race

Some Things I’ve Learned from Ferguson

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2014-09-09 Ferguson

A lot of the writing that has come out since Ferguson has focused on the disconnect between anger in black communities and apparent indifference in white communities. A lot of these articles have been unhelpful. They start with the premise that Michael Brown’s shooting was obviously illegal and immoral when the reality is that we don’t know. There are reasonable grounds to suspect the shooting was justified. From that erroneous premise, these pieces quickly conclude that the only reason for white people to remain silent on the issue is cowardice, racism, or both. This is unfair, often self-righteous, and never helpful.

The problem, I think, is that the shooting of Michael Brown was just a spark that ignited a powder keg. As a symbol, it’s potent, but in terms of understanding the real problem it’s a distraction. Not only because the events are unclear, but also because it puts focus on police-community relations, which are a small part of the real problem: the larger relationship between municipal governments and poor communities. The best article I’ve read on that is the Washington Posts’s How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. The story is relatively simple: fairly innocent violations that would be a speed bump to someone in the middle class are much more disrupting to people who don’t have the same kinds of safety nets and flexibility. These folks are easily trapped in a cycle of violations that are too expensive (literally, in terms of dollars) for them to escape. Meanwhile, the local governments profit from the unending cycle of fines and fees: “Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts.” Read the article, however, to truly understand the scale and perversity of the parasitical relationship between local governments and the populations they are supposed to serve.

It’s a serious problem and a serious injustice that underscores another criticism that I’ve seen liberals make of social conservatives. For all that social conservatives are worried about federal overreach, it’s historically federal or state governments that have stepped in to stop injustice perpetrated by state and local governments. Fear of federal tyranny seems utterly inexplicable in communities that have a history of seeing federal law defend them from local tyranny. Perversely, it doesn’t help that conservatives do see an issue to be angry about in Freguson: the violent initial overreaction of local police to peaceful protests. Militarization of local police is a serious concern, and the fact that conservatives see something legitimate to be upset about can make them all the more mystified when that concern is not acknowledged or shared by liberals.This isn’t to say that liberals ignore police militarization, but they certainly don’t seem to see it as fundamental to the Ferguson story./

It’s an old story, really. Both sides have points, but they fail to apprehend each other’s respective points of view. It is deeply unfortunate that sensational, random, tragic stories–like what happened to Michael Brown–seem to be the only thing that gets people talking. It’s not really a conversation when both sides are talking past each other.

Cop: If you don’t want to get shot, do what I tell you.

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2014-08-21 Sunil_Dutta_Los_Angeles_Police_Department

A lot of people are pretty angry about an OpEd Sunil Dutta wrote for the Washington Post. A sampling of reactions:

– Veteran Cop: ‘If You Don’t Want To Get Shot,’ Shut Up — Even If We’re Violating Your Rights (Huffington Post)
– To the Cop Who Told Me Not to Resist: Go F— Yourself (some random politics site)
– ‘If you don’t want to get shot, just do what I tell you,’ cop with Colorado ties writes (Fox affiliate)
– Column defending cops in Ferguson sparks online fury (CNN)

Let me first point out that, although most articles just call him “cop” and that might leave you the impression that he’s a stereotypical white police officer, he’s actually an immigrant who was born and raised in Jaipur, India, a “scholar of Urdu mystical poetry and an Indian classical music form called Dhrupad,” and “a professor of homeland security at Colorado Tech University,” in addition to being a cop with the LAPD. For somebody with such an interesting background to show up in the midst of one of the most contentious episode of racial tension in the United States is worth noting. Life has a funny way of not fitting the narratives we expect it to.

The angry reactions to his post are also misguided. Dutta is actually making a reasonable case that doesn’t include limitless authority for cops. As he writes:

I know it is scary for people to be stopped by cops. I also understand the anger and frustration if people believe they have been stopped unjustly or without a reason. I am aware that corrupt and bully cops exist. When it comes to police misconduct, I side with the ACLU: Having worked as an internal affairs investigator, I know that some officers engage in unprofessional and arrogant behavior; sometimes they behave like criminals themselves. I also believe every cop should use a body camera to record interactions with the community at all times. Every police car should have a video recorder.

