Okay we talk a lot about Morgan's deeply unhelpful advice to Reid in 2x16 when Reid confides that he's traumatized by the whole Tobias experience and keeps seeing himself in the photos of crime scene victims because that was almost him. We talk about how empathy is never something Spencer Reid has lacked. But can we talk for a second about how really fucked up Derek Morgan's week has been when he gives that advice?
He's a biracial (non-passing) ex-cop, son of a black cop, tossed into a case that's a racial powder keg. He tries to stay out of that and go with the profile instead of the delicate racial dance. We know he hates when cases get political. We know he tends to stick to the sidelines on cases with a racialized component. He and the black detective go out to 'do real police work' - read: get out of the station where Gideon is fighting with the white chief and mayor about whether a profile can include race, all while the pastor (who Morgan has no love for in general) makes proclamations about how the FBI only cares once a white boy gets killed. It's pretty clear he sees similarity between himself and the detective: black men in law enforcement who are really sick of being asked to represent something, who just want to be judged by the work they do and the content of their character.
And then the detective is shot and killed in front of him because a white guy - whose family was *never* in danger, since the UnSub was only going after black teenage girls - saw a black man and assumed "that's the bad guy!" and took it upon himself to shoot him. A black cop, shot and killed by a white guy, leaving young kids behind.
Who's that sound like? How many times has Derek stood over that body before?
How many times has he been assumed to be the UnSub or the bad guy in general because he's a 6' tall black man in a world that makes assumptions? He was in juvie when he was freaking 11 years old because of a racist cop who keeps climbing the ranks and recently arrested him for murder. He was identified as a potential killer by his freaking *boss*, the same guy back at the station arguing in favor of putting race in the profile.
How does he keep moving forward? How does he keep showing up and doing his job - a job he believes in, but also a job where he gets used as bait for racists a lot more often than he should? How does he "pull himself out of the gutter"? How does he keep from pummeling pedophiles into the dirt?
He tells takes the terrible shit he never should have needed to go through, and he lets it make him better. A better person. A better profiler. A more precise, more insightful, more empathetic, stronger person. He embraces "that which does not kill me makes me stronger" and tries to channel it into something useful, because the alternative is to let it fester and turn into anger and resentment and he knows that won't serve him.
So when Reid admits he's struggling...so is Morgan, that week. For the past two months, really, since Chicago. And he gives the only advice he can, the only thing that's gotten him through all the bullshit. The only thing he can tell himself after watching a good black cop get killed by some paranoid white moron and leave behind a little boy: turn this awful feeling into something positive.
It's not helpful for Reid at all, especially not the implication that he isn't empathetic enough. But it's giving the kid the only answer Morgan has that week.
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