Violence toward Black people at the hands of law enforcement has become so commonplace and routine many of us have become simultaneously outraged and psychologically numb.

Over the last few decades, from Rodney King to Sandra Bland to Breonna Taylor to George Floyd to Atatiana Jefferson to Tyre Nichols, we have become front-row spectators to often graphic footage of police officers engaged in horrific levels of violent behavior toward people of African descent.

We can now add William McNeil Jr., to the growing list of victims. While he fortunately did not lose his life, the Black college student, shown on video being punched and dragged out of his car by Florida law enforcement officers during a traffic stop, faces a long road to recovery from the physical and emotional trauma he encountered.

McNeil is a biology major who played in the marching band at Livingstone College, a historically Black Christian college in Salisbury, North Carolina. According to his attorneys, McNeil endured a concussion, a punctured lip, the loss of one tooth, and other injuries.

Video of the incident shows McNeil sitting in the driver’s seat and requesting to speak to the officers’ supervisor. The officers then break McNeil’s window, punch him in the face, pull him out of the vehicle, punch him again, and throw him to the ground before proceeding to deliver six closed-fist punches to the hamstring of his right thigh.

During a news conference in Jacksonville, the 22-year-old student briefly and quietly commented on his encounter as his family and civil rights attorneys stood by his side. “That day I just really wanted to know why I was getting pulled over and why I needed to step out of the car,” he said. “I knew I didn’t do anything wrong. I was really just scared.”

Predictably, many on the right rushed to the police officers’ defense. At a July 23 meeting with the press, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis defended the officers and insinuated the video was posted to advance a “narrative” and attract attention on social media. “That’s what happens in so many of these things,” DeSantis said. “There’s a rush to judgment. There’s a desire to try to get views and clicks by creating division.”

At the time of commenting on the fracas, DeSantis admitted he had not reviewed the viral video of the police encounter. Perhaps the governor was clairvoyant.

An added wrinkle to this incident is it involves a Black police chief who has steadfastly supported his rogue officers. T. K. Waters, chief of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, presides over a police department that has routinely come under fire for its hostile treatment of Black citizens. Interestingly, though hardly surprisingly, Waters’ stance has provided many white conservatives the green light to jump on the “I’m not a racist because the Black police chief agrees with me” bandwagon. Well, guess what: Black people, including Black cops, can be racist against Black people. In fact, individuals of every race can harbor racism toward one another. Intra-racial prejudice and nativism exist.

Black law enforcement has had a particularly adversarial relationship with Black communities — in particular, lower income and working-class Black communities. In his iconic and critically acclaimed 1991 film “Boyz n the Hood,” late director John Singleton closely depicts what he sees as the deep level of animus Black law enforcement displayed toward their fellow Black brethren. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Crime and Punishment in Black America,” James Forman Jr., the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, details how Black police officers are just as inclined to harbor anti-Black bias as white officers.

Forman is not alone. In one of his numerous essays, mid-20th century intellectual extraordinaire James Baldwin echoes similar sentiments: “‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God’s sake, make sure it’s a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder  —  on your head  —  to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n–.”

Since stepping foot on America’s shores, Black lives and bodies have been routinely scrutinized, objectified, sexualized, and racialized. All too often, we have been seen as primitive men and women invisible and deprived of any degree of humane acknowledgment from mainstream society.

White supremacy is complex and endemic. Regrettably, particularly in our current era of heightened bigotry and xenophobia, such reductive and repressive attitudes and antics are bound to continue.

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Copyright 2025 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.