Evergreen's Alan Nasser on last week's riots and everything else that is wrong in America
Hello all,
The discussion of the recent "riot" seems to have gone nowhere. For what it may be worth, here is why I think discussions of things like this are bound to be unproductive. Just about any violent confrontation between young people and cops, where events center around cops' treatment of an African American person, can be approached on any of a number of levels of generality. What has happened in this discussion is that comments are pitched at different levels of generality, such that a comment made at one level is responded to at a different level. This can only result in people talking past one another.
For example, in the previous paragraph I described the issue at a fairly high level of generality: "any violent confrontation between young people and cops, where events center around cops' treatment of an African American person". When the events of last week are described in this way, one simply *must* have reference to the Big Picture in order to do justice to the actual character of the event. Bruce Wilkerson wrote in an early post that one's knowledge that there is a conspicuous history of cops acting in a racist manner, that young people these days cannot look forward to a bright and successful future in the way that youth of my generation could (back in the '40s, '50s and 60s), that students are saddled with unparalled debt burdens that will weigh exceptionally heavily on them in years to come, that they live in a society whose leaders are commited to policies that guarantee permanent war, that economic debacle in the near future is not unlikely, etc. -- one's knowledge of all this must make a difference to how one thinks about the "riot".
In our saner moments, we all know this, at least implicitly. For example, it is common knowledge that in periods of economic recession, there is a tendency for rates of suicide, crime and domestic violence to rise. And the causal connection is not hard to discern. This is not to excuse domestic violence and other forms of crime, it is merely to recognize that the larger social and political context is directly relevant to the events in question. The latter are, after all, predictable given the former.
Now, regarding different levels of generality: we all acknowledge that while the maladies described above can indeed be predicted given knowledge of the Big Picture, what we cannot predict is precisely *who* will commit suicide, commit a crime, etc. The predictability of general *kinds* of behavior is compatible with the unpredictability of *individual* behaviors. But in the discussion I've read, folks go back and forth between on the one hand condemning and exonerating certain individuals, and on the other denouncing the *type* of thing that happened at the concert. We have enough knowledge of the relation between social conditions and aggregate behavior to understand that when a cop handcuffs a black man on the word of a hired "security" mercenary, on *suspicion* of a "misdemeanor", in the midst of a crowd of young people whose racial, social, and political consciousness is well above the average for their age group, and in the context of the Big Picture described above, -- in this kind of situation we don't need further empirical investigation in order to see that the stage is set for big trouble. If you lament the big trouble, lament it in the same way that you lament the rise in crime rates during a recession.
Another example of what I am talking about is also to be found in the newspaper: think about the increased incidence in shootings at schools. We know that young people these days are trying to make their way through life under increasingly stressful economic, political and social conditions. And it appears from the increasing school killings, and similar phenomena, that young people seem to respond to engulfingly stressful conditions and hopelessness about the future with acts of extreme violence. Add to this that the U.S. has the highest interpersonal violence rate in the industrialized world (Russia is the exception.), and unlike any European country, the U.S. state sets an example of how to deal with offense by executing, i.e. killing, people for alleged crimes, and you have not a sufficient, but surely a necessary condition for comprehending the school-killings phenomenon that is unique to the U.S.
A brief comment on the Lawyers Guild guy's comments on the police: these were very smart comments. Too often the police count on our ignorance of our rights. I'll bet that most readers of this post have been stopped by a police officer for allegedly speeding, and upon rolling down your window had the officer ask you "Do you know why I stopped you?" (S)he hopes you will say "Because I was speeding." But you have a right not to incriminate yourself. The officer, by asking that question, is hoping that you will forego your exercise of that right. There is a lesson to be learned from this.
Finally, I found it astounding that someone could suggest in a post to this discussion that those who oppose increased surveillance by placing cameras about the campus must be opposed to this because..... they have something to hide!! In recent years any number of once taken-for-granted Constitutional rights have been abolished (habeas corpus, among others) and the political powers that be have gained the "right" to snoop on us in ways that are unconstitutional. In this increasingly police-state context, we ought to oppose unqualifiedly any increase in surveillance. When the authorities act in extremist ways, our response must be comparably extreme.
