The White Supremacy Of Not Caring

The phrase "white supremacist" conjures up visions of Klan robes and shaved heads and swastika tattoos. These days one might also think of a Trump rally. These very obvious manifestations of white supremacy are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. White supremacy is maintained in this country less by openly expressed hate, and more by quiet, subtle, apathy.

One of America's dirty little secrets is that while white Americans by and large don't give a shit about the lives of people of color they don't talk about it much, either. Sometimes silence speaks louder than words. I know a lot of quiet white supremacists who are not vocal Trump supporters, do not express open bigotry, and in some cases are not even conservative. Many of them also don't even really seem to think a whole lot about race.

It's something they'd rather not think about at all. They have internalized the racist hierarchy in their minds, and so feel no need to examine their skin privilege, or even to think that such a thing exists. Their position in society is natural, as far as they are concerned, the product of hard work. When things happen that display the massive levels of racism in this society, they just choose to ignore it and just not care about it.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered, they assumed he must have done something to deserve it. (Repeat this for every time a black person is murdered by the police.) They look at the system of mass incarceration and only think that it's a fine thing that so many criminals are off of the streets. When Flint's water was turned into poison, they just turned the page and moved on. When immigrant children were kidnapped and jailed, they told themselves "well, they were breaking the law" and maybe, just maybe, thought "it's really too bad that had to happen." They heard Trump's racist rants and maybe didn't like them, but still went in to vote for him for a tax cut or an anti-abortion judge on the Supreme Court.

The protests by NFL players are the ultimate litmus test of this phenomenon. While I support the protesting players, I can understand but not agree with those who disapprove of their methods, if and only they are also upset about the police killings inspiring those protests. The thing is, I have never met one of these unicorns. The same people made at the kneeling are, surprise surprise, the same who never said a single word when Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and so many others were murdered. Why? Because they tacitly support the racist system responsible. 

And when you meet these people, you will often find that they are "nice" people. They are friendly, respectful in their speech, and may even have close friends and family members who are not white. Some people are amazed at the stories of white Trump voters whose immigrant spouses were later deported. I am not surprised in the least. White supremacy in America is violently maintained by the state, but those who approve of that system mostly do not do so by screaming "Build the Wall!" but by hearing about immigrant children abused in custody, shrugfully saying "that's a shame," and not giving it a second thought. 

The Other Gun Violence

If I were to say "America has a gun violence problem" you might instinctively think of mass shootings like the tragedy in Orlando. That frame is what drove the sit-in of House Democrats to force a vote on gun control legislation aimed at increasing background checks and barring those on the terror watch list from getting guns. That frame has issues, since mass shootings account for a small number of the tens of thousands of Americans killed by guns every year. 

The murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge at the hands of the police should also be prompting a different conversation about gun violence, one that will not be solved with gun control measures. This is the gun violence perpetrated at the hands of the police. There have been too many prominent instances to count, and they have been outnumbered by the victims whose names did not become hashtags or who did not have cameras present at the scenes of their deaths.

As awful as mass shootings are, we cannot forget that police shot and killed almost a thousand people last year. There's a big difference in how the two are received, however. Nobody defends mass shooters, but huge amounts of political capital are expended to defend killer cops. Prominent publications even write sympathetic articles about them. The blood is barely dry on the ground before stupid memes like "BlueLivesMatter" are all over the place. In Louisiana, the state where Alton Sterling was murdered by the police, the legislature just passed a law covering police as a category of victim in hate crimes. When police are faced with protests over their violence, they blame any street crime on protests, as if the blood on their hands can be transferred onto the hands of others. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, consistently defends the police after they kill, and has proposed a mandatory death penalty for those who kill police officers.

And here's the deal: a very substantial portion of the white American population cares more about assuaging their own fears of supposed black criminality than they do about the lives of black people. In their minds the police are holding the line against what Victorians called "a criminal class," and will support any level of force used against them. If the police are criticized they go nuts because they think the whole dam is about to break. It's in moments like this that I feel absolutely sick, and not just because of the horror and injustice of the killings. I get ill thinking about how this mentality is so common among the people who raised me and surround me. The police are allowed to kill not just because of a political system or legal system, but because of the everyday fear, hate, and contempt nestled deep in the soul of white America. As long as that remains, I fear that the other gun violence will never end.

