Journalist and activist Shaun King told several hundred Macalester College students on Wednesday that Philando Castile’s fatal shooting by a St. Anthony police officer last summer was the product of an American criminal justice system that is biased against people of color.
“The system is not broken,” he said. “It’s functioning exactly like it was designed to function. This was not an accident; this was deliberate.”
“What Philando was caught up in was this” rigged system, he added. Officer Jeronimo Janez was charged in November with manslaughter in Castile’s death.
King, who reports on justice for the New York Daily News, is a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and much of his work deals with tracking deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police.
The event at Macalester was restricted to students and faculty after RSVPs on Facebook exceeded the 500-seat capacity of the ballroom in Kagin Commons. King organized a second talk later at a high school in North Minneapolis that was open to the public.
In St. Paul, he spoke for about an hour at Macalester before opening up the room to a tense question-and-answer period.
Several African-American students expressed disappointment with some aspects of King’s speech, including his use of videos that showed black children being tackled and thrown to the ground by police. The students questioned the need for such videos, adding that while they may help make his point to white audiences, they are all too familiar and traumatizing for African-Americans.
“Who is this for?” one asked. “I don’t need to see black bodies thrown around.”
King said he gives a different speech to all-black audiences than he does to mixed-race audiences because each group brings a different set of experiences to the events, but he acknowledged that the videos were upsetting.
“The burden of fixing racism is almost totally put on the people who experience it,” he said, adding that white people need to be brought into the conversation.
Much of King’s speech dealt with how the current racial climate in the U.S. fits into the larger arc of history, arguing that while people tend to believe that humanity is steadily improving over time, progress actually comes in fits and starts.
King illustrated his point with a slide of a line graph representing human progress as a series of peaks and valleys.
“We’re in what I would call a dip,” King said of recent American history. “The good news is that if we look at the dips throughout history, we’ve always found our way out of them.”