Tag Archives: race

Slurs: Who Can Say Them, When, and Why

June 29, 2015 – 10:00 am

Why President Obama can say “nigger” and I can’t (except when I can)

Maybe the best treatment of racial slurs ever to appear in a movie was this scene from the 2006 film Clerks 2. Randall, a fast-food worker, can’t understand why porch monkey is racist: When his non-racist grandmother used to say it, he claims, she just meant “a lazy person” not “a lazy black person”. After a black customer (played by Wanda Sykes) freaks, Randall’s friend Dante finally convinces him that porch monkey really is a racial slur (and maybe Randall’s grandmother had more racial prejudice than he remembered). But then Randall decides he’s going to “take it back”; he’s going to keep saying porch monkey, but reclaim it by using it in a non-racist way. A frustrated Dante explains to Randall that he can’t reclaim porch monkey, “because you’re not black!”

“Well listen to you,” Randall responds. “Telling me I can’t do something because of the color of my skin? You’re the racist.”

Randall’s obtuseness and Dante’s exasperation are funny, but Randall’s view is not that different from a lot of white men: Why are the rules different for us? Black rappers say nigger all the time, but when we do it’s racist. Meredith Brooks can name a song “Bitch” and Christina Aguilera can up the ante to “Super Bitch“. But when a guy says “bitch”, it’s sexist. A female writer like Lisa Miller can title her New York Magazine article “Hillary Clinton Finally Has Permission to be a Bitch” and it’s supposed to be, like, liberating or something. But when Glenn Beck referred to Clinton — the same woman! — as a “stereotypical bitch“, that was objectionable.

What’s up with that? When blacks and women can say and do things that white men can’t, isn’t that a double standard? And as Randall says, aren’t the liberals who promote that double standard the real racists and sexists?

In a word, no. But in real life — particularly when an example springs up unexpectedly, like Randall’s porch monkey — explaining why can be frustrating. A whole branch of the media is devoted to promoting what I have elsewhere called privileged distress, the feeling among white men — and Christians and English-speakers and the rich and every other privileged class in America — that they are really the persecuted ones. Their supporting examples and arguments and ways of framing the situation come easily to mind, while the explanations of why that’s the wrong way to look at it require some thought.

So let’s do some of that thinking.

Banter or insult? When blacks say “Hey, nigger” or “What’s up, nigger?” to each other, that’s banter. But if a white man like me walks up to a black and says, “What’s up, nigger?”, it’s an insult — even if I’m smiling and friendly when I do it. Why? There’s actually a color-blind rule here that’s fairly simple: An insult can be friendly banter if it can be thrown right back at you.

The reason it can be banter when one black guy says nigger to another is that the other guy can respond, “Who you calling nigger, nigger?” That doesn’t work when the white guy says it.

It’s not a double standard, because the same rule applies to me in exactly the same way. At my 40th high school reunion last fall, we were constantly making fun of how old we’ve gotten. Picture me with a too-full beer stein, and a classmate saying “Hey, old man, you sure you can lift that? Don’t want to hurt yourself.” It’s banter, and everyone laughs, because we’re all the same age.

But now imagine that the handsome and athletic young guy tending bar says the same thing to me as he serves the drink: “Hey, old man. You sure you can lift that? Don’t want to hurt yourself.” Now those are fighting words. He’s thrown an insult at me that I can’t throw right back. Now I’ve got something to prove.

The same rule applies all over: Fat people can kid each other about their weight. Tyrion Lannister can tell dwarf jokes. It’s not a double standard.

There are no white male equivalents. Sometimes you’ll hear people banter, not by throwing the same insult back and forth, but by using insults that are more-or-less equivalent. Picture two white guys at a bar, taunting each other in a friendly way with dago and pollock.

Some white guys think they should be able to use nigger the same way. The other guy can throw honky or cracker back at us, so it’s all good. Here’s the problem: honky and cracker are in no way equivalent to nigger.

If you just look them up in a dictionary you might think they are equivalent: honky is a racial slur directed at whites, nigger at blacks. What’s the difference?

Usage.

Nigger has centuries of usage behind it, and the connotation of that usage is that blacks are a subhuman race. Nigger evokes a detailed stereotype — lazy, stupid, violent, lustful, dangerous — while honky just says you’re a white guy I don’t like. For centuries, niggers weren’t really people. There’s no equivalent word for whites, because whites have always been seen as people.

If that example of the importance of usage doesn’t ring true for you, look at a different example: cow and bull. If you had recently arrived from Mars, where you learned English out of a dictionary, you might think that cow and bull are equivalent insults for women and men: Each compares a human to a bovine of the same gender.

But those words have centuries of usage behind them, and so they connote very different ideas. Calling a woman a cow implies that she’s fat, lazy, and stupid, probably good for nothing but whelping and suckling babies. Calling a man a bull, on the other hand, is a compliment. He’s powerful and headstrong. A running back can bull his way over the goal line, while someone who gets intimidated out of making a legitimate claim has been cowed.

Likewise, a Martian might think that prick and cunt are equivalent insults: They each identify a person with his or her genitalia. But a prick is a minor annoyance, while a cunt is a subhuman who is only good for sex. You might have an argument with a prick, but talking to a cunt is just stupid.

Limbaugh.

In short: No way, no how can white men banter with nigger. Neither the word itself nor any equivalent insult can be thrown back at us. Ditto for bitch or cow or cunt. A woman can shoot back with prick, asshole, bastard, or jerk, but it’s just not the same.

Taboos vs. stereotypes. White guys like Rush Limbaugh treat slurs as if they were taboos — words we’re not supposed to say just because we’re not supposed to say them, like shit or fuck. There’s no reason for it, it’s just a rule. Worse, it’s a rule that’s not applied fairly: Only white guys get called to account when they break it.

How Limbaugh pictures himself

Consequently, white guys make slurs the object of bad-boy humor. Limbaugh thinks he is being brave and daring when he calls Sandra Fluke a slut. And he thinks he’s being clever when he finds ways to come as close as possible to saying nigger without actually saying it. (It’s like those I-didn’t-really-say-a-bad-word jokes we told in grade school: “What did the fish say when he swam into a concrete wall?” “Dam!”)

That’s what white guys — and a few non-white guys who are trying too hard to fit in — mean when they brag that they’re “not PC”. It’s a James Dean pose: I’m a rebel. I can’t be bound by your arbitrary rules about what words I can or can’t say.

What’s wrong with that attitude is that society’s distaste for slurs is not a meaningless taboo. There are at least two good reasons for it:

  • In any disagreement or discussion, using a slur is cheating: You’re hitting your opponent with a club they can’t use to hit you back.
  • Every time you use a slur, you perpetuate the stereotypes it invokes. Calling a black person a nigger raises the notion — whether you’re thinking about it consciously or not — that blacks are subhumans who don’t deserve equal treatment. Calling a woman a cunt reinforces the idea that women are just good for sex, and don’t have to be treated like thinking beings.

The various disadvantaged communities are all debating whether or not it’s ever OK to use the slurs themselves. Some argue that when black rappers use nigger, they jam the stereotype rather than perpetuate it. Some women believe that saying bitch is liberating, because it shows the word doesn’t scare them. Others disagree, believing that any use of a slur promotes its stereotypes.

I think this: Those issues are for those communities to figure out. In the unlikely event that they ask my advice, I might give it. But until then, my opinion as a white guy doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.

Words as words. Now, somebody is bound to point out that in my discussion of why white guys shouldn’t use nigger, bitch, and cunt, I’ve used nigger, bitch, and cunt. Isn’t that liberal hypocrisy? Aren’t I just waving my liberal privilege in Rush’s face, saying “I can say it but you can’t!”?

I plead not guilty. There is a difference between using a word and referring to a word. I haven’t been talking about “the niggers”, I’ve been referring to the word nigger.

Why is that OK? Once again, these are not taboos. There’s no dark magic in the letters that is unleashed whenever they are put together. The power is in the use, not in the pronunciation.

That distinction is too complex for children, so we teach them not to use the words by presenting them as taboo. And this creates problems for children, as when the tattle-tale blurts out: “Teacher, Billy said shit.”

Likewise in the mass media, where children might be listening and might regard the speaker as an authoritative example — “But Mommy, the man on the radio said it.” — we insist on circumlocutions like the N-word. But when adults talk to other adults as adults, we need to be able to name the words we’re referring to. Otherwise you wind up in situations like the stoning scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Obama on WTF. So now we come to President Obama’s interview on the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron“, where he said:

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public.

And that caused a freak-out. Fox News’ Todd Starnes was one among many:

It was disappointing to say the least to hear such a vulgarity come out of the mouth of the leader of the free world.

But there you have it folks – this is man who was supposed to usher in the post-racial America. This is the man who was supposed to unite, not divide.

What President Obama said is indefensible. It soils the dignity of the Oval Office.

That’s a reaction to breaking a taboo: It would be appropriate if Obama had said fuck or shit. We don’t want our president saying crap like that.

But look at it in light of my previous analysis: We have a black man referring to the N-word in a forum not intended for children. It’s fine.

Fox’ David Webb raises this question:

Could you imagine if a Ted Cruz or somebody on the Republican side used it, in the same context, what the reaction would be.

You mean referring to it, in a discussion of racism intended for adults? I’d be fine with it.

Glee. What I’m not fine with is what Ted Nugent did: Use Obama’s example as an argument in favor of slurs and offensive symbols in general.

What sort of politically correct zombie could actually believe that the elimination of a word or a flag would reduce the evil of racism?

What sort of goofball could possibly believe that certain words are OK for one group of people but forbidden by others?

That, by the way, is the definition of racism.

I’m sure Ted and Randall could have a long talk about that, but no, it isn’t.

There’s something gleeful in Nugent’s usage of nigger, and that right there is the final test I’d recommend to any white person who’s thinking about saying it: You might think you’re referring to the word in the analytic way I have endorsed. But while analysis may at times be satisfying or even fascinating, it is almost never gleeful.

So if the word tastes delicious in your mouth, if saying it feels like a forbidden pleasure, something else is going on. Maybe you should reconsider.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (91)

Please Take Down Your Confederate Flag

June 22, 2015 – 7:05 am

It’s his flag, not yours.

Friday, I was walking along Main Street in Nashua, New Hampshire, a few blocks from where I live, when a pick-up truck drove by trailing a full-size Confederate battle flag behind its cab.