Tamir Rice and the American Police State

I don't watch videos of police shooting suspects anymore because I watched the Tamir Rice video when it was first released.  I have never, ever seen anything so absolutely horrifying in my entire life.  The image of a 12 year old boy being shot down by a police officer in about two seconds has been burned into my mind and I cannot get it out.  From time to time over the last year it has bubbled up to haunt me whenever I hear about new cases of police violence.  I think about my students, many of whom fit Tamir's profile, yet older apparently more "dangerous," and get sick to my stomach with fear and anxiety.

By all accounts the officer who shot him was an incompetent, trigger-happy shithead.  The fact that he was allowed by the city of Cleveland to have the power of life and death over a child is in itself a crime of epic proportions.

Yes, there were some odd circumstances, namely that the dispatcher had made the situation sound much more dangerous than it actually was.  But even if Tamir Rice was holding a real gun, there's nothing, absolutely nothing that can explain the fact that he was left laying there, bleeding out, without any medical help, other than the complete and utter disregard that the officers on the scene had for his life.  If do not think he race had anything to do with that lack of regard then I don't even want to bother talking to you.

Of course, he didn't have a real gun.  He didn't point it at anyone.  Tamir lived in an open-carry state, where it is not a crime to carry a gun openly.  Watching the video, it is completely obvious that there is no way that Timothy Loehmann was able to properly assess the situation.  He was intending, perhaps from (or before) the moment he arrived, to shoot and kill Tamir.

And yet, there is no indictment.  Indictments are so easy to procure that lawyers like to joke that "you can indict a ham sandwich."  Yet in Ferguson, New York, and now Cleveland, it seems impossible to indict a white police officer who kills an unarmed black person.  It's almost too obvious to state this, but so many people in America don't want to believe it, so here it goes: when it comes to African Americans, the United States is a police state.  Any police officer who kills an African American will not be punished, because white society is so deeply invested in its fear of black people and its desire to enforce white supremacy.  Few white people will say that openly, of course.  But their lizard brains react in terror when they see black people taking to the streets to protest brutality, and those same lizard brains automatically search for ways to exonerate white police officers who kill black people.  Anything that challenges the status quo of radical residential segregation with black ghettoes patrolled by police officers who are above the law in their ability to use violence makes their fear reflexes go off the charts.

And yet white people are vastly overrepresented in the militia, open carry, and anti-gun control movements.  Many of them are constantly fearful of a "big government" that they think is trying to control their lives, all while endorsing that government's surveillance of Muslims and mass incarceration of people of color.  The crime rate goes down, but they freak out nonetheless about a perception of rising crime.  That perception is merely a barometer of their own fear that white supremacy is being undermined.  Again, they are not fully conscious of this fear, because in "post-racial" America the only racists are the ones wearing white sheets, and they think that to notice and talk about race makes someone the "real racist."

The anxieties around white supremacy are so deeply ingrained in the backs of the minds of white people that even I have to tell my own lizard brain to shut the fuck up from time to time.  (The implicit bias tests get at this issue.)  That's just how powerful this mental disease is.  Until it is eradicated, and more white people can choose humanity over fear, I worry that the American police state will be able to maintain itself, killing more innocents as it goes along.

Fort Campus

Today University of Cincinnati campus cop Ray Tensing was indicted for the murder of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed African American man that he shot in the head during a traffic stop.  The continued litany of black people killed by the police, whether directly like DuBose or more indirectly like Sandra Bland, is this nation's greatest shame.

Strikingly, this killing was done by a campus police officer off campus.  It reminded me of college campuses I've been affiliated with that had a heavy police presence, where the school seemed to relate to the surrounding neighborhoods like a fortress in hostile territory.  For example, my undergraduate institution sat right between downtown Omaha and the city's north side ghetto.  The police presence on campus was very apparent, although I mostly saw the cops issuing parking tickets.  Nevertheless, I felt like the school was very deliberately trying keep the mostly black local population from setting foot on campus.

