“They never tell you the whole story.”
This sage observation came from a student sprawled
in a seat towards the back of the room in the minutes before class was supposed
to start. A couple of weeks into the
summer session, I had learned a few points of his backstory. Recently discharged after six years in the
Marines, Mitch is back in school working on a criminal justice degree. He’s the student vet from central casting,
right down to the shaved skull and sleeve tattoos.
Mitch was holding forth on the recent demise
of Alton Sterling at the hands of police.
Mitch was of the opinion Sterling had it coming. “He was resisting arrest, you know. If he hadn’t been such an asshole he’d still
be alive. It’s not like it was his first
run-in with the cops.”
A couple of students sitting nearby nodded in
agreement as I sat at my desk going over my lecture notes and pretending I wasn’t
eavesdropping. One of them said, “He
shouldn’t have provoked them.”
The other student remarked, “Those people don’t
have any respect for the law.”
Those people?
This discussion was beginning to raise my blood pressure, but I kept my
mouth shut. The next exchange wasn’t
much better. Mitch was also taking an introductory
sociology class, it seemed, and he wasn’t too enthralled by the subject matter.
“Yeah, the professor was goin’ on about ‘white
privilege’ and how bad minorities have got it here. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking
about. Nobody I know’s privileged.”
Billie, another student sitting near the
group, bobbed her head emphatically.
Billie is another “mature learner” in the class. Rather diminutive and weather beaten in
appearance with a number of missing teeth, I would guess she’s in her early
thirties though she looks years older.
Billie chimed in with a short, harsh laugh, “Yep. I’m white and I don’t have no privileges
either.”
Up to this point I’d found Billie kind of
endearing. She's enthusiastic about
the class and while she isn’t a natural student it's clear she's a hard
worker. My
initial impression of Mitch and the other two students had been positive as
well, but as has been so often the case with me the more I get to know someone
the less I tend to like that person. I’m
a hopeful misanthrope, I guess.
After class, I found I was still disturbed by
the overheard discussion. Should’ve
minded my own business, I kept saying to myself. Alton Sterling was no saint, that’s for sure,
but that did not justify his being summarily executed in a convenience store
parking lot in the middle of the night.
I recall similar remarks after the Rodney King beating and the murder of
Oscar Grant: The guy was an ex-con, a troublemaker, it was just a matter of
time.
Yes, it is true Alton Sterling was breaking
the law when confronted by police. And,
yes, it appears he was carrying a gun (though the record’s unclear as to whether
he had brandished it as the phone tip claimed or had pulled it on the officers). Sterling’s selling CDs was an effort to
support himself and his family, other legitimate occupational pursuits being
closed to him because of his criminal record.
It probably wasn’t a good idea for him to carry a gun, but, as the NRA
folks like to point out, they’re the best protection from anyone who wants to do
you harm. Maybe he acted aggressively
toward the officers, which is never the desirable course of action in such
encounters.
None of this should matter. It was incumbent upon the officers to
deescalate the situation. Tasering
Sterling alone should have brought the confrontation to a rapid and nonlethal conclusion. (I’m not a fan of law enforcement’s use of
tasers but in this instance it was preferable to what happened next.) I won’t
try to guess at what the officers were thinking, but it’s pretty clear that for
many whites following the story they acted appropriately.
As I wrote in the preceding post, we are
making dismal progress on race in this country.
Common white reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement make this
quite clear. Leaving campus the day of
the overheard conversation I found myself behind a vehicle (an SUV, naturally)
with a bumper sticker which read “Police Lives Matter.”
I agree.
The lives of police officers do
matter. And so do those of the citizens
they are paid to protect, all of them. I
also mentioned in my last post that many whites seem to interpret Black Lives
Matter as an anti-white movement rather than as a protest against the daily brutality
which arises from the police occupation of the black community. It all
comes down to mindset.
A post by Steve Martinot on the Counterpunch website summarizes the problem
quite nicely. Police are in the
community, but they’re not of the community.
The resulting “us vs. them” worldview empowers law enforcement personnel
to act aggressively toward the most vulnerable citizens. Add to that the influence of the police lobby
in state legislatures and Congress, and there is little political will to hold departments
accountable for incidents of police violence.
There is a dimension of social class in where
folks fall on the blue-on-black violence issue.
My students at Verdant Fields Community College are predominately
working class, even though like most people who share their station in life they would probably insist they are middle class.
I’m often reminded of Jonathan Rieder’s 1960s study of the blue collar residents
of Canarsie, Brooklyn. Rieder noted that
his subjects were contemptuous of liberals in part for their perceived
masochism, for their tendency to blame white Americans for the country’s ills
and America for those of the world. The
students in my classroom undoubtedly feel the same way.
However, I would argue that the white working
class suffers from its own brand of masochism.
While I’ve managed to cover my origins with an admittedly thin veneer of
culture, my neck is still as red as theirs.
I’ve experienced the full range of their attitudes, paradoxical as they
are. Working class Americans, despite their
surface attitude of independence and rugged self-reliance, worship authority and its exercise. That is, they favor authority which has the
means of wielding violence on earth (police and the military) as well as in the
afterlife (the God of evangelical Christianity).
One authority they emphatically reject is
academic or intellectual authority. The prevailing culture is infused with an admixture of
practicality and blind faith undergirded by an inchoate anger and a desire to
punish. The treasured national myth of
equality is belied by differences in ability (not to mention the family wealth
of the 1%), though no one is inclined to accept this. The knowledge held by my
colleagues in the humanities and social sciences aren’t “real” knowledge to
their students. If it can’t lead directly to turning a buck,
it isn’t worth knowing. This outlook reminds me of
a passage in Joe Bageant’s book Deer
Hunting with Jesus where he describes a real estate agent he knows who is
functionally illiterate but is nevertheless prosperous. Why bother learning to read above grade
school level if you don’t have to?
Which brings me back to the students’
comments concerning white privilege. For
them, white privilege isn’t a “thing.” It’s
just a bunch of bullshit made up by a bunch of overeducated smartasses to insult
and undermine everything they know to be true.
The popularity of a certain internet urban legend is instructive. A strawman college professor announces to
his class that there is no God. When
challenged, the professor tells the students that if there was a God, He would strike
the professor down right where he stood.
The professor is then punched out by an ex-Navy SEAL in the class who proclaims
to the godless academic that he’s a Christian, Navy SEALs being the right-wing
heroes of the moment. (Fifteen years ago
the God-fearing student would have been an ex-firefighter.)
Good luck trying to get them to understand that
their attitudes are part of the larger race relations problem, or just to
understand their attitudes period. As
far as they are concerned, blacks and other minorities have already been “given”
too much as it is. They fail to grasp
that such statements imply that people of color deserve to be second-class
citizens. It’s probable that few of them
care. They’ve made up their minds, and
you can’t change them.
Ever.
© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar
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