The truck didn’t stop, so I didn’t have a chance to ask the driver what message he thought he was sending. But I know what message I received. A little more than 36 hours had passed since Dylann Roof had murdered nine black people at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, saying “You rape our women and you’re taking over the country. You have to go.” So, given the timing, what such a vigorous display of that flag said to me was: “Right on, Dylann.”

It’s possible that I’m misjudging that driver. Maybe he’s a Southerner stuck in New England for the summer, showing his regional pride. Maybe he’s a Lynyrd Skynyrd or Dukes of Hazzard fan who hadn’t been listening to the news at all. Maybe he’s the kind of guy who just likes to get a rise out of people like me. Maybe … I don’t know. I can spin possibilities all day, but the message I keep coming back to is: “Right on, Dylann.”

It pissed me off. I’m white, I’ve never been to Charleston, and to me Roof’s nine victims are little more than names and faces on my TV. But I imagine being gunned down in my church by someone I welcomed, and I get angry. And then I feel sad. And then I despair that we will never be done with this ancient tribal barbarism, much less ever achieve our stated national goal of “liberty and justice for all”.

As the truck went by, I didn’t respond, didn’t yell an insult or wave my middle finger or anything like that. To be honest, it was gone before I could react. But I like to think I would have restrained myself anyway. Because my anger, my sadness, my despair … maybe that was exactly what the driver wanted from me. Maybe hate-evoking-hate was exactly his purpose.

I don’t know what purpose motivates the government of South Carolina, or the legislature that put Dylann Roof’s favorite flag on top of the capitol in Columbia in 1961, and responded to an NAACP boycott in 2000 by moving it to fly in front of the capitol rather than above it. (Because the details of its presentation are enshrined in law, the flag could not be brought to half-mast in response to the Charleston massacre. So the American flag was lowered, but the Confederate flag was not.) I can’t say what motivates leaders like Governor Haley or Senator Graham to continue defending that flag.

Probably no state is more identified with the Confederacy than South Carolina, and no city more than Charleston. In 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. Charleston harbor was where the Civil War’s first shots were fired. Charleston is where the Southern delegates walked out off a Democratic convention set to nominate likely general-election winner Stephen Douglas, splitting the party and setting the stage for Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession. (According to historian Douglas Egerton, that series of events was foreseen and intended by the walkout’s leaders.) Years before that, South Carolina was the home of John Calhoun, whose speech “Slavery a Positive Good” announced to the Senate the arrival of the defiant, self-righteous Southern attitude that laid the groundwork for secession and war. (Calhoun’s statue still stands on a pedestal high above Charleston. The Emanuel AME Church where the massacre took place is on Calhoun Street.)

For decades after Appomattox, the Confederate flag was displayed mainly at cemeteries and war monuments, but it became a political symbol again after President Truman desegregated the military in 1948 and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats rebeled. Truman was succeeded by Eisenhower and Kennedy, each of whom sent federal troops to enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions. As the federal government became more and more identified with the civil rights movement, states and cities across the South began flying the Confederate flag over their official buildings. As in the 1860s, the flag represented “states rights”, but particularly a state’s right to oppress its Negro population.

South Carolina started flying it over the state capitol in 1961. After the Voting Rights Act restored the franchise to South Carolina’s blacks, the flag became a political issue. The slogan of those whites who want to keep it flying has been “heritage, not hate“, as if the heritage of South Carolina and the Confederate flag could somehow be separated from slavery, segregation, lynchings, and all the other manifestations of racism right up to Wednesday night’s massacre.

Since Wednesday, there has been a national backlash against the flag. In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “Take Down the Confederate Flag – Now“, and many other writers and bloggers have posted some similar message, often in an angry or demanding voice. Hundreds protested in Columbia Saturday, but South Carolina’s political leadership has held firm. That intransigence has prompted calls for protesters to take more drastic action.

In that South Carolina will never willingly take down the flag, the time has come for opponents to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and burn the Confederate flag — at the state Capitol in South Carolina, in front of the White House, in front of Fox News or maybe even outside the Grand Ol’ Opry.

One white supremacist’s merged symbol.

The writer angrily compares the flag to the Nazi hooked cross, and I’ve seen many blog articles and Facebook posts referring to it as “America’s swastika” or “the Confederate swastika“. (I found a literal Confederate swastika posted on a forum of the white supremacist group Stormfront. “I like it … a lot!” replied a commenter.)

I can imagine the feelings that lead people to say and write (and now do) stuff like that. Probably they’re a lot like what I felt when that truck went by me on Main Street. But burning Confederate flags to protest the Charleston massacre is like burning Qurans to protest 9-11. Yes, it will piss off the people who pissed you off. But how does that lead us anywhere good? I doubt that the glow of burning flags or books has ever enlightened anyone.

And enlightenment is what we need. The people who fly the Confederate flag need to come to understand the message they are sending. And understanding that message, they should take their flags down voluntarily. (Except for what I hope is the minority that really does want to say, “Right on, Dylann.” Racists have free-speech rights too.)

That’s what I’m asking, in as polite a form as I can manage: Please take your flag down.

I know you think your flag says something positive. But you need to understand that your intention does not control the message. You’re not saying what you think you’re saying.

Nobody enjoys being compared to the Nazis, but there is one way in which the swastika is an instructive example: It didn’t always mean what it means today. The swastika has a millennia-long history as a positive religious symbol. Even the word swastika has a pre-Nazi history, tracing back to a Sanscrit word that means good fortune. Particularly in India, you can see the hooked cross carved into temples built long before anyone ever heard of blitzkrieg or Kristallnacht or the Final Solution. There’s a lot in the swastika that I might want to invoke.

But I can’t.

The Nazis ruined the swastika. They own it now, because nothing captures a symbol like blood sacrifice.

Today, if I get a swastika tattoo or wear a swastika t-shirt or stencil a swastika onto the hood of my car, it doesn’t matter what I want it to mean. Whatever I think or intend, the swastika is a Nazi symbol, and no German-American like me will be able reclaim it for any other purpose for centuries.

And no, it doesn’t matter that generals like Rommel and Guderian were brilliant tacticians who revolutionized warfare, or that many of the brave German soldiers who marched under the swastika just wanted to defend their homes and families. The swastika is inextricably linked to Hitler and Auschwitz, and if I display it, I am linked to them too.

Something similar is true of the Confederate battle flag. Whatever you want it to mean, it belongs to the people who have sacrificed blood to it: the slave-masters and their defenders, the klansmen whose lynchings enforced Jim Crow, and the white supremacists who are still with us.

Dylann Roof laid his claim to the flag Wednesday night. He owns it; you don’t. What you want it to symbolize just doesn’t matter.

So take it down. It doesn’t say what you want it to say, and it won’t for generations to come.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (42)

Rich Lowry’s False Choice

June 1, 2015 – 7:52 am

If you don’t like racist police, you must want no police at all.

There’s a rhetorical trick that everybody needs to learn to spot, because it’s widely used and very convincing if you’re not on guard: the false dilemma. In the false dilemma, an author or speaker cuts an entire universe of possibilities down to two: the one he likes and an alternative that is obviously horrible.

A particularly nasty false dilemma is the heart of Rich Lowry’s “#SomeBlackLivesDontMatter“, which appeared on the Politico website Wednesday. (Lowry is a longtime editor at National Review. Why Politico publishes his work is something of a mystery.)

Lowry starts with the familiar conservative trope that black activists don’t care about black-on-black crime.

Let’s be honest: Some black lives really don’t matter. If you are a young black man shot in the head by another young black man, almost certainly no one will know your name. Al Sharpton won’t come rushing to your family’s side with cameras in tow. MSNBC won’t discuss the significance of your death. No one will protest, or even riot, for you.

Of course, no one should protest for you, because protest is a tool for addressing the government, not criminals. So protesting against some random street criminal who shot some innocent civilian would make no sense. (This is frequently missed point on the Right. For example, the protests after Trayvon Martin’s death weren’t directed at George Zimmerman, but at the local legal system that wasn’t taking Martin’s death seriously.) But keep going, Rich.

The Baltimore Sun ran a headline (since changed) that had the air of a conundrum, although it isn’t very puzzling, “With arrests down in Baltimore, mayor ‘examining’ increase in killings.” According to the paper, arrests have dropped by about half in May. The predictable result is that violent crime is spiking.

The implication is clear: More people need to be arrested in Baltimore, not fewer. And more need to be jailed. If black lives truly matter, Baltimore needs more and better policing and incarceration to impose order on communities where a lawless few spread mayhem and death.

The reason Baltimore can’t get this “better policing” — somehow synonymous with “incarceration” — is because the black community doesn’t like the bad policing it’s been getting.

If the message is supposed to be that they don’t want the police there, it has been received.

Of course, literally no one is saying that the black neighborhoods of Baltimore shouldn’t be policed. (That’s why Lowry needs the if. If he could quote some black or liberal leader calling for no policing, he’d really have a point against them. But since none is, he needs a hypothetical.) And now that Lowry has cut the alternatives down to (1) continued racist policing and (2) no law enforcement at all, it’s clear that the people protesting against racist policing should just shut up.

It is wrong for the police to shrink from doing their job, but the last month in Baltimore shows how important that job is. This is especially true in dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. They need disproportionate police attention, even if that attention is easily mischaracterized as racism. The alternative is a deadly chaos that destroys and blights the lives of poor blacks.

Again, he quotes no one saying that police don’t have an important job, and he offers no evidence at all that policing in Baltimore has been mischaracterized as racism. That’s just what Lowry wants to believe and wants you to believe. (If someday we reach a point where all the apparently racist actions of police have been “mischaracterized”, the #BlackLivesMatter movement will have succeeded.)

So that’s your choice, black America: Live in completely lawless communities, or STFU whenever police kill young blacks they already have subdued, or shoot down young blacks who are doing nothing wrong. You can have police who continue misbehaving the way they have been, or no police at all. There is no third alternative.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (13)

The Other Half of American History

March 16, 2015 – 9:48 am

Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told

In the U.S. history I learned in school, slavery is a MacGuffin. Two powerful groups of white men spend a century struggling over it, but what the slaves actually do never seems all that important.

That’s why people who don’t like to talk about slavery can claim that the struggle was about something else entirely: Tariffs or states rights or simple regional rivalry make great substitute MacGuffins, because the conflict is all that matters. From three-fifths and the Missouri Compromise and bleeding Kansas all the way to Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, and Appomattox, African slavery is just a plot device that gives white men something to fight over. So if you want to swap in some other plot device, feel free.