The show of force was even greater when I was at the University of Chicago for my master's degree.  I would commonly see UChicago police patrolling off campus, and had heard through the grapevine that most of them were off-duty CPD cops earning extra money.  While there was a high level of street crime in Hyde Park when I lived there (I know multiple people who were threatened with knives and guns during robberies), I've seen robust campus police in the sleepiest of locations.  Campus cops were everywhere when I taught in a small East Texas town, and as faculty salaries were frozen, the massive police force maintained its outsize position.

The fact that so many college campuses feel like fortresses is telling.  It is part of a larger trend in America where social inequality is accepted and dealt with through force and violence.  Rather than trying to increase the life chances for all, our society builds walls and arms sentinels to keep what were once called the "dangerous classes" in the Gilded Age from getting inside the havens of the more fortunate.  Ray Tensing felt so empowered in this role that he pulled over Samuel DuBose even though he was off campus, and tried to make an arrest for what should have been simple traffic citations.  Yes, he appears to be a particularly violent and murderous officer, but our system apparently finds it fit to employ such people to defend college campuses.  As long as white America persists in building its fortresses and arming them to the teeth, more tragedies like this will keep happening.

On Weimar Metaphors

The last few days are proof that we are often ruled by capricious events.  On Saturday the protest movements against police brutality and the legal system's failures managed to shut down the massive Mall of America in Minnesota.  Just as those movements were showing their continued strength, an unhinged assassin shot his girlfriend in Baltimore, then drove to Brooklyn and murdered two police officers in an ambush.  The forces of reaction and authority wasted no time exploiting this awful event by blaming it on protestors and mayor Bill de Blasio.  In a particularly galling display of contempt, New York police officers literally turned their back on the mayor, a man who was accused by their union to have "blood on his hands."

Soon afterward I saw people I follow on Twitter and friends on Facebook likening the current situation to Weimar Germany.  As a scholar of German history, I thought I'd talk about this.  While those invoking Weimar don't come right out and say it, I wonder if they are thinking of the exploitation of violence by the NYPD to condemn their opponents is akin to the Reichstag Fire, but don't want to reference Nazis directly because of Godwin's Law or something.  While I find that allegorical link a little much, there are some ways we can recall the history of the Weimar Republic that are fruitful for analyzing our current, tumultuous moment.

Weimar was an attempt to establish a democracy in a very new nation (united only since 1871) that had previously been an oligarchic autocracy and that had recently undergone a traumatic defeat in a war that killed two million of its young men.  This was a tall order, and the Republic barely survived a wave of crises from 1919 to 1923, including multiple Communist revolts, a military coup, hyperinflation, the occupation of the Rhineland by the French army, and Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch.  Between 1924 and 1929 it managed to attain a degree of stability and prosperity, but that came crashing down with the Great Depression.  Well before Hitler took power in 1933, Germany had already ceased being a real democracy after president Paul von Hindenburg began ruling by decree in 1930.  When people mention "Weimar" I assume they mean the late period, when Communists and Nazis fought each other in the streets.

Where I see a linkage that the non-historian might not is in the divided nature of Weimar society and American society today.  1920s Germany was a place of massive cultural changes, where young women in the cities began living more independent lives, where marriage ages rose and birth rates declined (spurring fears of the decline of family values), and old elites suddenly lost their prestige and power, among other things.  The Weimar Republic represented these changes, among others, and was thus hated and resented by those who preferred a hierarchical, traditional society.

The forces of reaction thought of the Weimar government as illegitimate, and still held plenty of power, especially in military and judiciary.  This helps explain why Hitler could attempt to overthrow the German government in the Beer Hall Putsch, but serve less than three years in prison.  The Nazis weren't the first or only group to claim Germany had only lost the war because it had been "stabbed in the back" by Leftist elements.  The adherents to the Republic were un-German traitors in the eyes of its opponents.  The Social Democrats were the political party most committed to maintaining the Republic, and thus reviled by reactionaries and nascent fascists.  They were also attacked hard by Communists, seeing Social Democrats as selling out the revolution for their part in suppressing worker revolts in the early Weimar years.  By the time the Nazis gathered a plurality of the vote in 1933, a majority of voters were casting their votes for parties committed to destroying the Republic.