His point is simply that reacting aggressively to a cop is not a good response when the cop is issuing lawful orders and even, in almost all cases, when the cop has overstepped his or her bounds. There are checks and balances for holding individual cops accountable for individual abuse and also for holding entire units accountable for systematic abuse. Now, you could argue that those checks and balances are broken. That’s a serious consideration, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with Dutta’s argument. Even if the checks on police abuse are broken, responding by aggressively resisting police authority is illegal (in most cases) and stupid (in all cases).

Cops have wives and children they want to go home to, and they have to defend themselves in life-threatening situations. This includes situations where they are dealing with an unarmed person.

There are no national statistics on how many times officers’ guns are taken away. But the FBI says that of the 616 law enforcement officers killed on duty by criminals from 1994 through 2003, 52 were killed with their own weapon, amounting to 8 percent. (PoliceOne.com)

So the mere fact that you don’t have a gun doesn’t mean that a cop doesn’t see you as a threat. You are a threat, and cops know that because they know nearly one in 10 of their fallen brothers and sisters was brought down with their own weapon. One of the problems here is that cops understand violent encounters. Bystanders and arm-chair lawyers don’t. Civilian reactions of “couldn’t the cop have used a taser?” or “couldn’t they have shot him in the leg?” or “why did they have to shoot him so many times?” are almost invariably founded in ignorance.

The deeper reality is that government is defined by the exclusive right to exercise force. We can go back almost 100 years to the political theorist Max Weber. He defined the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” A state is defined as the group with the monopoly on violence. In practice, individual people are invested with the monopoly on violence. We call them law enforcement officers. It’s not fair and it’s not supposed to be fair. It’s a monopoly. They have broad legal rights to use force on you. You don’t, except in very narrow and practically useless situations, have a right to use force on them.

Unless you reject all government, this is a state of affairs you will have to learn to live with. That doesn’t mean that we can’t change anything about our current system. Arguments about how the police use their authority to boss people around are reasonable. Arguments about whether the police can boss people around are not. Rejecting the authority of cops wholesale–which is what a lot of the anger seems to boil down to–is like getting upset that in a democracy sometimes the majority does the wrong thing. It’s s defect, but there’s no better alternative.

If there’s one criticism I have of Dutta’s piece, it’s that he acknowledges individual acts of police corruption but not the possibility of systemic injustice. That is the real issue here. It still doesn’t change his central point, however, and no amount of anger will.

Ferguson: Rushing to Rush to Judgment

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2014-08-21 Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_12

I wanted to share a couple more thoughts on this topic. First, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today and he was arguing that the idea that white cops are killing black kids is a myth. To back up his claim, he asked what people were using as the most recent example of police brutality prior to Ferguson. He answered his question: Rodney King. Nothing of note relating to cops assaulting or killing black men had happened, according to Rush, since 1992.

Say what?

I don’t think I’ve heard Rodney King’s name mentioned a single time, for one thing, and even I can think of multiple controversial shootings that are much more recent. OK, we’ll set Trayvon Martin aside on a technicality if you want (because George Zimmerman wasn’t a copy), but that still leaves (and these are just off the top of my head): the BART police killing of Oscar Grant (2009), the Danziger Bridge shooting (2005), and the shooting of Amadou Diallo (1999). All of those made national headlines, but the Root has a list of several more that weren’t as familiar to me (although they include security guards and tazers).

Meanwhile, on the other side of crazy, some of the critiques I’m reading from surprisingly legitimate sources are disturbing in their rush to judge everyone who hasn’t already made up their mind that Michael Brown was gunned down in cold blood. Case in point, this article featured at Quartz (which is operated by Atlantic Media Company, who run The Atlantic): 12 things white people can do now because Ferguson. In it, Janee Woods can’t figure out why white people aren’t spreading the word about the evil that was done in Ferguson, writing:

But an unarmed black teenager minding his own business walking down the street in broad daylight gets harassed and murdered by a white police officer and those same people seem to have nothing urgent to say about pervasive, systemic, deadly racism in America?

2014-08-21 PolicesignInstead of a bunch of white Americans failing to be bothered by the harassment and murder of a black kid by a white cop, might I suggest that many Americans simply aren’t sure if that’s the correct version of the events? Sometimes the cops do shoot and kill in horrific, illegal, and immoral ways. But sometimes cops also do shoot and kill because it’s what they have to do, even against unarmed assailants. In this case, Darren Wilson (the police officer) claims that Michael Brown attacked him and tried to take his gun, and that Brown was charging him when Wilson fired to protect his life. I am not rushing to judge that this story is true, but it might be. Right-wing news outlets are all saying that the officer suffered severe physical injures when Brown assaulted him, including a fractured orbital lobe, but I haven’t seen that picked up by the main stream press yet other than FoxNews.

