The ‘good cop’ narrative dominates American culture but the truth is there is no such thing

Police kneeling in solidarity implies there isn’t a problem with the system – just ‘a few bad apples’. But officers cling to this myth and use it as an excuse not to engage with deep-rooted racism, writes Holly Baxter

One officer decried his own ‘horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ and kneel (Getty)

A lot of white people in the southern states will tell you that the Confederate flag is misunderstood: that it stands for pride and independence, rather than racism, and that it commemorates their states’ fallen soldiers in the Civil War. But most Americans still understand that there’s a high chance the person who’s flying it is, quite frankly, a racist. Like displaying the flag of St George in England, you can plausibly argue away accusations that it represents white supremacy or anti-immigrant sentiments – but there certainly does seem to be a correlation between the people who choose that flag for their front window and people who think it’s better if the races don’t mix.

In the case of the Confederate flag, it should be very clear: had the Confederate states rather than the Union won the Civil war over 150 years ago, slavery would have continued. To display something with that kind of a history takes either a bold-faced racism or a huge effort of cognitive dissonance. As Dan Rodricks wrote in his “letter to those who raise the Confederate flag” in 2017: “A person who hoists a Confederate flag on his front lawn might not be as angry and as aggressive as the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville. But you never know, and that's a problem.”

The origin of the US police force could explain why it’s so dysfunctional (Getty)

As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests traversed the nation and then exploded internationally, it became clear that the world wouldn’t just have to reckon with acts of physical violence perpetrated against black people every day – the arrests, the murders, the overstuffed prisons, the mass shootings, the racist attacks on the streets – but also the cultural products which allowed that violence to go unchecked.

“White saviour” narratives in Hollywood films is a good example, and a surprisingly pervasive trope. The Help (2011), which began trending on Twitter over the last week, is the only film Viola Davis says she regrets working on, despite winning a supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of black maid Aibileen Clark. In explaining her reasoning for that during an interview, Davis was careful to say that she “had a great experience” on set with colleagues who were “extraordinary human beings”, but that “at the end of the day… it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.”