To those who slogged through all this, thank you.
Best,
Alan
The discussion of the recent "riot" seems to have gone nowhere. For what it may be worth, here is why I think discussions of things like this are bound to be unproductive. Just about any violent confrontation between young people and cops, where events center around cops' treatment of an African American person, can be approached on any of a number of levels of generality. What has happened in this discussion is that comments are pitched at different levels of generality, such that a comment made at one level is responded to at a different level. This can only result in people talking past one another.
For example, in the previous paragraph I described the issue at a fairly high level of generality: "any violent confrontation between young people and cops, where events center around cops' treatment of an African American person". When the events of last week are described in this way, one simply *must* have reference to the Big Picture in order to do justice to the actual character of the event. Bruce Wilkerson wrote in an early post that one's knowledge that there is a conspicuous history of cops acting in a racist manner, that young people these days cannot look forward to a bright and successful future in the way that youth of my generation could (back in the '40s, '50s and 60s), that students are saddled with unparalled debt burdens that will weigh exceptionally heavily on them in years to come, that they live in a society whose leaders are commited to policies that guarantee permanent war, that economic debacle in the near future is not unlikely, etc. -- one's knowledge of all this must make a difference to how one thinks about the "riot".
In our saner moments, we all know this, at least implicitly. For example, it is common knowledge that in periods of economic recession, there is a tendency for rates of suicide, crime and domestic violence to rise. And the causal connection is not hard to discern. This is not to excuse domestic violence and other forms of crime, it is merely to recognize that the larger social and political context is directly relevant to the events in question. The latter are, after all, predictable given the former.
Now, regarding different levels of generality: we all acknowledge that while the maladies described above can indeed be predicted given knowledge of the Big Picture, what we cannot predict is precisely *who* will commit suicide, commit a crime, etc. The predictability of general *kinds* of behavior is compatible with the unpredictability of *individual* behaviors. But in the discussion I've read, folks go back and forth between on the one hand condemning and exonerating certain individuals, and on the other denouncing the *type* of thing that happened at the concert. We have enough knowledge of the relation between social conditions and aggregate behavior to understand that when a cop handcuffs a black man on the word of a hired "security" mercenary, on *suspicion* of a "misdemeanor", in the midst of a crowd of young people whose racial, social, and political consciousness is well above the average for their age group, and in the context of the Big Picture described above, -- in this kind of situation we don't need further empirical investigation in order to see that the stage is set for big trouble. If you lament the big trouble, lament it in the same way that you lament the rise in crime rates during a recession.
Another example of what I am talking about is also to be found in the newspaper: think about the increased incidence in shootings at schools. We know that young people these days are trying to make their way through life under increasingly stressful economic, political and social conditions. And it appears from the increasing school killings, and similar phenomena, that young people seem to respond to engulfingly stressful conditions and hopelessness about the future with acts of extreme violence. Add to this that the U.S. has the highest interpersonal violence rate in the industrialized world (Russia is the exception.), and unlike any European country, the U.S. state sets an example of how to deal with offense by executing, i.e. killing, people for alleged crimes, and you have not a sufficient, but surely a necessary condition for comprehending the school-killings phenomenon that is unique to the U.S.
A brief comment on the Lawyers Guild guy's comments on the police: these were very smart comments. Too often the police count on our ignorance of our rights. I'll bet that most readers of this post have been stopped by a police officer for allegedly speeding, and upon rolling down your window had the officer ask you "Do you know why I stopped you?" (S)he hopes you will say "Because I was speeding." But you have a right not to incriminate yourself. The officer, by asking that question, is hoping that you will forego your exercise of that right. There is a lesson to be learned from this.
Finally, I found it astounding that someone could suggest in a post to this discussion that those who oppose increased surveillance by placing cameras about the campus must be opposed to this because..... they have something to hide!! In recent years any number of once taken-for-granted Constitutional rights have been abolished (habeas corpus, among others) and the political powers that be have gained the "right" to snoop on us in ways that are unconstitutional. In this increasingly police-state context, we ought to oppose unqualifiedly any increase in surveillance. When the authorities act in extremist ways, our response must be comparably extreme.
To those who slogged through all this, thank you.
Best,
Alan