OK, a serious non-glib non-rhetorical question, asked in good faith:
Given that the US has such a terrible problem with police officers killing people, why have we decided that #blacklivesmatter is the ideological tool we want to use to deal with it?
Vox in particular lovestotalk about the importance of #blacklivesmatter-ing, and I think it serves as a pretty good mouthpiece of elite identitarian liberal thinking generally. So let’s use Vox’s own chart as a baseline for thinking about this:
First thought: wow, that sure is some disproportionate killing of black people right there. I don’t know whether it should be chalked up to disproportionate crime rates, or disproportionate poverty rates, or latent police racism, or full-throated Bull Connor police racism, or what…probably it’s some complicated melange of all those things…but, yeah, I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our Sworn Protectors are disturbingly cavalier with black lives, and that black people have a special grievance.
Second thought: wow, even given the above, that sure is an awful lot of white people getting killed by the police. Even when they’re not being violent. More white people than black people, in absolute terms.
This is a big fucking problem for white people too, right? I’m white, and I promise you, I do not want the police to shoot me. Given how often this awful thing seems to happen – and given that almost half of those fatal encounters are fatal for white people – this issue seems like it should be legitimately very concerning to self-interested white people who have any reason at all to be uncomfortable with Johnny Law. Hell, they have reason to be concerned even if the only lives they care about are white lives!
So OK. All my instincts are telling me that this is a perfect Big Tent Populist sort of issue. Everyone versus the police.
(…OK, except maybe for Conventionally Attractive White/Asian Women and Charismatic Well-Heeled White/Asian Men, who can probably put themselves in a “really very unlikely to be shot by the police” category. But, y’know, everyone else. Black Lives, Hispanic Lives, American Indian Lives, White Trash Lives, White Teenager With Attitude Lives, Non-Neurotypical Lives, Homeless Lives: not only do they all Matter, all of them have a dog in this fight, like for serious. All of them have excellent reason to be afraid of the cops. All of them are natural allies here.)
So why are we lasering in on the fact that, of everyone who has it bad in this particular unconscionable way, black people have it the worst? Why are we turning this into a race issue instead of a general-public-safety issue? Why are we ensuring that, instead of being “everyone versus the police,” this turns into “the race-conscious left versus everyone with a preexisting grudge against the race-conscious left?”
My instincts tell me that this is memetic toxoplasma in its purest form – that the identitarian left just instinctively finds ways to make everything about its traditional causes, and seeks out excuses to attack its traditional foes, baiting them with ideological irritants if necessary. Even to the point of sabotaging its own actual policy agenda.
But I feel like I’m missing something. I have to be. This is just…it’s too dumb, too grotesquely self-destructive on all sides, the way I’m looking at it now. Even for contemporary culture war politics.
Thoughts?
*****
Bonus question: does anyone know why “not killed with rifle or shotgun” is a category worth special investigation?
So the issue is fear.
The extremely small percentage chance you(black person) will be
shot by a cop is somewhat greater than the extremely small percentage chance
you(white person) will be shot by a cop. It’s unfair, but also not enough to
change your habits. Sickle cell anemia is a greater cause of disproportionate
deaths.
But, black people walk down the streets feeling afraid they
will be shot. It’s a constant fear that infects their everyday joy. (Not all
black people, and not every day… but a lot and enough.) This sort of fear is
intolerable for our society, and causes massive dysfunction between communities
and the institutions we need to maintain law and order.
By calling it fear, I am not dismissing it, I am naming the
monster that needs to be slayed.
Unfortunately, fear is not very related to statistical
evidence. Plenty of people live in dread and paranoia of things that are
statistically trivial. What you need is a narrative where the fear has been
resolved.
Doubly unfortunately, political movements founded in fear,
have systemic incentives to feed the fear, and not to find ways to calm it.
They have to justify the existence of their movement, after all, and that
usually involves a lot of awareness raising about what they are afraid of.
This is all true as far as it goes, but I don’t think it answers the question.
There’s a certain legerdemain here between cause and effect. If the vast looming fear of black-people-getting-shot-by-the-police is not an outgrowth of actual omnipresent danger – if it’s a “disproportionate” reaction to a low-in-absolute-numbers phenomenon – then it presumably it exists because it’s being stoked. Which seems to be pretty much the case, as you say. But then…why did we stoke it? Why did we decide to rile up black fear instead of anyone-who-might-get-hassled-by-the-cops fear?
The cynical explanation is obvious.
But usually systemic cycles happen without intention. I suspect both people tried to frame this in the context of black fear, and some people tried to frame this in the context of general anti-cop fear, and one of those two got a much stronger reinforcement because of pre-existing anxieties by the relevant group.
I suspect maybe the fact that there are groups of white people who really are very respectfully treated by police and have never had a negative police experience matters for this too. You hear reports of how upper/middle class African Americans/Hispanics etc. dressed in business attire are still hassled by the police and this is a lot rarer for white people in similar situations. I think this makes it easier for minority communities to unite in that distrust of cops even across class lines (though you see arguments about respectability politics still). If the only person you know that has had a run in with the police is your druggy cousin who you disprove of you are going to be a lot less able to relate to these stories.
Also historically police forces have been pretty white so there may also be a difference in how many white people have friends or family on the police force.
Yeah…to the extent that the #BlackLivesMatter urge arises autochthonously, I’m sure it arises much more easily in alienated minority populations, who have long-standing antagonistic relationships with the cops.
But it’s not totally autochthonous. It’s not even mostly autochthonous. It’s a movement, which is being deliberately built up and expanded by social engineers. Many of them are white, elite social engineers. The entirety of the American Fashionably-Liberal Values Apparatus™, from the NYT to Vox to your friendly neighborhood SJ Tumblrina, is shouting “The police are killing innocent people! This is a huge problem! You need to be paying attention to this!” (And, often, adding “And you are a worthless garbage person if you don’t give sufficient air to this particular issue!”)
Which is fine, as far as it goes. “The cops are killing innocent people” is a pretty reasonable thing over which to be losing your shit. Fashionably Liberal elite white Americans have certainly rallied around causes that are a lot less worthwhile than this one.
My point is that, given that they’ve decided to fight this particular battle, I don’t understand their strategy. They had a perfect opportunity to pull some of their usual enemies into their own forces, to be “reasonable” and “ecumenical” and “on everybody’s side,” to isolate the opposition. Instead they demanded that the battle be fought on the usual culture-war lines. They insisted that talking about this in any terms other than blacks-against-racism was, itself, a species of bigotry. They mocked and marginalized everyone else’s problems with the cops. Hell, they made #AllLivesMatter – probably the single most obvious, morally-mainstream, inoffensive thing that any human could say under any circumstances – into a Badge of the Enemy.
The results were entirely predictable. #BlackLivesMatter has become just another Deeply Polarizing Thing, another piece of evidence that the SJ meta-movement “doesn’t care about white people” (for those who want such evidence), another reason for non-hip non-political white folks to be scared that the modern left is all about directing anger straight at them. Certainly it’s failed to unite people in opposition to the police. Quite the reverse – it’s ensured that people who under normal circumstances should hate the police, people who have “Live Free or Die” on their T-shirts, will stand by the cops because they really hate people who tell them that their problems don’t matter.
And, OK, maybe this is what Team #BlackLivesMatter kinda wanted all along. It’s hard to resist tangling with your perennial ideological foes. That’s the thing at which @bambamramfan and I are darkly hinting, more or less.
But it still feels really dumb. At least, it’s really dumb if you care about winning.
