Dispatches from the Race War. Tim Wise
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event, and utterly unnatural, such that militaries have to dehumanize their enemies and work furiously to break down their soldiers’ natural human tendencies not to kill. The fact that violence may be necessary in some instances, and even in the case of stopping bin Laden, cannot, in and of itself, justify raucous celebrations of his death at the hands of the United States.
Saying that bin Laden deserved to die is the easy part. Beyond what one deserves, whether they be terrorists or just street criminals, there is the matter of what society needs. And it may be that what we need is less bombastic rhetoric and jingoistic nationalism, even if that means that we have to respond to the news of bin Laden’s death by being thankful in private, but not turning the matter into a public spectacle. When we do the latter, we cheapen matters of life and death to little more than a contest whose results can be tallied on a scoreboard.
It may prove cathartic that bin Laden is dead. But that doesn’t render it the proper subject of a pep rally. Ultimately, the mentality of human disposability is what historically connects settler-colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and war. Such a mindset perpetuates itself without end, and serves to ratify the same in others. We should strive to do better, even when, for various reasons, we can’t manage it and are required to take life for one reason or another. Most soldiers, after all, are not happy about the things they’ve done in war. For many, killing even when you have no choice, is life-changing. It scars. It comes back in the middle of the night, haunting the soldier’s dreams for years and sometimes forever. We do not honor their sacrifices by treating the mortal decisions they have to make as if they were no more gut-wrenching than those made while playing a video game.
Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than the celebrations unleashed in the wake of bin Laden’s demise was the cynical way in which President Obama suggested his killing proved “America can do whatever we set our mind to.” If this is the lesson of bin Laden’s death, it means we must not want to end child poverty, excess mortality rates in communities of color, or food insecurity for millions of families. After all, we don’t address these with nearly the aplomb we manifest in killing our adversaries.
We are, if the president is serious here, a nation that has limited its marketable talents to the deployment of violence. We can’t fix our schools or build adequate levees to protect a city like New Orleans from floodwaters, but we can kill you. We can’t reduce infant mortality to anywhere near the level of other industrialized nations, but we can kill you. We can’t break the power of Wall Street bankers or jail those who helped orchestrate the global financial collapse, but we can kill you. We can’t protect LGBTQ youth from bullying in schools, or ensure equal opportunity for all in the labor market, but we can kill you.
Somewhere, I suspect, there is a young child—maybe the age of one of my own—who is sitting in front of a television tonight in Karachi, or Riyadh. And they’re watching footage of some fraternity boy, American flag wrapped around his back, cheering the death of someone this child believes, for whatever fucked-up reason, is a hero, and now, a martyr. And I know that this child will likely do what all such children do: forget almost nothing, remember almost everything, and plan for the day when they will make you remember it too, and when you will know their name. And if (or when) that day comes, the question will be, was your party worth it?
YOU WILL KNOW THEM BY THE EYES OF THEIR WHITES
FERGUSON AND WHITE DENIAL
IN THE WAKE of the Justice Department’s long-awaited reports on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, some would like to have it both ways. On the one hand, they praise the Department for mostly exonerating Officer Darren Wilson, and insist that the facts of the case prove the black community’s outrage about the killing was unjustified. Yet they ignore the companion report, which found a pattern of racist abuse by the Ferguson Police Department stretching back many years.
Much of white America wants to use the first report to beat the Black Lives Matter movement over the head (“See, Mike Brown didn’t have his hands up!”), while paying no mind to the second report at all. They are impervious to the well-documented, daily indignities meted out to black Ferguson residents who have been regularly stopped, ticketed, fined, arrested, and even attacked by police dogs for decades. According to the Justice Department, the Ferguson police have used the black community as a virtual ATM, extracting cash from them in the form of fines and fees for minor infractions. But all that matters to some is that their presumptions about Michael Brown’s actions (which were fixed well in advance of any evidence) turned out to be sufficiently confirmed by the Justice Department.
And yes, by the same logic, so too must we who backed the original “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” narrative accept both reports. And this means accepting that our assumptions about what happened were also concretized ahead of the facts. What’s more, such assumptions were mostly unsustainable. Fine. I can’t speak for others, but I can speak for myself. I am willing to accept both reports, having read them from beginning to end. I am ready to accept that, so far as the available evidence indicates, Officer Wilson reasonably felt endangered, or at least could not be proved a liar when he claimed so, which is the burden the feds had to consider. As such, the law says he was justified in using force against Brown. I am willing to accept that, so far as the bulk of available evidence is concerned, Brown’s hands were not up, and he was not in the act of surrendering when he was shot. And I am willing to accept that Brown was moving toward Wilson, based on eyewitness testimony, and the location of his blood, twenty feet behind the spot where his body fell.
But what does that really mean?
One thing it demonstrates is this: When it comes to white people who kill black people, the system ultimately works, and quickly. Darren Wilson was not jailed for his actions. He will not spend a day in prison.
How nice it would be if we could say the same for Glenn Ford, imprisoned for thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit, but for which an all-white jury convicted him. How nice it would be if we could say the same for Darryl Hunt, imprisoned for two decades, despite his innocence, for the rape and murder of a white woman—also convicted by an all-white jury. How nice it would be if we could say the same for Ronald Cotton, falsely convicted and imprisoned for ten years for rape of a white woman, only exonerated after DNA evidence proved his innocence.
Or for Marvin Anderson. Or for Herman Atkins. Or for Bennett Barbour.
How nice it would be for the hundreds of black men falsely accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit over the last several years, not a one of whom was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from strangers for their defense, as Darren Wilson was. Because for every Darren Wilson, whose life, though disrupted, has not been destroyed, there are hundreds of black men not so lucky, men who are railroaded to prison based on testimony far flimsier than that against Officer Wilson.
And no, this is not changing the subject. It is the subject. For two reasons. First, because white America by and large sheds no tears, spills no ink, and exudes no anger about the injustices done to these black folks. Just as most of us say nothing about those killed by police in cases where even video evidence suggests cops lied, and the killings were unjustified, as with Tamir Rice, John Crawford, or Eric Garner, to name a few. So long as most white folks turn a blind eye toward cases where the injustice is apparent, it will be hard for people of color to view concerns about Darren Wilson as anything but white racial bonding and smug supremacy.
And second, because those injustices—the false convictions, racial profiling, police brutality, and harassment of blacks by the Ferguson police—explain the rage that seems irrational to so many whites. To not attend to these indignities—to not be as outraged about them as we are about those who rise to challenge them—is to miss the story. And it is to ensure there can be no healing, no justice, and no peace for any of us.
The reason it was so easy for black folks to presume the worst about Officer Wilson was because they have seen this movie before, and rarely does it offer much in the way of a surprise ending. Does it appear that the facts, in this case, might have been an example of that rare plot twist? Yes. But it was nothing if not rational for the African American community, given the typical