Free Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge Page A

arrested for “possession of paraphernalia” and given a citation for failing to stop at a stop sign. The car was towed, the pipe was confiscated, and Kenneth was dropped off at police headquarters.
    This is how large numbers of black men in the United States are caught in the criminal justice system—with a dragnet. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander explains that 95 percent of “Pipeline” stops yield no illegal drugs. 13 (Operation Pipeline trains uniformed officers to identify indicators of drug-related illegal activity while engaged in traffic-enforcement operations.) This was one of them. But once they’ve stopped you for “something” they’ll settle foranything. In the words of one California Highway Patrol officer quoted in the book, “It’s sheer numbers. . . . You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.” 14
    Kenneth’s pipe made him a prince that night. Though he was killed nine days before he was due in court, one can assume—given that it apparently was his pipe and the likelihood of his affording a good lawyer was probably remote (he’d been assigned a public defender)—that he would have been convicted of “something.” This would have cast him out of the world of “babes” and “angels.”
    To a sympathetic eye, it wouldn’t take much imagination to cast Kenneth as a success story. In a city where 38 percent of black kids did not graduate from high school in 2012, 15 he was, according to his obituary, a graduate of Arsenal Technical High School. 16 In a city where 74 percent of black youth between ages sixteen and nineteen were not working (many, of course, were still in school), 17 Kenneth had a job at U-Haul. But, most significantly, he was loved. “K.J. was like a Son to us all,” wrote one family friend on his online obituary page. “I always enjoyed watching him in church. . . . You always had them dressed so well, and they were so well mannered, and I enjoyed looking into his bright eyes.”
    But had Kenneth’s death been an issue of public concern, all of this would likely have counted for nothing. No media account could or would include the phrase “never been in trouble with the law”; most would be sure to mention his “recent drug-related conviction.” No longer innocent, no longer worthy. On some level it would be framed as though he had it coming.
    As it happens, the handful of stories about the incident said nothing about Kenneth beyond his age and name. The circumstances surrounding his death earned a couple of hundred words; the fact of his death earned scarcely more than a sentence; to his life was devoted nary a word. But had anyone considered it worth denigrating him, they wouldn’t have needed to trawl through his police records. They could just go through his Twitter feed and let him condemn himself. For although dead men tell no tales, many younger ones (including all the teens who died that day) do now have a voice beyond the grave—on social media.
    One should be cautious when drawing conclusions about people’s characters from social media. On Facebook, nobody’s children cry, nobody’s marriage is imperiled, and everybody has beautiful holidays under the bluest of skies. These are performance platforms where we present versions of ourselves that are curated for public consumption.
    Such performances are ripe for misinterpretation. After policeman Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, news organizations initially used a picture of Brown from his Facebook page holding his hands in a manner that some claimed was a gang sign and others said was a peace sign. Within days, hundreds of young African Americans tweeted contrasting pictures of themselves—one in which they could be perceived as threatening and another in which they would be deemed “respectable”—with the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. They wanted to show