Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – As if there were not enough heartbreak in the case of an Indian graduate student who was tragically killed by a speeding police car in Seattle last January, now body cam footage released this week shows an officer laughing at her death, saying that her life had “limited value” and that the city could “just write a check.”
Caste is the arbitrary assigning of value and of roles to people in a ranked hierarchy and the diminishment of those assigned beneath the dominant group. We know the groups that fall into the least valued categories in our society, based on what they look like or are assumed to be. And nothing could be starker than this literal computation over the loss of Jaahnavi Kandula’s life.
The officer’s side of a conversation with a police union leader was caught accidentally and surfaced this week after a department employee heard it and sent it up the chain of command. The case is under investigation.
The officer describes the horrific circumstances when a police car going 74 miles an hour struck her at a pedestrian crosswalk and killed her. He makes light of it, saying she wasn’t hurled as far some were reporting. “But she is dead,” the officer tells the union leader. He laughs and says, “No, it’s a regular person.” Then he says, “Yeah, just write a check,” and laughs again. “Eleven thousand dollars. She was 26 anyway,” the officer says, though she was actually 23. “She had limited value.”
Kandula was scheduled to receive a master’s degree in information systems in December. She had been working to take care of her mother back in India. Her uncle told The Seattle Times: “The family has nothing to say. Except I wonder if these men’s daughters or granddaughters have value. A life is a life.”
#castetheoriginsofourdiscontents | Posted on 15/Sep/2023 01:11:09