The postmodern focus on diversity and multiculturalism has added sidebars to that story: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or a day in the life of a slave. And who was this Dred Scott that so many white lawyers argued about? Such human-interest features add emotional depth, if you’re into that kind of thing. But the real history of American history is still driven by white men: Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, John Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth.

Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism turns that approach upside-down. In his telling, slavery is the story of America. The Pilgrims’ search for religious freedom or the injustice of taxation without representation — those might make good human-interest sidebars. But the spread of English-speaking people across North America is fundamentally about profit, and the profit comes from two primary sources: land stolen from Indians and labor stolen from Africans. Bringing those two together opened a spigot of wealth that white men struggled to control. In that story, the experience of the African slaves — how they lived, the work they did, the culture they built, and how they eventually got their story out — is key. It is a story of progress but not of triumph, and the story continues to this day.

Slave Capitalism. In addition to shifting the focus to slaves [see endnote 1], Baptist fixes another mistake: We tell the triumph of the industrial North and the end of institutionalized slavery as if it were the inevitable result of the inexorable forces of progress. In that version, Southern slave society represents the last gasp of dying feudalism, while the rising tide of capitalism and freedom propels the North.

But in Baptist’s telling, the South is every bit as capitalistic as the North. To Baptist, capitalism is just a way of managing property, and property can be whatever society wants it to be. Today, property can be a copyright, a trademark, or a slice of radio spectrum. Then, property could be people. [2] Capitalism doesn’t care.

Southern slaves were managed capitalistically, not feudally. Feudalism stratifies society, but each stratum is a community that has its rights and duties. Serfs live in serf families, who intermarry with other serf families on land that has been their home for generations. Serf communities may not have much military power compared to their lords, but by appealing to tradition and communal judgment, they can exercise considerable moral force. Serfs might be bound to the land, but neither they nor the land are property in the capitalistic sense; both are entangled by moral obligations that capitalism doesn’t recognize. [3]

In the old slave country of the Chesapeake, slavery could occasionally resemble feudalism, as master families and slave families lived side-by-side for generations. But Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina — the tobacco country — saturated with slaves early. From the Revolution onward, slaves were an increasingly important cash export, whose price fluctuated with the price of cotton. They might be raised in families and communities, but they were sold as individuals — ripped away from their wives, their husbands, their children, their parents — to wherever the frontier of the cotton country happened to be: first Georgia, then Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and finally Texas.

On the cotton frontier, slaves were simply chattel. They had no families or communities — at least not until later — and could be worked without regard to any moral judgments or human rights. Depending on market conditions, they might be expensive to replace. But they were all replaceable for a price.

Slave efficiency. One of the inevitable-triumph-of-the-North myths is that slavery was inefficient. The idea that free labor is vigorous and creative while slave labor is lazy and stupid was originally British propaganda. Britain banned slavery in 1833, as the rising political power of the working class made the dignity of labor a key talking point. Northern abolitionists picked up the British line, which was then adopted by Union propagandists and eventually by post-Civil-War historians.

It’s not true, and Baptist has the numbers to prove it.

In terms of cotton-bales-per-worker, no system of free labor (prior to the invention of the mechanical cotton-picker in the 1930s) ever matched the slave-labor system of the 1850s. What’s more, cotton productivity was rising at the beginning of the Civil War. It had been rising for decades at a rate of around 2% per year. That’s comparable to the rate of increase in the textile industry of Britain and the North, where machine power was replacing human power.

How did the Southern slavers achieve that astounding managerial feat? Did they have cotton-picking research institutes and extension services that trained slaves in the latest methods? No. They set individualized measurable daily production goals for each slave, and whipped slaves who didn’t meet them. Then they ratcheted up those goals year by year.

The slavers themselves had no idea how the slaves managed to meet the goals as often as they did; most slavers couldn’t have picked cotton efficiently if their lives depended on it. But the threat of daily whipping inspired the slaves’ ingenuity, and compassion led them to teach each other their best techniques. [4]

So no: purely economic considerations wouldn’t have ended slavery at least until the 1930s. And even then, the produce-or-be-whipped motivation system might have performed well in factories, mines, and the kind of crop-picking-by-hand that undocumented immigrant workers still do. Even today, any workplace where produce-or-be-fired is the motivating principle might work more efficiently under produce-or-be-whipped slavery. [5]

The Hidden Connections. Making slavery a MacGuffin and the slave experience a sidebar leads to a one-damn-thing-after-another telling of even the white half of American history. But Baptist’s approach restores the hidden connections between events, and creates a more unified tapestry. I’ll just give just two out of many possible examples: Haiti and Texas.

Haiti. In the usual telling, the Haitian Slave Revolt is only significant because it stokes Southern planters’ fears of a slave revolt in the United States. It’s not directly connected to any other important event, so unless you look it up, it’s hard to remember exactly when it happened.

But Baptiste situates it like this: Before its revolution, sugar-producing Haiti was France’s most profitable New World colony, with exports outstripping all of Britain’s American colonies put together.

The French Revolution created an opening for the Haitian slaves to revolt, and after Napoleon came to power, recapturing Haiti was key to his North American plans. The wealth of Haiti together with the strategic domination of New Orleans over the trade of the Mississippi watershed would be the basis for the expansion of French power throughout the vast-but-untapped Louisiana Territory. Perhaps France might even push the fledgling United States back from the eastern side of the Mississippi.

So Napoleon dispatched two armies: one to recapture Haiti and the other to base itself in New Orleans and prepare for expansion. But when the Haitians defeated the first army, the second was diverted to reinforce it. It was also lost. That massive failure convinced Napoleon to abandon the New World and sell Louisiana to President Jefferson.

So the next time you hear about Americans helping Haiti in some way, don’t think of it as charity. Think of it as repaying a significant debt.

Texas. In the Alamo Myth, the Texas Revolution is a battle for freedom against the imperial domination of Mexico. But actually, the 1824 constitution established after the Mexican revolution from Spain did away with slavery. The Southern slavers who had emigrated to Texas came up with a variety of dodges to keep their slaves, and figured Mexico City was far away. But when Mexico eventually began moving to enforce the ban, slave-holding Texans organized resistance, eventually declaring independence in 1836. So the Alamo really was a battle for freedom, but Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett were on the anti-freedom side.

Around the same time, President Jackson was fulfilling two of his major goals: Getting rid of the Second Bank of the United States and ejecting Indian tribes to the far side of the Mississippi. Removing the Indians opened up large regions for new cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi, while getting rid of the central bank initiated a free-wheeling period of American finance.

The result was a slave bubble, much like the recent real-estate bubble. Newly chartered Southern banks sold bonds in Europe collateralized by the mortgages they held — slave mortgages rather than home mortgages — and lent money to virtually any white man with a plan to buy slaves, clear former Indian land purchased cheaply from the government, and plant cotton. When the price of slaves sky-rocketed, that just made them more valuable collateral for bigger mortgages and more mortgage-backed bonds — just like houses in 2007.

Predictably, the world economy couldn’t absorb the sudden increase in cotton production, and falling cotton prices started the Panic of 1837 (conveniently after Jackson had left office). Suddenly, everybody wanted to sell assets for cash, banks were going under, mortgage-backed bonds were in default (leaving state governments on the hook), and lots of would-be cotton magnates had negative net worth. But unlike the houses of 2008, the slaves of 1837 were mobile. And there was Texas, an independent pro-slavery republic where the bankers couldn’t chase you down. All across the south, re-possessing bankers often found nothing but empty buildings and a sign saying “Gone to Texas”.

So the new Texas settlers had stolen black labor twice: once from the blacks themselves, and a second time from the banks and European investors who held mortgages on them.

Continuing illusions. The way we tell our national story affects the way we think about ourselves and our future. It remains far too easy to romanticize the antebellum South, and to replace the brutal abuse of an entire people with a few air-brushed memories of white slavers’ affection for their nannies or valets. (I would tear down every Civil War monument in the South. No one who fought for the slave empire is a hero.)

It is too easy to give the North credit for black freedom, ignoring the slave-trade profits, the Northern land speculators who helped slavery expand, the cheap cotton that made the fortunes of the New England mills, and the markets that Southern wealth created for fledgling Northern industries. Ignoring the African role in the origins of all American wealth makes today’s impoverished blacks seem ungrateful for their food stamps and welfare checks.

And it is too easy to see capitalism simply as a modernizing, beneficent force, rather than an amoral machine that will process whatever assumptions are fed into it. Without the balancing force of democratic government, and without an electorate guided by compassion, justice, and other humane yearnings, capitalism will monetize all values and turn everything into property — including human beings.

Once people are property, they will be used like property — until some political process makes the abuse stop.

[1] In talking about slaves, I’m doing Baptist an injustice, because his terminology reverses the usual objectifications. Instead of slaves, he says enslaved people. It is their masters he de-personalizes as enslavers. He also rarely refers to the slaves’ workplaces as plantations, a word that evokes images of fair Southern belles or genteel men in white suits having drinks on the veranda. Instead, he talks about forced labor camps, presaging Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags.

[2] One of the creepiest things in the surviving letters of Jefferson Davis is the way he used the phrase my people. Today, my people are my community, the humans I identify with. But Davis used my people in sentences with my horses or my cattle.

[3] A big chunk of Marx’ Capital describes how the English lower classes suffered as feudal land gradually evolved into capitalistic property.

[4] It’s no coincidence that set-high-goals-and-punish-failure is still a favored policy of the American Right, and that the Right’s center of power is the white population of the old cotton country. See, for example, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education policy.

[5] In Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmon described how phony vagrancy laws created slave-like prison labor that was used in mines and factories throughout the South until World War II. I reviewed his book in “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor“.

By weeklysift | Posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Also tagged | Comments (26)

Justice In Ferguson

March 9, 2015 – 9:15 am

Darren Wilson gets off, but the Ferguson police and courts don’t.

Through the late summer and into the fall, no issue in America was more polarizing than the shooting of Michael Brown and the demonstrations of public anger that it sparked. Objective reality seemed to have vanished. The “facts” you saw or believed or told other people depended almost entirely on your prior commitments, what news sources you trusted, and who your friends were.

In Ferguson’s African-American community, everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who had seen Brown gunned down in cold blood, his hands up, trying to surrender. Meanwhile the police (and later the prosecutor) were doing Darren Wilson’s public relations, selectively leaking whatever evidence supported Wilson’s story or made Michael Brown look like a thug.

When the prosecutor organized a defense of Wilson in front of the grand jury, the result — no indictment — seemed predetermined and changed very few minds. If you had believed Wilson from the start, you felt vindicated. But if not, the Brown’s murder was just one more example of police misconduct swept under the rug.