I think it’s also worth noting that plenty of white Americans did protest early and loudly that the crowd control measures were inept and immoral. The first wave of criticisms involved a whole bunch of combat vets joking that the Ferguson cops were outfitted in more body armor than they had had in Iraq or Afghanistan. A lot of those vets were white. Meanwhile, libertarians have been attacking the militarization of the police since way before Ferguson, and (as I noted in my last piece on this topic) there were even early rumblings that this would be an issue where left and right could unite.

I don’t think it’s too early to conclude that the crowd control was wrong, and also that the rioting and looting was wrong. That’s safe. But it is too early to assume that Michael Brown’s death was a murder. It’s irresponsible and dangerous to make that assumption, let alone to accuse anyone who doesn’t go along of moral cowardice or racial prejudice.

Ferguson and Common Ground

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2014-08-18 Ferguson

I was on vacation all last week, and so I’ve been catching up on the events from Ferguson, MO over the past couple of days. CBSNews has a pretty good rundown. I’ve seen one particular article that grabbed my attention, however: What I Did After Police Killed My Son.

Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot more than that going on here. Our country is simply not paying enough attention to the terrible lack of accountability of police departments and the way it affects all of us—regardless of race or ethnicity. Because if a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy — that was my son, Michael — can be shot in the head under a street light with his hands cuffed behind his back, in front of five eyewitnesses (including his mother and sister), and his father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew in three wars for his country — that’s me — and I still couldn’t get anything done about it, then Joe the plumber and Javier the roofer aren’t going to be able to do anything about it either.

Michael Bell (who wrote this piece) is absolutely correct. I hope that issues of police accountability and police militarization can provide some much needed common ground. Based on articles like this one from the New Yorker, I think that hope might not be misplaced:

But over the past two days — as the police in Ferguson have responded to very angry protests with an alarmingly heavy hand, looking and reacting as if they were not the community’s own peace officers but an invading army — something remarkable has happened. The longstanding liberal concerns about police racial hostility has seemed to merge with the longstanding libertarian concerns over police militarization. It isn’t just that no one is defending the cops. It’s that many of the criticisms from the left and the right sound very similar.

The only thing I’d add to that is that initiatives like badge cameras and independent review of lethal shootings are not about attacking the police. They are about making a better police force, and improving trust between law enforcement and the communities they seek to serve.

Racism: A Definition and a Critique

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A couple of weeks ago I came across an extremely articulate explanation of perhaps the dominant perspective of racism from the American political left. The explanation comes in the form of an online Powerpoint at the Tumblr of Women of Color, In Solidarity.

It’s a fairly short and straight-forward presentation, and I’m deeply appreciative of how starkly it lays out the case against white privilege, starting with this definition of the key terms:

2013-11-06 Racism Definition

So here we have a very precise definition of racism: it is the institutionalization of discrimination (which is itself the acting out of prejudice). This definition has one very important and straightforward consequence: reverse-racism (i.e. anti-white racism) cannot exist.

2013-11-06 No Reverse Racism

In simple terms: individuals may have anti-white prejudice and may even act on that prejudice (which is anti-white discrimination), but because this discrimination is not built into the structure of our society it’s not institutionalized and therefore doesn’t qualify as racism by definition. The author slammed this point home with one more emphatic slide:

2013-11-06 Tragedy of Victimization

Once again: this is a clear and unambiguous perspective on race and–within its assumptions and definitions–it is consistent and logical.

But it is still deeply, deeply flawed. The flaw will seem subtle at first, but as it ripples through the larger argument it will have profound implications. And the flaw is this: the assumption that the cause of discrimination is animosity. 

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Building Bridges Across A Race Division

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There’s no denying the raw emotion behind this video, just as there’s no denying the historical reality that drives those emotions.

I don’t disagree with a single word, but I do disagree with how Adam Mordecai at Upworthy decided to introduce it: If You Have To Tell Your Kids This Stuff, Then You Probably Aren’t A White Person. According to that presentation, the way we relate to cops is something that divides us. Black boys have to fear cops while white boys have nothing to fear. Dave Chapelle, who is hilarious, made the same point:

So there’s one view of reality, a view in which white people have absolutely nothing to fear from cops, and black boys are completely alone in their fear of police brutality. Here’s my view of reality. 

