Can we talk about white supremacy for a sec?
(I am white, by the way.)
I owe most of my understanding of white supremacy to black people, including, in the past, Professor John H. Bracey Jr., and just today, Roger Wareham:
...[A]nd that’s the lesson that black people take out is that we’re born having committed a capital offense, which is breathing while black. And as the economic crisis in the United States worsens and people looking for explanations for why their lives are getting worse, the fallback in this country has always been that it’s black folks' fault.
I think one of the most important points I got from Professor Bracey is that the ideology of white supremacy distorts people's ability to correctly comprehend the world. He said, "We don't know who we are. We don't know who’s important and why they're important." (We in this case being Americans.)
White supremacy is, at the base, the ideology that white people's lives matter more than black (or brown or Native or Asian) lives. (Also that white people are smarter, better looking, harder working, more "civilized," and a bunch of other bull pucky, but all of those are in effect excuses to devalue black and brown and Native and Asian people's lives.) Which is why the movement's slogan is Black Lives Matter, and also why that slogan drives certain white people to distraction: it names the problem accurately.
As Marc Lamont Hill put it last week on Democracy Now,
If you have a criminal profile they say, well he was a bad guy. If you have a good - if you’re a "good guy," it still doesn’t matter. If you, if you stand still like Eric Garner, you get killed. If you run like Freddy Grey, you get killed. If your pants are down, like Trayvon, you die. If your pants are up, like Walter Scott, you die. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the problem isn’t people being killed, it’s the people who were rendered invisible at first, and then when they get seen and become legible they’re still nobody. That’s the problem.
After each shooting of a person of color by a police officer, you see people second-guessing everything that person did in the lead-up to the shooting, pointing out what they did "wrong", how they could have saved their own lives if they just behaved "correctly." Of course, some degree of racial prejudice underlies this -- how about the idea that "you have the right not to be killed" even if "it is done by... a policeman" (The Clash "Know Your Rights"), unless you pose an immediate and real threat the police officer's life (or another civilian's life).
Not unless you get out of your car and yell. Not unless you run away. Not unless you disobey an order. Not unless you obey and order and it still frightens the officer. Not unless you are black and therefore inherently criminal or even subhuman. Unless you are a real, immediate threat.
But underlying the urge to look for reasons also is the idea that the people we have given guns and badges and the sanction of the law to show up in crises should behave in sensible, understandable ways. We don't want to believe that police are killing civilians around the country for no good reasons, so we look for good reasons. We try to make sense of the senseless, and thus defend the indefensible.
In 1996, Arthur Miller wrote in a New Yorker article "Why I Wrote The Crucible", "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
It is a lot easier and more comfortable to believe that the police only use deadly force when they have to; when the deceased forced them to do so. Unfortunately, as video after video has demonstrated over the past couple years, to believe that is to incorrectly understand to the world.
As a final note: While in this essay I have addressed our country's culture of white supremacy and the resulting impunity for police violence against people of color, I likewise decry and denounce violence against police. It is possible -- and vital -- to be against both.
I owe most of my understanding of white supremacy to black people, including, in the past, Professor John H. Bracey Jr., and just today, Roger Wareham:
...[A]nd that’s the lesson that black people take out is that we’re born having committed a capital offense, which is breathing while black. And as the economic crisis in the United States worsens and people looking for explanations for why their lives are getting worse, the fallback in this country has always been that it’s black folks' fault.
I think one of the most important points I got from Professor Bracey is that the ideology of white supremacy distorts people's ability to correctly comprehend the world. He said, "We don't know who we are. We don't know who’s important and why they're important." (We in this case being Americans.)
White supremacy is, at the base, the ideology that white people's lives matter more than black (or brown or Native or Asian) lives. (Also that white people are smarter, better looking, harder working, more "civilized," and a bunch of other bull pucky, but all of those are in effect excuses to devalue black and brown and Native and Asian people's lives.) Which is why the movement's slogan is Black Lives Matter, and also why that slogan drives certain white people to distraction: it names the problem accurately.
As Marc Lamont Hill put it last week on Democracy Now,
If you have a criminal profile they say, well he was a bad guy. If you have a good - if you’re a "good guy," it still doesn’t matter. If you, if you stand still like Eric Garner, you get killed. If you run like Freddy Grey, you get killed. If your pants are down, like Trayvon, you die. If your pants are up, like Walter Scott, you die. It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the problem isn’t people being killed, it’s the people who were rendered invisible at first, and then when they get seen and become legible they’re still nobody. That’s the problem.
After each shooting of a person of color by a police officer, you see people second-guessing everything that person did in the lead-up to the shooting, pointing out what they did "wrong", how they could have saved their own lives if they just behaved "correctly." Of course, some degree of racial prejudice underlies this -- how about the idea that "you have the right not to be killed" even if "it is done by... a policeman" (The Clash "Know Your Rights"), unless you pose an immediate and real threat the police officer's life (or another civilian's life).
Not unless you get out of your car and yell. Not unless you run away. Not unless you disobey an order. Not unless you obey and order and it still frightens the officer. Not unless you are black and therefore inherently criminal or even subhuman. Unless you are a real, immediate threat.
But underlying the urge to look for reasons also is the idea that the people we have given guns and badges and the sanction of the law to show up in crises should behave in sensible, understandable ways. We don't want to believe that police are killing civilians around the country for no good reasons, so we look for good reasons. We try to make sense of the senseless, and thus defend the indefensible.
In 1996, Arthur Miller wrote in a New Yorker article "Why I Wrote The Crucible", "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
It is a lot easier and more comfortable to believe that the police only use deadly force when they have to; when the deceased forced them to do so. Unfortunately, as video after video has demonstrated over the past couple years, to believe that is to incorrectly understand to the world.
As a final note: While in this essay I have addressed our country's culture of white supremacy and the resulting impunity for police violence against people of color, I likewise decry and denounce violence against police. It is possible -- and vital -- to be against both.