Was this was an act of racial violence? Let’s look at what we know.

The Chicago police department identifies the passenger as a “69-year-old Asian man”. There seems to an unhealthy logic in thinking if that if he had refused to give up his seat, the appropriate response was violence. People tweeting “What would you have done?”, as if the only “choice” was unleashing law enforcement upon an elderly person, reveals how the the American moral imagination dwells in what Get Out director Jordan Peele might call our collective “sunken place”.

The same logic is often applied to black men who don’t survive encounters with the police: if he’d obeyed, he’d be alive. This message is meant to instil a fear of disobedience in the living and convince Americans that violence to facilitate commerce should be our first response. The Chicago police department’s statement describes the passenger becoming “irate” when asked to disembark from the flight,then claims that he “fell”, striking an armrest “causing injuries to his face”. That this so brazenly contradicts what we can all see on video speaks to the belief of American law enforcement that the public will obey it, regardless of what we can see with our own eyes.