The federal Department of Justice was uniquely situated to bridge the gap. It had the direct access to the witnesses and evidence that the community lacked, and the desire to find the truth that the police and prosecutor seemed to lack.

Wednesday, the Department of Justice released two reports, one specifically about the Brown shooting and the other examining the general state of policing in Ferguson. Taken as a whole, the two reports fit the narrative of neither side. But I heard a convincing ring of truth in them.

Policing in Ferguson. You get the clearest picture if you read the general report first, because the community’s response to the Brown shooting makes no sense until you understand its long-term relationship to the FPD.

The essence of the problem in Ferguson can be summarized in one sentence:

Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.

In other words, the City of Ferguson relies on fines for a major portion of its revenue. It regularly budgets for fines to increase, and it pressures the police department to meet its budget goals by finding more offenses it can cite citizens for. Its municipal court is an opaque, inflexible system that is hard to navigate, particularly if you are poor and/or lack transportation.

As a result, a minor initial offense can snowball into an endless and expensive series of interactions if a citizen fails to appear in court when expected (whether notification of a court date has been received or not) or fails to pay the full fine assessed (regardless of the citizen’s ability to pay).

In short, the Ferguson justice system is predatory and the citizens are the prey.

The report illustrates with many examples — most taken from the FPD’s own files — the following series of abuses:

  • Police regularly stop citizens without probable cause of any wrong-doing.
  • They demand that citizens submit to unjustified searches of their persons or vehicles.
  • Refusal of unlawful commands or attempts to claim constitutional rights are met with punitive arrests and/or violence.
  • While in custody, citizens are controlled by violence and threats of violence. For example, protesting the basis of an arrest, passively refusing to cooperate, or verbally abusing an officer frequently results in being shot with a taser.
  • The FPD ignores its own system for tracking officers’ use of force. When supervisors do submit a report on a use of force, typically only the arrest report written by the officer in question is consulted, even if that report contains internal contradictions.
  • Complaints from the public are discouraged, are frequently ignored, and can result in punitive investigations of the complaining citizens.
  • Officers are rated and promoted based largely on their “productivity”, i.e., the number of revenue-producing citations they write. Citizen complaints or repeated use of force does not significantly affect an officer’s career.

The damage done by a rogue police force can be mitigated by the courts, if the courts are motivated to pursue justice. However,

The Ferguson municipal court handles most charges brought by FPD, and does so not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue.

The municipal court, in other words, is part of the predatory system.

Racism. The report describes a general pattern of abusing the powerless, with sections on the mentally ill or mentally handicapped (whose inability to comprehend or respond to police commands is often taken as resistance and met with violence), and students (the officers assigned to Ferguson high schools escalate situations towards arrests — more revenue! — rather than trying to establish and maintain peace).

But the largest of these sections focuses on racism. The FPD, the city government, and the municipal court are overwhelming staffed by whites, in a city that is two-thirds black. Blacks are disproportionately the prey of the municipal justice system, and the more extreme the police action, the more likely the victim is to be black. For example,

The department’s own records demonstrate that, as with other types of force, canine officers use dogs out of proportion to the threat posed by the people they encounter, leaving serious puncture wounds to nonviolent offenders, some of them children. Furthermore, in every canine bite incident for which racial information is available, the subject was African American. This disparity, in combination with the decision to deploy canines in circumstances with a seemingly low objective threat, suggests that race may play an impermissible role in officers’ decisions to deploy canines.

The more an officer’s discretion is involved in an arrest, the more likely the arrested citizen is black. For example,

With respect to speeding offenses for all roads, African Americans account for 72% of citations based on radar or laser, but 80% of citations based on other or unspecified methods. Thus, as evaluated by radar, African Americans violate the law at lower rates than as evaluated by FPD officers.

Another factor was the practice of police and court employees “fixing” traffic tickets and other municipal citations for friends and relatives. Given the racial composition of the city’s staff, the recipients of these favors were probably overwhelmingly white.

In addition to statistics, the report culled a number of racist emails from the police and court systems. Like:

A November 2008 email stated that President Barack Obama would not be President for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

Justice Department investigators could find no record of recipients objecting to such emails or of superiors reprimanding the senders. Often such offensive jokes were forwarded to others.

Reading the report, I was left with an impression not of Klan-like, get-the-niggers racism, but of widespread racial stereotyping that affected decisions at all levels. Being a young black male was in itself seen as probable cause of wrong-doing that police should look into. Uncooperative blacks were seen as inherently violent and dangerous, justifying police violence to control them. Violence directed at blacks was considered a less serious matter than similar incidents against whites* would be. The overall predatory nature of the system was more easily ignored or rationalized because its victims were mostly black.

Michael Brown. When Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in broad daylight on a city street in front of many witnesses, the African-American community saw a chance for some good to come of this tragedy: Maybe finally the police had done something so outrageous that it couldn’t be covered up. Maybe finally the world would have to notice the abusive system they lived in, and a policeman would have to pay.

It is no wonder, then, that the community was quick to believe the worst about Darren Wilson. Accounts in which he gunned down Brown for no real reason fit very well with the accounts they heard every day from their friends and neighbors: of dogs set on young blacks for no real reason, or tasers used when blacks mouthed off or just didn’t move fast enough to suit police.

Likewise, it is no wonder that witnesses saw what they expected to see, that they exaggerated what they did see, or that they stayed away from TV cameras if what they saw supported Wilson’s account.

The Justice Department’s report on the Brown shooting recommends no charges against Darren Wilson. It goes through the evidence in great detail, and concludes not that everything happened the way Wilson said, but that it could have happened that way. (In Mythbusters terms, Wilson’s story is “plausible”.)

Wilson’s account goes like this: He tried to stop Brown on suspicion of a petty theft (of a handful of small cigars from a convenience store). Brown punched him and reached into his vehicle to struggle for Wilson’s gun. Wilson fired the gun once while inside the car, causing Brown to run away. Wilson pursued, and Brown turned to charge him. Wilson started shooting again, but Brown did not stop until Wilson had fired the fatal shot to the top of Brown’s head.

None of the physical evidence contradicts that story. Some eye-witness testimony supports it. The testimony that contradicts Wilson would not impress a jury, because there are no witnesses who

  • contradict Wilson
  • tell a story consistent with the physical evidence
  • have told the same story consistently to all investigators.

So the Justice Department concludes that prosecuting Wilson would be a waste of time.

The separate accounts of the various witnesses paint a picture of more than just the Brown shooting: a community that wants this shooting to be what it needs rather than what the incident was. Again and again, witnesses against Wilson confess that they have mixed the part of the event they saw with what they have heard on the street. Witnesses supporting Wilson are reluctant to come forward, either because they want Wilson convicted or because they don’t want to be known in the community as the witness who got Wilson off. Some just don’t talk and we don’t know why.

Putting the two reports together, I am left with questions about Wilson, even if I know that I couldn’t vote to convict him. Was killing Brown really necessary, or was it the kind of punitive violence that is endemic in the FPD? To what extent was Wilson worried about his own safety, and to what extent was he just angry that Brown disrespected his authority? (For example, Wilson explains why he reached for his gun rather than his taser during the struggle in his SUV. He doesn’t explain why — given a brief period of time to collect himself before pursuing Brown — he didn’t switch weapons.) Was it really necessary to keep firing, or did the stereotype of the unstoppable black beast affect Wilson’s decision? (Wilson’s choice of words — comparing Brown to a demon — suggests it did.)

I’ll never know for sure. But I couldn’t convict Wilson just on my questions. He should go free.

Justice. In the end, although the Justice Department hasn’t given the black citizens of Ferguson Darren Wilson’s scalp, it has given them what they really need: Exposure of the corrupt and predatory system they live under, and some hope of relief.

Friday, Attorney General Holder pledged that the Justice Department is “prepared to use all the power that we have … to ensure that the situation changes.”

Asked if that included dismantling the Ferguson Police Department, Holder said, “If that’s what’s necessary, we’re prepared to do that.”

Sunday’s NYT illustrated all the ways that Ferguson is not unique, particularly in St. Louis County, but also in communities across the country. There are other predatory police-and-court systems out there. Those towns and cities will be watching Ferguson closely. If the DoJ follows through, the effects could ripple across the nation.

That may not be the conclusion that either side was asking for, but it may be the best ending this tragic story could have received.

* For contrast, consider this:

In one 2012 incident, for example, officers reported responding to a fight in progress at a local bar that involved white suspects. Officers reported encountering “40-50 people actively fighting, throwing bottles and glasses, as well as chairs.” The report noted that “one subject had his ear bitten off.” While the responding officers reported using force, they only used “minimal baton and flashlight strikes as well as fists, muscling techniques and knee strikes.” While the report states that “due to the amount of subjects fighting, no physical arrests were possible,” it notes also that four subjects were brought to the station for “safekeeping.”
By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (24)

The Liberal-on-Liberal Debate Over Political Correctness

February 2, 2015 – 9:24 am

A fascinating argument was touched off when Jonathan Chait, a writer I usually like, posted “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: how the language police are perverting liberalism” on the New York magazine site.

Chait began by recounting an incident that really is objectionable: A Muslim man at the University of Michigan wrote a column for the campus conservative newspaper of the sort that campus conservatives think is clever, a spoof of someone from a marginalized group looking for things to be offended by. Not my cup of tea (or probably Chait’s either, for that matter) but what upset Chait was the reaction: Four people littered the steps of the student’s apartment building with copies of his column written over with insulting and hostile messages.

Up to that point, Chait was on firm ground; that kind of intimidation isn’t an appropriate response. But from there he segued into a stream of conservative tropes:

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate. Two decades ago, the only communities where the left could exert such hegemonic control lay within academia, which gave it an influence on intellectual life far out of proportion to its numeric size. Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach. And since social media is also now the milieu that hosts most political debate, the new p.c. has attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old.

Naturally, conservative writers loved watching liberals argue about this. The Federalist‘s Robert Tracinski wrote:

I have observed several times before that the actual essence of the Obama era’s “post-racial” politics is: white people calling other white people racist. The true icons of racial politics in our era are not a fiery Jeremiah Wright or Jesse Jackson or even Al Sharpton, taking the white man to task for keep black folk down. No, it is the average Obama voter—a left-leaning, college-educated white person like, well, like Jonathan Chait, who uses his support for Obama and the Democrats’ agenda as evidence of his enlightenment, which in his mind makes him superior to Obama’s critics, who must be motivated by insidious, secret racism. … So you can see Chait’s dismay at seeing good white “liberals” have their Not Racist credentials challenged by those who are farther out on the left. Don’t they know how the system is supposed to work?

