Amy Cooper is Logical
Amy Cooper’s behavior in Central Park brings up a swell of emotion. People have mourned that this is a normalized occurrence and they’ve expressed outrage at her fear. In grappling with her actions, some have called her “crazy.” For me, only one word comes to mind: logical.
Using the adjective “crazy” is not just a rhetorical move; it is part of a cultural end-game that creates safety for those who want to put rhetorical and psychological distance between themselves and Amy Cooper. If she is “crazy,” then the events in Central Park are a singular occurrence. If she is “crazy,” then no one else is responsible or implicated. If she is “crazy,” then her actions do not make sense. If she is “crazy,” she is illogical.
Amy Cooper’s behavior is not crazy and calling her “crazy” has undesirable implications for a real investment in justice. First, calling her “crazy” marginalizes those who have disabilities of the mind — for example, cognitive disabilities, mental illness, mood/affective disabilities — by insisting that their lives are disposable because people believe their interior lives are illegible. It erases the very real structural issues they face in getting an education, receiving treatments, having a social life, making a living, and their dignity after death.
Furthermore, calling Amy Cooper “crazy” marshals the language of disability to excuse or make white supremacy outside of the so-called norm. In using that language, Amy Coopers of the world become outliers, and their behavior is dismissed as ordinary. Such language allows people to view them as individual actors, not part the American fabric.
Yet, rhetorical feint obscures the insidious nature of white supremacy: where it is, who perpetuates it, and how it operates based on logic. Yes, logic. Our contemporary national culture was formed in the aftermath of the Western European Enlightenment, a movement that sought to define humanity, not merely as a category but as an experience. Enlightenment thinkers and their intellectual descendants base the idea of the human on the experiences of white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, cis-gendered middle-class men. Anyone existing outside the confines of those categories was not considered valuable unless, of course, if they could be of service to those men and their prosperity. If you want proof that this humanist project produced white people as human and rejected others, see the history of Haiti.
Many people abide by this definition of humanity by simply not questioning it. Others embrace this version of humanity because it allows them access to power. With white womanhood in particular, that power tends to come in the form of protection that can be as mundane as the benefit of the doubt and as spectacular as state sanctioned violence. What we saw in Central Park was a woman who knew how to use her proximity to the power of white supremacy to her advantage. Amy Cooper called on the power of the state to protect her because she knew that the threat of a Black man-white woman violence would bring armed state-sanctioned force to her rescue.
Christian Cooper (no relation), the man accused of being her so-called attacker, told her that if she was not going to leash her dog, as required, in The Ramble that he would respond accordingly, saying, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.” Amy Cooper has responded in the days since the event by saying, “I didn’t know what that meant. When you’re alone in a wooded area, that’s absolutely terrifying, right?”
Amy Cooper’s “right?” tries to enlist onlookers into her fear and justify her actions. If others believe that a Black man whom she had already identified as a bird watcher is terrifying, then prevailing white supremacist logic holds that his recording of her was threatening, and her call to 911 was legitimate.
Here is where calling her crazy gets it wrong.
First, to be able to enlist others in her fear indicates that she is not operating at the individual level, but rather a systemic one. She attempts to mobilize the white supremacist cultural idea that a Black man is an automatic threat to a white woman. This is never more clear to me than when her voice sounds audibly upset, but her facial expression remains calm. Her reach to that specific trope means that she has an intellectual, social, and cultural forebears in Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose false claim that Emmett Till was menacing and sexually crude toward her resulted in his 1955 lynching. In fact, the history of white women terrorizing Black men predates Till by a century. If we think about the institution of slavery, why do Amy and Christian share the same last name?
Second, Amy Cooper’s accusation draws on widely held white supremacist logic and implicates others who were expected to come to her rescue and those who have. She assumed that the NYPD officers who responded would have disposed of Christian Cooper as a threat. This is not a baseless assumption; past events indicate that would have been done swiftly and violently.
Her accusation also implicates those who defend her. Some have called the backlash disproportionate including Christian Cooper himself. According to them, the social media response, being fired, and the repossession of her dog is supposedly too much. But, what does justice look like here? Should someone who so cavalierly endangers human, avian, and canine life be trusted with life? That may be why Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel Rescue took the dog. (She got the dog back.) Should someone who cannot be trusted to obey rules of public space be entrusted with others’ finances? That may be why she lost her job at Franklin Templeton. Should someone who assumes public servants as her own personal bodyguards be afforded the protection of those services? That may be why she’s afraid to go out in public. Those rushing to her defense ignore that the consequences of her actions speak directly to what the actions themselves. There is an adage about reaping and sowing that comes to mind.
Third (but not finally), there are many Amy Coopers. That is, her behavior is not singular in the way that “crazy” would suggest. These are not limited to the white women who call the police on children selling lemonade, children mowing lawns, Black people at barbeques, college students sleeping in dorms, and the list goes on. These are the people who routinely mobilize racist narratives for their specific personalized gain with no regard for how their lie puts someone else in mortal danger. This Amy Cooper got caught. What about the countless others who haven’t?
White supremacy would allow for Amy Cooper to be an innocent woman who simply overreacted. The fact is that she is not. She knowingly and logically used the narratives and ideas that provoke state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies. She’s not crazy.