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Orson Scott Card and His Imitation of Fox News: Paranoia? Hyperbole? Satire?

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After reading novelist and political commentator Orson Scott Card’s bizarre “thought experiment,” titled “Unlikely Events,” I really am quite mystified. In the article he plays a “game” in which he imagines President Obama becoming a fascist overlord ruling with an iron fist over America and being a figure akin to Hitler. Although he tries to reassure his readers that, of course, he doesn’t believe this stuff, and that he’s just wearing his hat as a “fiction” writer, yet he still also insists that “it sure sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Because, like a good fiction writer, I made sure this scenario fit the facts we already have — the way Obama already acts, the way his supporters act, and the way dictators have come to power in republics in the past.” He says that “the writer’s made-up characters and events must seem truthful. We must pass the plausibility test.”

But then Card shovels in comparisons to Hitler and every other dictator he can think of. When people start comparing their ideological rivals to Hitler, they have shown their refusal to speak with nuance and distinction. They have immediately lost the argument, in my mind. He then throws in a huge number of broad generalizations and hyperbolic statements such as this:

Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing “czars” who didn’t need Senate approval. His own party hasn’t passed a budget ever in the Senate.

In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt.

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Reconciliation and the Eternal Race War

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2013-06-27 VRA

Right now everyone’s talking about the SCOTUS decisiosn overturning DOMA and (effectively) Prop 8, which is understandable, but I don’t like talking about what everyone else is talking about so I’m going to talk about the decision that was making headlines before the gay-marriage decisions: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

For those not paying attention, the Court (by a 5-4 margin, again) struck down the provision of the VRA that required certain states (mostly in the South) to run any proposed changes to voting by the Department of Justice for review first. Of course there is the usual liberal willful blindness on this one. Rather than see that Southern states chafe under federal intervention (just as Western states are annoyed by how much of their land is owned by the Feds), they see nefarious schemes for intentional racist oppression. The worst of which, as far as I can tell, comes down to requiring photo IDs, which is something that developed democracies in Europe require as a matter of course (this Foreign Policy mag referred to the US system as “trust based”). 

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Cheerios and a Model of American Political Stupidity

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2013-06-14 Cheeriogate Family
The adorable family at the heart of Cheeriogate. Note: only an inhuman monster would have a problem with this level of cute.

Let’s call it Cheerio-gate. It starts with a simple commercial by Cheerios featuring a cute little girl and her parents: a black man and a white woman. Next thing you know, ugly and racist comments are being made on YouTube, General Mills has to shut comments off of the video, and now everyone on the Internet is referring to the “controversy”. Think I’m exagerating? Google it. I’ve even seen several Facebook friends angrily state that anyone who has a problem should just defriend them now, and so forth and so on. The anger is justified, of course, but do these people really believe that there is even a significant minority of Americans out there who have a visceral antipathy to mixed-race families? I want to be clear at the outset that this is not a post that argues that everything is perfectly fine in America as far as race goes. That’s so obviously not true it should go without saying, but I said it just in case. Instead, I just want to do my best to try and dissect what is really happening here, and why–overtime–it is a perfect model for American political stupidity.

I’ll proceed in phases. 

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When Racism Isn’t

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So the first problem I noticed with this NYT op-ed is that it is based on research that is not research. Nancy Ditomaso makes the stunning observation that job-seekers depend on social networks to get jobs. The fact that Ditomaso appears to think that this required “research” to discover–and that the discovery warrants an op-ed piece–suggests quite a lot about Ditomaso. Starting, for example, with the fact that if you’re looking for someone who has anything like expertise on job-searching you should look elsewhere. Seriously, has she never heard of the term “networking”?

2013-05-07 NYT Race Jobs OpEd

Still, despite the fact that the starting point of this piece is basically “when it rains things get wet”, the fact that it appears in the NYT (even the blog section) shows that if you add charges of racism to an otherwise banal story, you’ll make waves. Or at least ripples. Ditomaso’s argument is that since people use their social networks to get jobs, and since social networks are correlated with race (“we still live largely segregated lives”), and since white people have better jobs, the end result is that white people can effectively discriminate against black people not by discriminating against black people, but by showing favoritism towards white people.

As an observation about systemic inequality, Ditomaso is right. I think it’s a real problem, and I think it’s one that should be taken seriously. But there is a huge problem with the way that Ditomaso addresses this legitimate concern. That problem is that she sees the problem entirely through partisan political lenses, thus intertwining left and right with black and white. That’s a terrible thing to do.