Because that whole “racism” thing is such a scam in the post-Jim-Crow era, when we all have equal opportunities and are treated the same wherever we go.

I thought about writing my own Chait-response article, but other liberals — mostly people Jonathan Korman linked to on Facebook (thanks!) — have been doing a better job than the first ideas that occurred to me, so I’ll mostly just link to them and decide at the end whether I have anything worth adding.

My problem with Chait is simple: As long as we’re not talking vandalism or violence or physical intimidation — and we’re not, in almost all of the cases he mentions other than that first one — saying that somebody’s view is “bigoted and illegitimate” is just as much an exercise of free speech as whatever that person said in the first place.

But wait, Belle Waring said it better:

People like Chait also don’t merely want to be allowed to say whatever they wish about whomever they wish for the sake of debate itself. Because he can already say whatever he damn well pleases! Look at him go! What he wants is the right to both say things which are offensive to some people and remain a liberal in good standing once he has said them. This is a stupid right which no one should have. … Chait wants to say offensive things and not be criticized.

And for Chait to write off such objections as “political correctness” … doesn’t that label represent the same kind of de-legitimization he is objecting to? But Vox‘s Amanda Taub has that covered:

First things first: there’s no such thing as “political correctness.” The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.

Chait identifies a long list of disputes that he describes as examples of “p.c.” demands that are hurting mainstream liberalism. But calling these concerns “political correctness” is another way of saying that they aren’t important enough to be addressed on their merits. And all that really means is that they’re not important to Jonathan Chait.

Because it’s up to white men (like me and Chait) to decide whether your concerns deserve attention, or if you’re just being too sensitive. We’ll let you know what we decide, but until then try to keep the noise down so that you don’t disturb the neighbors.

Anti-war activist Fredrik deBoer offered a more nuanced opinion: Chait may be full of it, but that doesn’t mean there’s no problem in left-wing discourse. He described a series of situations where he’s seen left-wing groups chase away potential young recruits by coming down way too hard on them the first time they say something that offends a marginalized group — which is bound to happen, because marginalized groups have been marginalized; if you don’t belong to the group, you probably have never been taught how to consider their point of view, and you won’t figure it out until you go through a certain amount of well-intentioned trial and error. In the long run, might it be more productive to point out and correct those errors in a nicer way?

I don’t want these kids to be more like Jon Chait. I sure as hell don’t want them to be less left-wing. I want them to be more left-wing. I want a left that can win, and there’s no way I can have that when the actually-existing left sheds potential allies at an impossible rate. But the prohibition against ever telling anyone to be friendlier and more forgiving is so powerful and calcified it’s a permanent feature of today’s progressivism. And I’m left as this sad old 33 year old teacher who no longer has the slightest fucking idea what to say to the many brilliant, passionate young people whose only crime is not already being perfect.

An interesting detail: In deBoer’s examples, the people coming down hard on the newcomers are themselves from privileged backgrounds, which suggests that a cycle-of-abuse thing might be going on: I got hazed when I joined the movement, so I’ll be damned if I let you get away with anything.

Like deBoer, Julian What’s-He-Doing-At-the-Cato-Institute Sanchez starts with an accurate critique of Chait:

For people accustomed to seeing their opinions greeted with everything from dismissive condescension to harassment and death threats, a successful writer complaining from a perch at New York magazine about his friends being “bludgeoned… into despondent silence”—because people are mean on social media—simply sounded whiny.  Chait also moves a bit too seamlessly from real, honest-to-God censorship by public institutions to more informal social pressure in a way that makes it sound like he’s conflating them—claiming that criticism is somehow tantamount to censorship or repression.

But then he goes deeper. Every movement, Sanchez says, needs to watch out for a certain discussion-constraining dynamic: When the group’s extreme fringe takes its good ideas too far, it’s a thankless job for anyone within the movement to say, “Hey, wait a minute.” So instead, that criticism winds up being made by opponents, who just want to shut the group down. And once that starts happening, any insider who raises a similar point is siding with the enemy, and implicitly endorsing the whole ream of bogus criticisms enemies raise.

When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

You see this dynamic, in fact, with the response to Chait’s essay: Progressives who think maybe he’s kinda-sorta got a point quickly move on, ceding the field to those who want to revoke his ally card and conservatives eager to welcome him, at least for the next ten seconds, to “their” side. … And this makes it still easier to conclude that nothing interesting or valuable is lost by any self-censorship that may be occurring. We know what the counterargument looks like, after all: It’s the garbage those assholes are spouting. Discourse gets increasingly polarized and, in the process, stupider. Which, again, seems like a bad outcome even if you don’t particularly care whether Jon Chait gets his feelings hurt.

So, do I have anything to add to that? Maybe I’ll just kibbitz a little to resolve the apparent contradiction between two people I think are both right: Taub saying PC doesn’t exist and Waring talking about it as a real thing that has positive value.

Let’s start with the definition I gave in “A Conservative-to-English Lexicon“:

Political correctness. The bizarre liberal belief that whites, men, straights, Christians, the rich, and other Americans in positions of privilege should treat less privileged people with respect, even though such people have no power to force them to.

Removing the snark: political correctness is the attempt to extend to powerless people the same kind of courtesy that powerful people can take for granted.

Just as an example, suppose you work for a large corporation and somehow find yourself talking to the Big Boss. Maybe you’re on an elevator together or standing in line next to him at the cafeteria, hard as that is to imagine. Naturally, the wheels in your head are spinning as you try to imagine his point of view, so that nothing you say or do will accidentally offend him. But if you were in a similar situation with a janitor or some other person of low rank, you probably wouldn’t work your empathy nearly so hard.

Maybe you should. Or maybe you should at least work your empathy harder than most of us usually do.

Extend that to groups. When you belong to a powerful group — say, men or whites or straights or something similarly normative in our culture — you can take for granted that nearly everyone you run into has a general appreciation of your point of view and knows better than to piss you off in obvious ways. Members of marginalized groups can’t assume that. They’re constantly being jostled or hassled or put on the spot; occasionally by haters, but more often by ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to think too hard about them. PC is the attempt to raise the overall level of consideration to the level that powerful groups take for granted.

That, I think, is the PC that Waring sees value in.

Taub, on the other hand, is talking not about PC as it would be defined by its practitioners, but about the undefined negative label that gets thrown around by critics. And she’s right: The most common usage of “political correctness” in the media is to label some issue as beneath my concern, because the people being offended or victimized or insulted aren’t people I care about, and aren’t powerful enough to make me care.

I think maybe I should add that usage to the Lexicon.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (11)

Am I Charlie? Should I Be?

January 12, 2015 – 9:47 am

Let me start by saying what should be obvious, something I hope will provoke no disagreement: Nothing that people say or write or draw should get them killed. Not by a government, a church, a political party, or offended individuals. No opinion or blasphemy or insult or truth or lie, no matter how it’s packaged or delivered, justifies violence.

In almost every case, the proper response to speech is speech, or perhaps a shocked or dignified silence. Truth is the best answer to lies, insight the proper response to fallacy. Sometimes an insult can be topped by a cleverer insult, and sometimes it’s wiser to walk away. If a comedian tells a cruel joke and the audience responds with stunned silence, justice has been served. No violence is necessary or called for or warranted. Say what you may, you don’t “have it coming”. As Hassen Chalghoumi, the Muslim imam of the Paris suburb Drancy said in response to the Charlie Hebdo killings:

We can argue over liberty, but when we’re in disagreement we respond to art with art, to wit with wit. We never respond to a drawing with blood. No! Never.

Even the classic exception — yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater — just calls for someone to put a hand over your mouth and hustle you out the door, maybe to face a misdemeanor charge that underlines the seriousness of the situation. No beat-down is necessary. No lengthy imprisonment. No execution.

Nothing you say or write or draw should get you killed.

My next point isn’t quite as obvious, but also shouldn’t be controversial: Some legal speech should be socially unacceptable. After Mel Gibson went on a drunken rant about the “fucking Jews”, he wasn’t imprisoned or assassinated, but his popularity took a dive. When Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson spewed a lot of demeaning nonsense about gays, blacks, and anyone who isn’t Christian, he was not arrested, but the show’s ratings dropped.

If I started sprinkling words like nigger and faggot through all my conversations, I would be breaking no laws, but people would avoid me. If I talked like that in a workplace, to my co-workers or our employer’s customers, I’d probably get fired. That’s an entirely appropriate response that has nothing to do with free speech.

Free speech has social consequences. If you want to be protected against the nonviolent social consequences of what you say, you’re talking about something else, not free speech.

Free speech also doesn’t require anyone to sponsor my speech or provide a convenient platform for me to say things they find offensive. (That actually isn’t hypothetical; I occasionally get invitations to speak in public, which I believe would dry up if I made a habit of saying racist or otherwise hateful things.) So when A&E briefly decided to separate itself from Robertson (and then reversed that decision), that wasn’t about free speech. Neither were the examples raised by David Brooks Thursday in his NYT column. If the University of Illinois doesn’t want to pay a Catholic priest to preach his doctrine in a for-credit class as an adjunct professor (and then reverses that decision), that might violate academic freedom (depending on what academic freedom means in the tradition of that school), but not freedom of speech. If universities do or don’t want to host Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Bill Maher, that’s a sponsored-speech issue, not a free-speech issue.

If people respond to what I say by calling it “hate speech” or by calling me a racist or sexist or some other name I don’t like, my rights have not been violated. (No matter what Sarah Palin thinks the First Amendment says.) Those words don’t have some magical power to “silence” people. Free speech doesn’t end when I’m done speaking; other people get to speak too — about me, if they want.

So I should be free to say or write or draw what I want without violence, but everybody else should be free to argue with me or insult me or shun me, if that seems appropriate to them. And if your response to me seems over-the-top to some third person, he or she should be free to criticize or insult or shun you too. That’s how freedom works.

So am I Charlie? After 9-11, Le Monde titled an editorial “Nous sommes tous Américains” — we are all Americans. For decades, the French had resented being in the shadow of American power, and had been reluctant allies at best. But in 9-11 Le Monde saw a violation of the civilized principles France and America share, and realized that what had happened to us could happen to them. So they put aside any petty urge to gloat over our misfortune and instead chose to identify with us: In the aftermath of 9-11, we were all Americans, even if we happened to be French.

