Michael Brown, and Now Eric
Garner
At some point between the
moment a Missouri grand jury refused to indict a police officer who had shot
and killed Michael Brown on a Ferguson street and the moment a New York grand
jury refused to indict a police officer who choked and killed Eric Garner on a
Staten Island sidewalk — on video, as he struggled to utter the words, “I can’t
breathe!” — a counternarrative to this nation’s calls for change has taken
shape.
This narrative paints the
police as under siege and unfairly maligned while it admonishes — and, in some
cases, excoriates — those demanding changes in the wake of the Ferguson
shooting. (Those calling for change now include the president of the United
States and the United States attorney general, I might add.)
The argument is that this is
not a perfect case, because Brown — and, one would assume, now Garner — isn’t a
perfect victim and the protesters haven’t all been perfectly civil, so
therefore any movement to counter black oppression that flows from the case is
inherently flawed. But this is ridiculous and reductive, because it fails to
acknowledge that the whole system is imperfect and rife with flaws. We don’t
need to identify angels and demons to understand that inequity is hell.
The
Mike-or-Eric-as-faces-of-black-oppression arguments swing too wide, and they
miss. So does the protesters-as-movement-killers argument.
The responses so far have only
partly been specific to a particular case. Much of it is about something larger
and more general: racial inequality and criminal justice. People want to be
assured of equal application of justice and equal — and appropriate — use of
police force, and to know that all lives are equally valued.
The data suggests that, in the
nation as a whole, that isn’t so. Racial profiling is real. Disparate treatment
of black and brown men by police officers is real. Grotesquely disproportionate
numbers of killings of black men by the police are real.
No one denies that police
officers have hard jobs, but they volunteer to enter that line of work. There
is no draft. So these disparities cannot go unaddressed and uncorrected. To be
held in high esteem you must also be held to a higher standard.
And no one denies that
high-crime neighborhoods disproportionately overlap with minority
neighborhoods. But the intersections don’t stop there. Concentrated poverty plays
a consequential role. So does the school-to-prison pipeline. So do the scars of
historical oppression. In fact, these and other factors intersect to such a
degree that trying to separate any one — most often, the racial one — from the
rest is bound to render a flimsy argument based on the fallacy of discrete
factors.
Yet people continue to make
such arguments, which can usually be distilled to some variation of this: Black
dysfunction is mostly or even solely the result of black pathology. This
argument is racist at its core because it rests too heavily on choice and too
lightly on context. If you scratch it, what oozes out reeks of race-informed
cultural decay or even genetic deficiency and predisposition, as if America is
not the progenitor — the great-grandmother — of African-American violence.
And yes, racist is the word
that we must use. Racism doesn’t require the presence of malice, only the
presence of bias and ignorance, willful or otherwise. It doesn’t even require
more than one race. There are plenty of members of aggrieved groups who are
part of the self-flagellation industrial complex. They make a name (and a
profit) saying inflammatory things about their own groups, things that are full
of sting but lack context, things that others will say only behind tightly shut
doors. These are often people who’ve “made it” and look down their noses with
be-more-like-me disdain at those who haven’t, as if success were merely a
result of a collection of choices and not also of a confluence of
circumstances.
Today, too many people are
gun-shy about using the word racism, lest they themselves be called
race-baiters. So we are witnessing an assault on the concept of racism, an
attempt to erase legitimate discussion and grievance by degrading the language:
Eliminate the word and you elude the charge.
By endlessly claiming that the
word is overused as an attack, the overuse, through rhetorical sleight of hand,
is amplified in the dismissal. The word is snatched from its serious scientific
and sociological context and redefined simply as a weapon of argumentation, the
hand grenade you toss under the table to blow things up and halt the
conversation when things get too “honest” or “uncomfortable.”
But people will not fall for
that chicanery. The language will survive. The concept will not be corrupted.
Racism is a real thing, not because the “racial grievance industry” refuses to
release it, but because society has failed to eradicate it.
Racism is interpersonal and
structural; it is current and historical; it is explicit and implicit; it is
articulated and silent.
Biases are pervasive, but can
also be spectral: moving in and out of consideration with little or no notice,
without leaving a trace, even without our own awareness. Sometimes the only way
to see bias is in the aggregate, to stop staring so hard at a data point and
step back so that you can see the data set. Only then can you detect the trails
in the dust. Only then can the data do battle with denial.
I would love to live in a world
where that wasn’t the case. Even more, I would love my children to inherit a
world where that wasn’t the case, where the margin for error for them was the
same as the margin for error for everyone else’s children, where I could rest
assured that police treatment would be unbiased. But I don’t. Reality doesn’t
bend under the weight of wishes. Truth doesn’t grow dim because we squint.
We must acknowledge — with eyes
and minds wide open — the world as it is if we want to change it.
The activism that followed
Ferguson and that is likely to be intensified by what happened in New York
isn’t about making a martyr of “Big Mike” or “Big E” as much as it is about
making the most of a moment, counternarratives notwithstanding.
In this most trying of moments,
black men, supported by the people who understand their plight and feel their
pain, are saying to the police culture of America, “We can’t breathe!”
