The Sandra Bland Video Tells Us More Than What Happened

Once I saw Sandra Bland’s smiling face in the news reports, I didn’t want to watch the video of her arrest. It was going to be a level of wrongdoing and injustice that would be intolerable to watch, burn my eyes.

What had to have happened between her joyful look in the photographs probably supplied by her loving family and the reports of her alleged suicide in jail would be outrageous, assault everything I keep wanting to think is true about America. We are mostly good and fair. Do I still believe this? I don’t know.

What I believe but can’t fully face is this: it’s so much worse than we think it is.

We only really get what has been going on, what we have been told has been going on forever, because now there is video. Before, when we heard the stories, we might have thought the descriptions…