By Winford K. Rice Jr.

The damnable killing of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old black male shot by Officer Roy Oliver of the Balch Springs Police Department after leaving a party April 29, reintroduces age-old discourses about the politicization of black deaths.

Jordan Edwards was an honor student with a 3.5 GPA, he was an exceptional athlete, he was a “good” kid, reared in a two parent household, and he was unarmed at the time of his murder.

These facts are not undermined by the fact that he was black. They actually confound the fallacious, parochial narrative that to be an exception is to be exempt from such travesties. This reality is a farce.

At the epicenter of national dialogue about Edwards’ death is the notion of respectability politics — the idea that if one comports himself in such a way that appeases and assimilates to whiteness, that he will be absolved from the grotesque realities that perennially victimize black people.

Race and class, then, function as social signifiers, which are emblematic of a broader cultural milieu that venerates respectable lives over others. Had Jordan Edwards not been an academic or athletic standout, his death still would not have been justifiable.

To assert such claims is to perpetuate insidious narratives of exceptionalism. Utilizing this logic to legitimize police misconduct is fundamentally flawed.

A person’s background does not grant him immunity from micro–aggressions and state-sanctioned violence. Social performance is not the grounds upon which black women and men are killed by policing institutions; their blackness is.

Regardless of one’s social location amongst racialized hierarchies, he cannot escape being black. Blackness has been historically equated with criminality and today is considered inherently suspicious.

This has been demonstrated in the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice.

Countless media outlets incriminated Trayvon, Michael and Tamir — all of whom were children — for their own deaths. Their humanity was demonized prior to the start of any legal proceedings. What is worse is that their blackness was put on trial as the cause for their deaths, not the officer’s embedded biases.

America has a tendency to vilify black people to the degree that police mistreatment is scarcely questioned. This has been a recurring trope throughout the politicization of black deaths.

A common mischaracterization, however, about black deaths and policing personnel is that it is merely reducible to a male gaze. Black women suffer equally at the hands of police brutality.

Thus, it is necessary to disrupt heterosexist and hetero-patriarchal conceptions that sensationalize the death of black men, while ignoring the plight of black women.

The normative ideal that black men are primary targets of law enforcement activity more so than black women is problematic and must be dispelled. It re-inscribes ahistorical depictions that black men have always been subject to police violence, and not black women.

The death of Jordan Edwards requires us to re-think how black deaths are politicized. Furthermore, it suggests that black people cannot evade the ills of white supremacy.

To itemize one’s death with social markers and discredit one’s blackness — labeling them as respectable citizens — is reprehensible.

Winford K. Rice Jr. is a native of Suffolk and a Master of Divinity student at Harvard University.