I think we can all agree that the American political and cultural landscape today is as polarized as it has been in quite some time.  Politics and culture have also intertwined to the point that progressives and conservatives don't watch, read, or listen to the same things.  Conspicuous gun ownership has become a Rightist fetish, and in some corners of America Fox News is ubiquitously blared in public spaces.  Those on the Left tend to find these things abhorrent.  While there is a strong regional flavor to these deep differences, the Red State-Blue State model obscures as much as it reveals.  For example, New York City is supposed to be the bluest of blue territories, yet former mayor Guiliani has blamed African-Americans for the police violence used against them, and the NYPD has used inflammatory rhetoric against the current mayor for daring to criticize them.  They, like the Fox-devoted aging Boomers in my hometown view progressives in power as illegitimate, an abomination to be destroyed.  The unhinged manner in which the Republican Congress has dealt with Democratic presidents in recent decades (impeaching Clinton and engaging in unprecedented insults and obstruction against Obama) shows this.

There is a sense that those on the Left and Right no longer see their political opponents as people who hold different ideas, but as entirely different kinds of people completely.  The racial dynamics of political devotion today, where the Right is extremely White and engaging in White identity politics against a much less White opposition, has a lot to do with this, much more so than the pundit class would ever dare to admit.  I can certainly see in this intense division, where the side on the Right questions the very legitimacy of the government, echoes of Weimar.  Of course, such situations have appeared elsewhere in history, notably in France in the same era, when opponents of the Leftist coalition used the slogan "Better Hitler Than Blum."  Much the same could be seen in Chile in the early 1970s, too.  Things didn't end too well in any of these scenarios.  This makes me fearful, especially in a country where the police and military are two of the most trusted institutions.  It can't happen here?  Don't kid yourself.

New York's Cultural Memory of Crime And Its Current Abuses

Growing up out on the Nebraska plains in the 1980s, I always thought of New York City as a singularly lawless and dangerous place.  I still remember seeing a commercial for the Friday the 13th sequel Jason Takes Manhattan, which shows a character running scared into a convenience store screaming about how a madman is trying to kill her, and the jaded clerk just huffs and says "welcome to New York."  That image was also reinforced by more benign entertainment like Barney Miller, where the crime-ridden streets of New York were played for laughs.  I remember news stories about the Central Park jogger and the panic over "wilding," the racist attacks in Bensonhurst, and Bernard Goetz blowing away muggers on the subway.

Of course, the raw numbers show that violent crime was indeed a lot higher in the Big Apple back then.  There were 2245 murders in the city in 1990, compared with 332 in 2013.  It is arguably the safest big city in America.  It is curious then, that today brought news that the NYPD's police sergeants union had written a letter to the Democratic National Convention telling them not to have the party's 2016 convention in Brooklyn because it was getting too dangerous.  This brazen action, which is appalling in that it goes so much against the city's economic interests, was intended to spite new mayor Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio has not been a zealot when it comes to putting a leash on the police, and he has even endorsed the controversial "broken windows" strategy.  However, he did campaign against stop and frisk, and has been critical following the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the police.  This force, so used to acting with impunity in the last two administrations, would rather harm the city's quest for an economically beneficial convention than be held accountable in any way for its actions.  (Today also brought news that the NYPD's internal review board is throwing out an increasing number of citizen complaints of wrong doing.)

Critics of de Blasio have a very powerful cultural memory on their side: the jump in crime that affected New York from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.  Essentially, the cops are telling people "unless you give us free reign to do anything we want, we'll be headed straight back to the bad old days."  It also hurts de Blasio that periods of high crime are associated with other liberal mayors, like David Dinkins and John Lindsay, despite the fact that crime was already going down in the Dinkins years before Giuliani showed up.

There's another element at work here, one that those pushing back against police oversight are well aware they are using: racial fear.  Lindsay, Dinkins, and de Blasio all came to power with the overwhelming support of black voters, and all came into office promising to heed the voice of that constituency, the one historically worst protected and served by the police.  What the police sergeants union is really saying is "don't put the leash on us, because "those people" will run wild given half a chance."

Time will tell if this strategy works, but the fact that many supposedly "liberal" people in NYC voted for Bloomberg, a staunch defender of stop and frisk, is a sign that it just may be successful.  The murder rate is actually down this year, but the lenses of racial fear can very easily obscure reality.