For example, Ditomaso levels the heavy accusation that “despite complaints about “reverse discrimination,” my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.” The thing that’s most troubling about her specific reasoning is that she never even considered the possibility that people might oppose affirmative action for the reasons that conservatives actually state as their reasons for opposing affirmative action. For example, many conservatives believe that affirmative action is counter-productive, and they have good empirical reasons for believing that. Ditomaso doesn’t even acknowledge that possibility. More generally, conservatives tend to believe in the ideal of a race-blind society.

This doesn’t actually mean that people would have to abandon their heritage of culture. In past centuries, there was significant discrimination among white people against other white people (such as Irish and Italians), but this kind of discrimination is largely non-existent today. That doesn’t mean that white people of Irish or Italian descent have had to abandon, hide, or deny their heritage. It’s just that the specific categories have been largely subsumed. They are there, and people are aware of the stereotypes (positive and negative), but they don’t seem to really matter.

That is the kind of future that conservatives would like to see: the same process of integration that brought various European ethnic groups into tolerant interdependent existence continuing to grow to incorporate all races into a common humanity. That’s not such a bad vision. It’s definitely not a racist vision. And it’s easy to see why conservatives might feel that affirmative action obstructs this progress, by entrenching racial differences in society and law. Ditomaso doesn’t seem to see any irony at all in lamenting that we’re still segregated, and then calling for race-based differential treatment. Conservatives, on the other hand, would love to live in a world where favoritism still exists (if you think that’s going to be stamped out, you’re insane) but social networks are no longer strongly correlated with race.

But Ditomaso isn’t having any of that. We never get to have that discussion. It is cut off at the knees by her myopic insistence that opposition to affirmative action has to be about one of two things: white people don’t like giving black people jobs (“reverse-discrimination”) or white people just really like giving white people jobs (favoritism). Given this whopper of a false-choice dichotomy, the results of her study are not nearly as powerful as she thinks they are:

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.

Yes: it must be about entitlement and white privilege. The possibility that the other side of the political aisle actually has sincere desires to improve race relations but simply a different view about how to accomplish that is not even entered for consideration.

Please note, by the way, that I’m not denying the existence of entitlement and white privilege. I think these are concepts that do exist. Of course a part of the desire for conservatives for racial integration is that it by white racial integration: integration into a white culture as opposed to integration into a new, pan-racial culture. Everyone prefers what is familiar. There are no angels on earth, and everyone’s politics are going to be tainted with self-interest or prejudice to some degree. The fact that conservative views on race are not perfect shouldn’t be used as an excuse to pretend they are not good. Nor, by the way, do I think this is such a big deal. A couple of centuries ago we would have been talking about the need to assimilate Irish immigrants into American culture. Now we all celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Clearly integration is intrinsically a two-way street, so I just don’t think that white or black unease with integration should be a dealbreaker for this plan.

I’m not writing this piece because I think America has no problems with race. That would be laughable. I’m writing this because it seems that the only folks who feel at liberty to discuss race come from a particular political viewpoint. And that hamstrings the discussion and also our progress. If there’s one thing I’d like to see change about America’s race dialogue, it would be to make it a dialogue. To actually have a diversity of opinion. I think affirmative action is a terrible idea in practice, but I don’t question the sincerity of those who advocate for it. It’d be nice if that good faith was a two-way street.

Another way to look at it is Hanlon’s Razor, which states: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The gist of this is that when something bad happens, don’t assume malice. It could be incompetence. It could be stupidity. It could be bad incentives. It could be ignorance. There is no doubt that the combination of social networks and pre-existing racial inequity is self-perpetuating. The outcome is racist. But it’s time we learned to separate between 21st century racism, which is primarily about unintentional perpetuation of pre-existing disparities, and 19th century racism, which was about the belief that some races are intrinsically inferior to others. Using the same terminology to cover innocent (but dangerous and sometimes stupid) behavior and evil behavior is not constructive.

That’s what the title of this article refers to. I’m absolutely not denying the reality of systemic racial injustice in our country. Far from it. I’m saying that the best way forward includes an admission that the battle to be fought in 2013 isn’t the same as the ones that were fought in the 1960s or 1860s. That struggle is not over, but it has changed. Our tactics–and our language–should reflect our past progress if we want to see more progress in the future.