In the same spirit, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has people all over the world saying “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie. (Wednesday, it led to a Le Monde op-ed by American ambassador Jane Hartley gratefully recalling “Nous sommes tous Américains”.) But are we really Charlie? Should we be?

There are a lot of ways in which we are all Charlie, or wish we had it in us to be Charlie. Charlie Hebdo is a satirical magazine that refused to back down when it was threatened or even attacked. (It’s still not backing down; the next issue will have a million-copy run.) All of us want to speak freely, and want to identify with people who stand up to intimidation and bullying, even if we don’t always stand up ourselves. Nobody wants to see the bullies win.

To that end, a lot of web sites have been re-posting the Charlie cartoons that offended Muslims (with translations at Vox), and are presumably the ones that 12 people died for. If anybody thinks that murder is an effective way to suppress cartoons, they should find out how wrong they are. Here’s one:

“Muhammad Overwhelmed by Fundamentalists” says the headline, and Vox has a red-faced Muhammad saying “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” That sentiment would also fit well in Jesus’ mouth, IMHO, and would make the cartoon funny, if that’s what it really said. I could imagine such a cartoon in The Onion.

But something isn’t quite right about Vox‘s translation, because idiot is a perfectly fine French word, and Muhammad isn’t saying it. French has never been my subject, but after a little poking around online, I’m suspecting that cons is actually closer to cunts, which changes the impact considerably. (That’s also the translation favored by Saturn’s Repository.)

Then there’s the cartoon I won’t re-post, but The Hooded Utilitarian did: the one that turns the Boko Haram sex slaves into welfare queens. Is that supposed to be funny?

The American media has been portraying Charlie Hebdo almost as a French equivalent of irreverent American publications like The Onion or Mad, but it really isn’t. Something much darker has been going on. Charlie wasn’t just trying to be funny without worrying who it offended; it was trying to offend people for the sake of offending them, while maybe incidentally being funny. And although you can find examples here and there of attacks on Catholics or Jews, it put special effort into offending Muslims.

Which leads to the next question: If Charlie Hebdo was attacked for baiting Muslims, should those of us who find ourselves identifying with Charlie carry on its mission by doing our own Muslim baiting?

For me, that’s where Je suis Charlie starts to break down. Glenn Greenwald makes the obvious comparison:

[I]t is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights.

Greenwald (who is of Jewish heritage but was not raised in any organized religion) illustrates that point by posting an ugly series of anti-Semitic cartoons and asking: “Is it time for me to be celebrated for my brave and noble defense of free speech rights?”

Punching down. Humor works best as a weapon of the weak against the powerful. But when the powerful make fun of the weak — like when popular high school jocks trip the new kid into a mud puddle and laugh — it soon stops being humorous and turns ugly.

Sometimes telling the weak from the powerful is tricky. When Rush Limbaugh plays “Barack the Magic Negro” on his show, is he a free citizen lampooning a powerful politician, or a rich and influential white celebrity telling American blacks that even the best of them don’t deserve his respect? I can imagine someone taking the first view, but the mere existence of the second restrains me from laughing.

In France, Muslims are not just a minority religion, they are an underclass. Many come from former French colonies like Algeria, and work low-status jobs for considerably less than the average French wage. Whatever other messages Charlie Hebdo‘s anti-Muslim cartoons might send, they also express the social power that educated white Frenchmen have over their darker-skinned menials. And that makes those drawings considerably less funny.

The Hooded Utilitarian sums up:

White men punching down is not a recipe for good satire, and needs to be called out. People getting upset does not prove that the satire was good. And, this is the hardest part, the murder of the satirists in question does not prove that their satire was good.

Satire, even bad satire or bigoted satire, is not something anybody should be killed for — or arrested or beaten up or vandalized for. I’m not making a both-sides-are-wrong point, because the wrong on one side is completely out of scale with the other. But that doesn’t mean I want to celebrate anti-Muslim bigotry.

So in some ways I want to be Charlie and in other ways I don’t. I hope that if anyone ever tries to intimidate me out of speaking my mind, I will be as courageous as the staff of Charlie Hebdo. I hope their successors remain free to print what they want, and that the people who appreciate their work remain free to buy it. But I can’t endorse what they published. All speech should be legal and free from violence, but some should be socially unacceptable.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , , | Comments (26)

Will Republicans Ever Have a Sister Souljah Moment?

January 5, 2015 – 8:23 am

Now that he’s under duress, Steve Scalise will denounce David Duke. But when it mattered, he courted Duke’s racist voters. Will a Republican ever intentionally offend extremists in the base to gain credibility with the center?

Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise is the new member of the Republican House leadership, replacing Eric Cantor, who lost his primary to a Koch-brothers candidate. Scalise is supposed to be the link between the leadership and the GOP’s extreme right wing, a role he appears to be good at.

But a funny thing happened: A blogger* (Lamar White Jr.) did some digging and found out that in 2002, then-state-rep Scalise was “an honored guest and speaker at an international conference of white supremacist leaders.” The group was the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a hate group established by KKK-Grand-Wizard-turned-Republican-politician David Duke.

Now Scalise says he doesn’t remember the event (which an aide said it was “highly likely” he had attended), and there’s a complicated version of the story in which it’s all a big misunderstanding; he just happened to be speaking at the same hotel at the same time to a lot of the same people. (Under further investigation, this version is falling apart.) Scalise claims he wouldn’t have spoken to EURO if he’d known what they were. He mentions giving hundreds of speeches with just one staffer, implying that the EURO gig just slipped through the cracks somehow.

But that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test. Duke was not an inconsequential figure in Louisiana politics in 2002. In 1991 he had stunned the state Republican Party by out-polling the establishment Republican candidate in the primary and winding up in a run-off for governor. (In the run-off, a national controversy in which Duke’s Klan-leader past was a major issue, he got a majority of the white vote and 39% statewide. If the Voting Rights Act of 1965 hadn’t enfranchised blacks, Duke would have become governor.)

In his early campaigns, Scalise at times consciously courted Duke voters. A Roll Call article from 1999 reported on a congressional race Duke was considering:

Another potential candidate, state Rep. Steve Scalise (R), said he embraces many of the same “conservative” views as Duke, but is far more viable. … “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”

Three years later, Scalise couldn’t have just not noticed that David Duke was leading EURO now, or not known what that meant.

The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler makes the right point: The problem this incident illustrates isn’t that Scalise himself is or was a white supremacist — he probably isn’t and wasn’t. But (especially in the South) white racists have become a key component of the Republican base, one that a canny politician has to court, even if he can’t publicly endorse their ideology.

if in 1999 you said “the first and most important thing” about Duke was merely that he couldn’t get elected, rather than his despicable racism, it says something important about the voters you were trying not to offend. Many of those voters are still alive today.

In Democratic circles, you frequently hear talk about a “Sister Souljah moment“, which has been defined as “a key moment when the candidate takes what at least appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes in their party”. The paradigmic SSM was when candidate Bill Clinton denounced statements by black rapper Sister Souljah, saying “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”

But SSMs only happen on the Left. (The article I took that definition from discussed Mitt Romney’s missed opportunity for an SSM, when he failed to denounce Rush Limbaugh’s grotesque slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke, saying only that slut was “not the language I would have used“. The substance of Limbaugh’s comments was apparently fine with Mitt; only his language was objectionable.) When the national media gets focused on an issue like Scalise’s EURO speech, conservative politicians can be cornered into rejecting an extremist like David Duke or Cliven Bundy — and can’t be cornered into rejecting Rush Limbaugh, no matter he says or does — but no Republican creates such moments to demonstrate his or her reasonableness to the moderate voter.

So no Republican presidential candidate — not even a so-called “moderate” like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie — is going to confront conservative extremists with reasonable positions and intentionally get himself booed.** No one is going to tell CPAC that the party needs to move to the center, or endorse background checks in front of the NRA, or defend church-and-state separation at the Values Voters Summit, or confront the Energy Alliance with the facts of climate science, or tell white racists that he really isn’t interested in their support.

Instead, if candidates don’t feel comfortable endorsing extremist views outright, they will dog-whistle to these groups, as Scalise did to EURO in 2002***, or Ronald Reagan did to white racists in 1980. They’ll present their conservative bona fides to CPAC, defend “constitutional rights” to the NRA, endorse “traditional values” to the values voters, identify with “sound science” in front of the Energy Alliance, and talk to white racists about the deficiencies of “inner city culture”.

Everyone in the room will know what those words mean. The extremists will come out feeling that the candidate agrees with them in his heart, but his agreement will be deniable in front of the general public.

Maybe someday there will be Sister Souljah moment on the Right. But not yet. The crazies are too important a constituency, so all serious Republican candidates have to pander to them.

* Can we finally put to bed the canard popular among mainstream journalists that they do all the investigative reporting, while bloggers just bloviate based on mainstream journalists’ discoveries? Bloggers may not have access to anonymous “highly placed sources” and can’t score interviews with Dick Cheney, but collectively we plow through a lot of original source documents. White apparently rummaged through the online archives of the white-supremacist Stormfront group. I doubt he had to elbow any Washington Post reporters out of the way.

** Romney did construct a reverse-SSM when he intentionally evoked boos from an NAACP gathering, thereby proving to extremists in his own party that he would stand up to black leaders.

*** According to a contemporary Stormfront account, Scalise didn’t directly endorse white supremacy at the EURO meeting. (But if Scalise thought he was speaking to some other group, that distinction apparently was lost on the Stormfront commenter, whose subject-line says “EURO/New Orleans 2002”.) Instead, he spoke about a topic white supremacists would appreciate: government favoritism to blacks.

Representative Scalise brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (1)

This Time, Will the Outrage Matter?

December 1, 2014 – 10:12 am

Objective people could come to different conclusions about Darren Wilson’s guilt. But no one can argue objectively that the investigation of Michael Brown’s death was impartial and conducted appropriately.

Monday night, after Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown — my Facebook news feed exploded with anger: Wilson got away with murder. Police have free rein to keep shooting young black men. Black lives don’t count. And much more.

I had heard similar outrage when Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free. And yet, nothing changed; if it had, we wouldn’t be doing this all over again, would we? Will anything change this time? Or will we be right back here in another few months — another unarmed black youth killed by a cop or vigilante, who faces no substantive consequences?

After Trayvon, we already know how the nothing-changes path looks: Rather than evidence of systemic dysfunction, the case becomes an identity marker in the endless Red/Blue partisan battle: George Zimmerman is a racist murderer, or Trayvon Martin was a thug who got what was coming to him. There seems to be no objective truth; you just pick your side and wave its flag. To one side, the martyrdom of an innocent motivates change. To the other, failure of yet another an attempt to railroad a good man is proof that the system works, but just barely; give an inch, and the next time the grievance industry wins.

