From left: A protester’s sign
depicting Sandra Bland at a
rally against police violence in
New York City, 2015; Bernard
Madoff in London, 2003;
British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler,
1938; Amanda Knox in
criminal court in Italy, 2007;
Jennifer Aniston as Rachel in
the pilot of Friends, 1994.way we were trying to make sense of it was
inadequate to the task.
OW: We also seem to be greatly moved by
these incidents—but then we quickly put
them behind us and forget.
MG: Exactly. I really dislike that when
these shootings occur, there’s a big fuss
with people oversimplifying, pointing
fingers and saying “It happened because
he’s a bad cop, a racist.” I thought that since
it occurs as often as it does, maybe there’s
something deeper going on.
OW: Other than racism?
MG: In addition to. You can’t separate
race from police shooting cases, but you
also can’t say that’s the whole story.
There’s something out of whack with the
way we’ve structured relationships—not
just between police officers and civilians,
but between strangers of all kinds.
OW: And you wanted to take a step back
and say, “Wait a minute.”
MG: I wondered: Is there something
fundamentally off with how we assess
people different from ourselves? Are
we bringing the wrong strategies to
that problem?
OW: You write: “If we were more
thoughtful as a society—if we were willing
to engage in some soul-searching about
how we approach and make sense of
strangers—she [Sandra Bland] would not
have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.”
Bland’s a central figure here—she begins
and ends the book. Tell me why.
MG: Yes, she’s the frame. Something abouther case just stayed with me, and still does.
OW: And her death happened around the
same time as the deaths of Michael Brown,
Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Eric
Garner, Walter Scott—all black men who
died at the hands of the police between
2014 and 2016.
MG: Yes, and Sandra Bland in 2015. She’s
this very politically aware person who had
some difficulties in Chicago, but is about
to start her life over after getting a new
job in a lovely college town in a different
state. She’s leaving the campus to buy
groceries when a police officer sees her
and makes a judgment—that there’s
something funny about her. So he trumps
up an excuse to pull her over.
OW: He starts out friendly, but when she
lights a cigarette, he asks her to put it out,
and then things go awry.
MG: She says, legitimately, “Why do I haveto put out my cigarette?” And by the way,
she hadn’t done anything to warrant getting
stopped. She simply made a right-hand turn
out of the campus, and the officer thought
there was something about her, and he
pulled out and drove up really fast behind
her. So she got out of the way, of course.
OW: She did the thing we’re told to do,
which is to move over to the side.
MG: But she didn’t use her blinker. When
he tells her she’s been stopped for that
reason, she tells him she was getting out
of his way and lights a cigarette, and after
that everything goes sideways.
OW: And this is all caught on camera—
he tries to drag her out of the car,
handcuffs her.
MG: And puts her in jail, where she kills
herself three days later.
OW: We hear stories like hers. They affect
us. But then people just move on. You wrote102 SEPTEMBER^2019 OPRAHMAG.COM
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