him. Early on, they did learn his name, but they do not think to use it to calm him down.
Never do we hear the words You’re going to be okay.
When the crowd shouts that officers should check Floyd’s pulse, they do. “I can’t find one,” says one officer.
Nothing changes. They remain kneeling on Floyd. They say nothing more about his pulse. Chauvin remains on his neck.
It wasn’t just the officers—I was biased, too.
A second thing struck me about watching Timpa’s video. It was even more disturbing than the difference in the officers’ treatment of Timpa and Floyd, because it emanated from deep within me.
I had different reactions to Timpa and Floyd.
When I’d first seen Floyd’s video, I’d thought my sympathy for him was boundless. His death had been nauseating to watch. And I had found a special connection to his situation, because when I thought of him, it made me think of my dad.
My dad struggled with depression and alcoholism. There were times when he called me or my sister from parking lots where he was sitting and drinking in his car. Now and then, we were worried enough that we considered calling the police—maybe they could help us find him and keep him from driving drunk. We didn’t call them, but only because we had no faith that they’d be able to figure out where he was, which parking lot he was in.
It never occurred to us that if we did call the police, and they did manage to track Dad down in some parking lot, he might be in danger from them. The fact that that possibility never even entered our minds is white privilege.
After a long, tortuous struggle that lasted decades, Dad eventually achieved sobriety. I am so very proud to write that. He became a successful staff member at a natural history museum. His achievements were lauded in the local newspaper and he won awards for his service. He died at age sixty-seven, of stomach cancer. As he lay dying, he was surrounded by loved ones in a beautiful VA hospice facility. In the last months of his life, he and I had precious time together to heal our complex relationship.
Ever since George Floyd’s death, I had been thinking of that precious time with Dad. Floyd, too, seems to have been struggling, just as Dad was struggling at his age. But Floyd will never have the chance to live out his life and heal. And his young daughter will never get to sit beside him in a hospice room, reading to him and crying with him and hearing him say he is proud of her, and saying goodbye.
I had been thinking about all that a lot since Floyd’s death.
But what struck me, when I watched Tony Timpa die, was that some visceral part of me connected Timpa to Dad on an even deeper level than the connection I’d been feeling with Floyd.
Tony Timpa reminded me of my dad. The two men look nothing alike—Timpa looked to be a head taller than Dad was, and heavier and blonder. And to my knowledge, Dad never had a mental episode quite like Timpa’s.
Nevertheless, when I saw a white man being wrestled over the ground by the cops, and when I saw him lie on the grass breathing his last breaths, some instinctive, lizard-brained part of me identified Timpa as my own kinfolk. My tribe.
Because Timpa was white, he resembled various people in my family more than Floyd did. Timpa, unlike Floyd, looked like someone I might be related to. Because of that, I felt Timpa’s video hit me in an even more personal, deep-down way than Floyd’s had.
When I noticed that reaction within myself, it disturbed me, but I was grateful for noticing it. This, I knew, was my unconscious bias. I had found it, taken its pulse deep down in my bones. And recognizing it as bias was a path towards empathy.
My instinctive bias was something I could do little about. But noticing it was a gateway to a better understanding of the feelings of Black people and their loved ones about George Floyd’s death. Suddenly I could better understand how his death must feel to people who looked more like him, or whose family members looked more like him. I could deepen my empathy.
Sometimes, you just know.
The commenter had posted Timpa’s video on Ben’s Facebook thread to demonstrate that white people, too, are killed at the hands of police. He’d made his point. There’s more to say on that topic, but to me, just as powerful as any stats is the story of how Timpa’s and Floyd’s deaths happened—the feeling of them, and the feeling of watching them.
It’s sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly which actions and injustices stem from unconscious bias. It’s impossible to know, with absolute, empirical certainty, whether the police treated Timpa differently from Floyd because of bias. There are numerous other factors at play, such as the fact that these were officers from different jurisdictions who might have received different training, or the fact that Floyd’s arrest took place in a chaotic, public setting while Timpa’s was in a quiet locale.
Those confounding factors are why statistics are so important. They show us that regardless of exactly when bias occurs, it does sometimes occur.
But it does occur. And sometimes, you just know when it is occurring.
The indifferent smirk on Derek Chauvin’s face was the shrug of a man who didn’t see his victim as fully human. Chauvin saw George Floyd as an object to subdue rather than a person who needed help. From the data, we know that such indifference happens. From the footage of George Floyd’s death, we can witness it happening in plain sight.
We as a country have come a long way in terms of racism. We’ve abolished slavery; we’ve theoretically outlawed segregation and racial discrimination. But despite those accomplishments, Black Americans still face far worse outcomes than white people when it comes to income, wealth, education, health care, and criminal justice. To understand why, it’s crucial to understand unconscious bias and the way it affects our myriad decisions, large and small. Like the decision of whether or not to use a soothing tone with a panicking, handcuffed man. Or decisions about how to treat him once he’s down.
Sometimes, even if bias is present, the outcome is the same. Both Timpa and Floyd died at the hands of police. But sometimes, when bias is present, it makes all the difference in the world. Those differences, across populations, add up to grave injustice.