It’s already easy to see how that could happen again. If I had a different batch of Facebook friends, no doubt my news feed would have exploded with reactions of a different flavor: I always knew there was nothing to that case. It was obvious a bunch of the witnesses were lying, and when the grand jury had all the evidence in front of it, they agreed. What a shame Officer Wilson decided to resign — all the liars who smeared him should be prosecuted for perjury. The whole thing was all just an excuse to riot.

If we want anything different to happen this time, I think we need to re-establish the notion that there is an objective truth to this matter — the kind that persuades the uncommitted and converts some of the opposition — and that objectively, the system did not work. More than that, we need to argue that the reasons it did not work are not specific to the details of the Brown shooting; the same reasons will continue to endanger innocent people until something changes.

As in every attempt to speak the truth, this means choosing our words carefully, rather than saying whatever it feels good to say. That’s what I’m going to try to do.

Here’s my best statement of what went wrong: The process was rigged to get Darren Wilson off. And the same forces that created this rigged process will still be there for the next case.

Notice what I didn’t say: that Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown. I didn’t say it because (although I suspect it) I don’t actually know that it’s true. But I have no doubt whatsoever that the process was rigged, and I believe that any person who looks at the situation objectively will have to agree.

In refusing to say that Wilson murdered Brown, I am also refusing to get into the minutia of the evidence — which witnesses were and weren’t believable, what the autopsy or the forensic evidence said, and so on. That’s one prime way that the Red/Blue debate goes nowhere: by producing fractal he-said/she-said arguments that spin off ever-smaller he-said/she-said arguments, until the larger point the case exemplifies is lost.*

You don’t have to go into any of that to see that the process was rigged at two levels:

  • The Ferguson police were more focused on getting Wilson off than finding the truth.
  • The prosecutor subverted the ordinary grand jury process in Wilson’s favor.

The police. The Washington Post outlined the ways that crime-scene protocols were ignored in gathering the initial evidence:

When Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson left the scene of the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the officer returned to the police station unescorted, washed blood off his hands and placed his recently fired pistol into an evidence bag himself. … the officers who interviewed Wilson immediately after the shooting did not tape the conversations. The [grand jury] transcripts also showed that an investigator from the medical examiner’s office opted not to take measurements at the crime scene and arrived there believing that what happened between Brown and Wilson was “self-explanatory.’’

In addition, the Ferguson police violated their internal protocol by not creating a use-of-force report. As a result, Officer Wilson had the time to concoct an account of the shooting that covered all the points necessary to avoid guilt without directly contradicting the undeniable physical evidence. (Again, we do not know that he did so — perhaps his hard-to-believe story is actually true — we only know that the Ferguson police gave him that opportunity by violating all their usual procedures.)

If I had any temptation to give the Ferguson police the benefit of the doubt — maybe they were just so shocked that one of their own could be a suspect that they forgot how to do their jobs — it vanished when the police started acting as the unofficial Darren Wilson Public Relations Department. As a Justice Department spokesman put it: “There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.” At a time when the police were still withholding the name of the officer and the number of shots fired, they released video of Brown appearing to steal cigars from a convenience store, and leaked that the autopsy had shown THC in his bloodstream. As for the false rumor (with fake photo**, no less) that Wilson had suffered a fractured eye socket — we have no way of knowing whether that came from police or not.

The prosecutor. In the day-to-day course of their jobs, prosecutors work hand-in-glove with police. So if the police have circled the wagons around one of their own, it takes a brave local prosecutor to go against them.

That’s why Governor Nixon was urged to appoint a special prosecutor, one who had no prior relationship with either Michael Brown or the Ferguson police. He refused, saying:

There is a well-established process by which a prosecutor can recuse themselves from a pending investigation, and a special prosecutor be appointed.  Departing from this established process could unnecessarily inject legal uncertainty into this matter and potentially jeopardize the prosecution.

In other words, procedural abnormalities that worked in Officer Wilson’s favor were fine, but any that might counter that bias would “inject legal uncertainty”.

As a result, Prosecutor Bob McCulloch engineered something that bore no resemblance to a typical grand jury.

The ordinary purpose of a grand jury is to determine whether probable cause exists to move on to a trial. In other words: Does the prosecution have a case that would be convincing in the absence of any defense rebuttal? For this reason, a grand jury investigation is entirely the prosecutor’s show; he is under no obligation to present evidence that favors the suspect, or to challenge the testimony of witnesses against the suspect.

As Justice Scalia (of all people) wrote in a different case:

It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. … As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.

But the ordinary grand jury process assumes the prosecutor is motivated to get an indictment; it completely misfires if his intention is not to get an indictment.

Instead, McCulloch ran the equivalent of a trial, but one that had only a defense attorney, not a prosecutor. Law Professor Marjorie Cohn explained:

[McCulloch] put the grand jury in the role of being a trier of fact, which is not its role. The grand jury was put in the position of basically being a jury, but in a one-sided, closed proceeding.

Witnesses whose testimony indicated that Wilson was not in danger, that Brown was far away and surrendering when Wilson gunned him down, were grilled hard. In McCulloch’s words, they were “confronted with the inconsistencies and conflict between their statements and the physical evidence”.

But one witness was treated with unusual deference: Officer Wilson himself. His unusual story — in which Brown does everything he can to goad Wilson into shooting him — was not challenged in any way. MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Bloom tweeted that the cross-examination “Should have been a grueling session, not the tea party the transcript shows.” She focused on the conflict between Wilson’s statements about Brown’s attack and his incredible strength, and Wilson’s complete lack of injury when examined afterwards.

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi suggests another opening that a serious cross-examination might have pursued:

Wilson’s description of Brown as a “demon” with superhuman strength and unremitting rage, and his description of the neighborhood as “hostile,” illustrate implicit racial bias that taints use-of-force decisions. These biases surely contribute to the fact that African Americans are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than whites in the U.S., but the statement’s racial implications remained unexamined.

The icing on this misshapen cake was identified by Lawrence O’Donnell: The grand jury was misled about the law. Vox summaries:

Before Wilson testified to the grand jury on September 16, prosecutors gave grand jurors an outdated statute that said police officers can shoot a suspect that’s simply fleeing. This statute was deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1985; the court ruled that a fleeing suspect must, at least in a police officer’s reasonable view, pose a dangerous threat to someone or have committed a violent felony to justify a shooting.

Like the Ferguson police, McCulloch also joined the Wilson public-relations effort. Repeated leaks from the grand jury were all favorable to Wilson. His public statement announcing the non-indictment — itself a nearly unprecedented event — “read like a closing argument for the defense” according to a University of Missouri law professor.

His release of the grand jury transcripts — also highly unusual — merely reinforced the need for a trial. As The New Republic‘s Noam Scheiber put it:

The problem with this is that we already have a forum for establishing the underlying facts of a case—and, no less important, for convincing the public that justice is being served in a particular case. It’s called a trial. It, rather than the post-grand jury press conference, is where lawyers typically introduce mounds of evidence to the public, litigate arguments extensively, and generally establish whether or not someone is guilty of a crime.

Objective people could come to different conclusions about Wilson’s guilt. They might disagree about which witnesses were credible, and envision the scene differently. But no one can argue objectively the investigation of Brown’s death was impartial and conducted appropriately.

So what if the process was rigged? If you believe Wilson was justified, you may not care that Michael Brown’s killing was never impartially investigated. The reason you should is that police killings and other police violence against unarmed victims in questionable circumstances is not rare in America.

No one keeps track of the exact number, but at least 400 Americans are killed by police each year, compared to (for example) six in Germany in 2011. No one knows how many of these shootings were of unarmed and otherwise unthreatening people, but now that the world is filling up with cameras, we’re seeing more and more videos of such cases. (Conor Friedersdorf collects several.)

You and I weren’t the only ones watching the rigged process that protected Darren Wilson. Police all over the country were watching with great interest. And they learned that if they over-react and kill someone — perhaps particularly if they kill a young black man, but more generally as well — they are very unlikely to be held accountable. Their colleagues will protect them, and prosecutors will not want to take a stand against them.

Several reforms are needed, which Friedersdorf lists: lapel cameras for police, dashboard cameras for police cars, independent prosecutors in cases where police are suspects, and more.

Wisconsin has such an independent-prosecutor law, probably because that state had the perfect poster case: Michael Bell, a white retired Air Force colonel whose son was shot in the head by police in 2004 after his hands had been cuffed behind his back. With the Bell case in front of them, even white citizens understood that unjustified police violence could happen to them.

Black citizens had always known.

* It’s worth pointing out that endless argument is not a draw; it’s a victory for the side that believes nothing should change.

** The fake photo trick was also used in the Trayvon Martin case.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (7)

5 Lessons to Remember as Ferguson Fades into History

September 1, 2014 – 9:53 am

If you learned anything from Ferguson, how are you planning to hang on to it?

Remember the days right after the Newtown Massacre? For a week, maybe two, it seemed like the country had finally woken up and nothing would ever be the same. Twenty innocent children were dead, along with six adults who tried to protect them. And it was our fault. Mass shootings had been happening more and more often for years, and — unlike Australia, which had the same problem and solved it — we’d done nothing. But now that was all going to change.

Be a Target(ed) shopper.

It didn’t. Within months, all the vested interests that benefit from our crazy lack of gun laws had re-asserted themselves, and nothing happened. Or rather, things continued getting worse, with the momentum still on the side of the guns-everywhere movement. Instead of trying to get rid of assault rifles (or at least keep them away from the mentally ill), we’re debating whether or not you can hang one over your shoulder while you shop for Oreos. (The ad to the right is a parody, but the picture is genuine.)

So now we’ve had Ferguson, another national trauma that has mesmerized the media and caused a number of people to see the light on some important issues. Maybe someday we’ll look back and see the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests as a tipping point, a moment when things started to turn around. Or maybe we have just briefly tossed in our sleep and will soon settle back down.

In part, that decision is up to all of us. Will we let the things we’ve learned these last few weeks slip away like the trig identities we crammed into our heads for the big math test? Or will we hang on to our new understandings and not settle back into the same old conversations? Will we demand that our news sources and our political representatives recognize these realities? Or not?

The first step in hanging on to new knowledge is spelling it out clearly. Here’s my attempt to isolate five simple Ferguson lessons that we shouldn’t forget or let the country forget. I admit they’re not rocket science. If they were, we’d already be forgetting them.

1. Police mistreat black people. It’s not a fantasy created by “the grievance industry” and it’s not a few isolated incidents caused by a handful of bad apples, it’s a pattern.

Some parts of the national media have finally started covering it like a pattern, and drawing attention to incidents that by themselves wouldn’t usually get national attention. Just this week I ran across the following stories.

  • New information the John Crawford shooting came out. On August 5, a 22-year-old black man was killed by police in a WalMart in Ohio because he was carrying an air rifle that he had picked up from a shelf. We had already heard from his girl friend, who was talking to him on the phone as he was being shot. Tuesday, we heard that the shooting was captured on WalMart’s surveillance video. It has not been released (though information favorable to the police has been), but Crawford’s parents and their attorney have been allowed to see it. The attorney said that Crawford was facing away from officers when they killed him, and that “John was doing nothing wrong in Walmart, nothing more, nothing less than shopping.” One of the officers involved in the shooting is back on the job. (A fake news site’s story of a second WalMart shooting got taken seriously by a number of people, but didn’t actually happen.)
  • Chris Lollie was arrested and tased by police in St. Paul while he was waiting for his kids to get out of school. He was trying to walk away from police when they got violent with him. The incident was recorded on his cellphone when it happened in January, but only became public recently after charges against Lollie were dropped and he got his phone back. St. Paul police have defended their officers’ actions, which is hard to imagine as I watch the tape.
  • Kametra Barbour and her four young children were pulled over in Texas, even though their car was a different color than the one police received a complaint about. The police dashcam video shows the terrified woman being forced at gunpoint to walk backwards towards the police cruiser, protesting all the while that they’re making her leave her frightened children alone in the car. The confrontation doesn’t end until her 6-year-old son also gets out of the car and walks toward police with his hands up. (What if he’d come out some other way?) “Do they look young to you?” one officer finally asks the other.
  • A week and a half ago TV producer Charles Belk was walking back to his car from a Beverly Hills restaurant when his evening took a bad turn. “I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded…..All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong ‘tall, bald head, black male,’ … ‘fitting the description.’ ” It was six hours before his lawyer convinced police to watch the surveillance video and recognize that the bank robber’s accomplice was obviously not Belk. According to his lawyer (as summarized by ThinkProgress) “many other individuals who found themselves in Belk’s situation without his resources would likely have been detained at least until Monday”.
  • Rev. Madison T. Shockley II published similar stories from his own life, his father’s, and his son’s. “I fit the description. I was a black man.”

What makes these stories hit home is that they’re not about purse-snatchers who got roughed up a little too much. They’re about people who did nothing and suffered for it.

I know blacks must look at this lesson and say, “Well, duh.” But for the most part, whites — and the media that caters to whites — have refused to take it seriously until these last few weeks. Many of us came to a similar insight after Trayvon Martin, and then backslid into denial. Let’s not do it again.

2. Police kill a lot of people in America. Responding to the racism charge, some conservatives put forward a bizarre police-kill-white-people-too case centered on the shooting of Dillon Taylor in Salt Lake City — as if that should make everybody more sanguine about Michael Brown or John Crawford. But if white deaths are what it takes to get a certain segment of the public excited about police violence, then let’s publicize them. Because whether you break things down by race or not, there’s a problem.

You can say policing is a tough, dangerous job — and it is. But somehow police in other countries manage to do that job without killing nearly so many people. No government agency totals the exact number — it’s like we don’t really want to know — but various available statistics point to around 400 police killings a year in the United States. Here’s how that stacks up internationally.

If you want some real contrast, look at Iceland, where last December police shot and killed someone for the first time in the country’s history. Admittedly, Iceland is a thousand times smaller than the U.S., but even so, at our rate you’d expect Icelandic police to shoot someone dead every two or three years, rather than once since World War II.

3. We need better ways to hold police accountable. One inescapable feature of the Michael Brown investigation is that the Ferguson police are an interested party, and are not simply seeking to bring the truth to light. (For example, the only detail they were willing to release from Brown’s autopsy was that he tested positive for marijuana. And they released a video that they claimed was Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store, but not an incident report on his death.) It’s crazy to believe that they — or a prosecutor who works hand-in-glove with them every day — will investigate Brown’s death fairly and see that justice is done.

And yet, that is the standard situation whenever a citizen feels mistreated: Police will investigate themselves and find that whatever they did was justified. After police killed his white son, Michael Bell did the research:

In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.

Police will also control — and distort — the flow of official information to the media. Reporters, in turn, depend on police leaks for their scoops, so they are often active participants in smearing victims. (It’s the same pattern we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when reporters whose careers depended on their relationships with Bush administration sources published whatever they were told as if it were fact.)

Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel (whose interview with Chris Hayes starts around the 14-minute mark) suggests a common-sense reform:

There should be a civilian review board in Ferguson and in every city in America. And what that means is that you can’t allow the police to investigate the police. You have to have independent civilians looking at the complaint. We need a permanent special prosecutor for police misconduct so we can finally get accountability.

In April, Wisconsin passed a law requiring an outside investigation whenever someone dies in police custody. Every state should follow.

There has been some limited accountability for the most outrageous police behavior during the Ferguson protests. Dan Page, the frighteningly paranoid St. Louis officer I described last week, has been allowed to retire; he’ll get full pension and benefits, but at least he’s not wearing a badge any more. Ray (“I will fucking kill you”) Albers was forced to resign. Matthew (“These protesters should be put down like a rabid dog the first night”) Pappert was fired. Chris Hayes asks the right follow-up question:

The national media came to one (in some ways) random metro area suburb, St. Louis Country, with a hundred cameras for two weeks. And you’ve got at least four police officers essentially caught on camera doing really awful things, and a bunch more unnamed. It was almost a random audit. And the thing I can’t help thinking is “OK. There’s two ways to interpret this. Is this area particularly bad in terms of the quotient of police officers who act like this? Or is this just normal, and we just happened to have the cameras pointed there?”

What if we put the cameras right on the police? Events in Ferguson have added momentum to the notion that all police cars should have dash-cams and all officers should wear cameras on their uniforms. Private sources have donated enough body cameras for every Ferguson officer to wear one. Let’s see if they do.

4. White privilege is real. Stephen Colbert advised the Ferguson protesters to learn from Cliven Bundy and his friends in the militia movement.

By the way, black people, why can’t you be more like these guys? They were armed, and they dared the cops to shot them, and nothing happened. Just figure out whatever was different about them, and you’ll be fine.

But being treated with more respect by police is just one aspect of white privilege, which affects everything from hailing a cab to whether your resume will get you an interview. Pre-Ferguson, most whites reacted to talk about white privilege as if it were just an Ivy League way to call them racists or tell them to STFU.

But recently more whites have started to get it and explain it to others. One of the most approachable explanations is in “What My Bike Has Taught Me About White Privilege” posted by Pastor Jeremy Dowsett on his blog A Little More Sauce. Dowsett, who is white but has non-white children, compared being black in America to his own experience riding a bicycle on the busy streets of Lansing.

[Bike riders] have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I’m on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.

Now most people in cars are not intentionally aggressive toward me. But even if all the jerks had their licenses revoked tomorrow, the road would still be a dangerous place for me. Because the whole transportation infrastructure privileges the automobile. It is born out of a history rooted in the auto industry that took for granted that everyone should use a car as their mode of transportation. It was not built to be convenient or economical or safe for me.

And so people in cars—nice, non-aggressive people—put me in danger all the time because they see the road from the privileged perspective of a car.

Similarly, our laws promise racial equality and not all whites are racists, but our society was built with whites in mind. Systems that seem perfectly natural and transparent if you’re white are problematic if you’re not.

Elaborating on Dowsett’s metaphor from my biking perspective: I can’t count how many times I’ve nearly fallen off a no-shoulder country road because car drivers have no idea how loud a “light” beep of the horn sounds to someone not enclosed in a glass-and-metal bubble. (Apparently they worry that their internal-combustion engine might “sneak up” on me because it seems so quiet to them.) Keep that in mind the next time you offer a “reasonable” criticism of the black experience.

Jon Stewart’s epic response to conservative fury that blacks “make everything about race” is worth watching from the beginning, but it came down to this:

Race is there, and it is a constant. You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how f*cking exhausting it is living it.

How are we whites going to keep this increased consciousness of privilege from fading away? Christian Lander, who writes the blog Stuff White People Like, suggests making it the next ice-bucket challenge. He observes that what whites really need to raise their awareness of (far more than any deadly disease) is what it’s like to be a black teen. So he proposes the BT Challenge: Video yourself doing something that is dangerous for a black teen — like, say, walking to the convenience store for Skittles — and post it on social media.

5. We need to de-militarize our society. Americans from coast to coast were repulsed and alarmed by the images of mine-resistant military vehicles roaming American streets with camo-clad police snipers perched on top of them. It was way beyond ironic that equipment created to defend an occupying army in a guerrilla war was being deployed against American citizens protesting excessive force from police.

The militarization of police has been roundly denounced — most effectively by John Oliver — and it deserved every word of that denunciation.

That public outcry has even started to have some effect. Anchorage police have rescinded their request for military vehicles. Claire McCaskill will be chairing Senate hearings on police militarization.

But while MRAPs are obviously over the top, Ladd Everitt from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence told Business Insider that some advanced weaponry is justified by the level of armament police might face (from someone other than mostly non-violent protesters).

 “We see this as a product of the continuing arms race between law enforcement and civilians that has been going on for decades.” Everitt said the increasingly sophisticated weaponry being sold to U.S. civilians is forcing police to keep up, with both sides purchasing ever more powerful weapons. The arms race means “police officers have legitimate fears about the nature of the firepower they are confronting on a daily basis,” he said.

So the problem isn’t just the militarization of American police, it’s the militarization of American society.

That puts a different spin on the gap in police killings between the U.S. and every other first-world nation. American police are on a hair trigger because, in a country with over 300 million firearms, the possibility that a suspect might start shooting at them is never far from their minds. Over the course of a long career, it just doesn’t seem safe to take the more laid-back approach of a German or English policeman.

Bear that in mind the next time the NRA frames guns-everywhere as purely a question of personal rights. No matter how responsible and well-intentioned that gun-toting Oreo shopper might be, his presence raises the temperature in the room. All of us — and especially police — have to shorten our response times, given how fast a situation can turn deadly. So whether I choose to carry a gun or not, that raised room temperature might get me killed someday.

And that brings me full circle, back to gun control. Remember Newtown?

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (14)