Be careful what you teach your children. Certain things you say or do can have lasting
repercussions beyond the environs of hearth and home. A student reminded me of this
today.
My college was generous and assigned me to
teach a summer class. It’s an online
section. Conventional wisdom in my
field says that students taking online classes need the sort of self-discipline to
succeed that those in traditional classes don’t. I’m learning that a similar principle applies
to online faculty.
And so, each day I steel myself to the task of
grading discussion posts and writing assignments. This week’s topic was whether there was
potential today for building an issue-based mass social movement of the
magnitude of the Civil Rights Movement or the campus antiwar movement of the
1960s. Most of the assignments were the usual
attempts to answer my question in as few words as the student can get away with
and still get a passing score.
But, as always, a few stood out. And one in particular raised my hackles,
which doesn’t happen very often. It was
from a young lady I’ll call Prudence.
According to her personal introduction post from the first week of
class, Prudence is a sixteen-year-old homeschooled Mormon taking the class
under the college’s academic enrichment program. With most of the overtly religious students I
get, I simply sidestep debates with them on issues where the student and I
would have diametrically opposed positions.
With Prudence, this has become increasingly
difficult. I’ve found myself literally
grinding my teeth reading her narrowminded opinions on subjects ranging from healthcare
to taxes to jobs, with the inevitable references to her religious convictions as
justification. So far, I’ve refrained
from leaving comments on her more out-there assertions. Normally, I would patiently question any
factual distortions or point out any lapses in logic. But with cultural conservatives, I’ve found
that evidence based counterfactuals fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
Prudence’s latest missive used Black Lives
Matter as an example of a contemporary social movement. So had a number of other students. Their positions on the subject varied. A couple, from self-identified criminal
justice majors aspiring to police careers, were mildly critical. Most tried with varying degrees of success to
evaluate BLM in the context of social media and citizen activism. Fairly typical student responses, in other
words.
But our girl Prudence is not the sort of student
to mince words or mask her opinions behind a bunch of weasel words. No sir, she jumped in with both feet. On Michael Brown, as it happened, whose 2014 shooting
by the Ferguson, Missouri police was the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter
movement.
Prudence defended her objections to Black Lives
Matter by pointing out that Brown had had a police record. That is, he’d been in trouble before and so the
cops were justified in shooting him.
Reading
this, I took a deep breath as I felt my face turn red. I stopped there, closed Prudence’s assignment,
and logged out of the LMS. I still haven’t
come back to it, though I know I'll have to.
I shouldn’t let an adolescent know-it-all twit
get to me like that. It’s not entirely
her fault she is the way she is. I don’t
think Prudence has any idea how her bigoted views are received by anyone
outside her social circle. I don’t think
she’s interacted much with people outside her social circle.
For that, most of my opprobrium is focused on
her father and mother. It is very unlikely she formed these ideas wholly on her own. Prudence’s rigid
beliefs and judgmental attitude toward anyone different from her are much the
same as those of past students hailing from certain evangelical Protestant and
Mormon families. Prejudices are
inevitably learned at our parents’ knees, but in most families they tend to be more subtle than those Prudence freely expresses and are couched in language not considered blatantly racist by the folks using it.
All right, let’s move on. Let’s look at the discourse surrounding police
violence against young black men. Michael
Brown had it coming because he had a record.
Oscar Grant deserved to die because he had a record. Rodney King’s beating to within an inch of
his life was just deserts for having had a record.
It is precisely these attitudes in mainstream
white America which has given rise to Black Lives Matter. American law and American society do not
value the lives of American citizens equally, and racial oppression is the
original sin in which our country was conceived. It is deeply ingrained in our cultural fabric
that people of color are inherently inferior, and it’s this very premise which
lurks in the background whenever whites discuss police violence against
them. Even the act of asserting racial
equality in any serious sense puts some of them on the defensive, hence the emergence
of All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter.
There’s nothing wrong with either of these
propositions in a normative sense. All
lives should matter in
principle. But the way the idea is
asserted implies pretty clearly that it is all white lives which matter to the exclusion of those of others. If one side says Black Lives Matter, All
Lives Matter is merely a coded retort from the other side saying, “No, they don’t.”
The white backlash is kind of funny when you
think about it. Black Lives Matter as a
movement is approaching the civil rights issue of police violence in a
constructive manner. (I am referring to
BLM itself, not to those individuals who have shot at or otherwise attacked law
enforcement officers using police violence as an excuse for their crimes.) Numerous civil disturbances have broken out
in response to police actions in the black community, with the 1992 L.A. riots,
the violence in Miami’s Liberty City in 1980, the 1967 uprisings in Detroit and
Newark, and the 1965 Watts Rebellion being the most frequently invoked
historical examples. By comparison, BLM
is a peaceable attempt to address an ongoing issue which never seems any closer
to resolution.
I recognize that police work is not easy. And it shouldn’t be. The profession requires its members to be men
and women of sound judgment and possessing well-developed social skills capable
of exercising discretion and restraint in rapidly changing and potentially
dangerous situations. I want to believe
that this is the case with the majority of law enforcement officers.
However, law enforcement is a traditionally conservative
(with a small “c”) field. It has
historically resisted change, relying on the fears of affluent whites to slow
or head off reform. When the Warren
Court issued its rulings in Mapp v. Ohio,
Escobedo v. Illinois, and Miranda v.
Arizona, law and order advocates howled with indignation telling the public
that the police’s hands were tied by a bunch of Washington bleeding hearts. (Never mind that Earl Warren was a former
prosecutor.) I would argue that having to cross T’s and dot
I’s has professionalized law enforcement and resulted in introducing solid evidence
leading to convictions.
Despite this, the narrative of the besieged cop
in a hostile society has persisted since the Sixties. Richard Nixon capitalized on this during his
presidency. As a kid, I remember the “Support
Your Local Police” bumper stickers fastened on numerous cars (often as not
right next to the equally ubiquitous American flag decals). An example of the tenor of the era comes from
a 1970 issue of Life magazine whose
cover bore the ominous legend, “Cops as Targets.” By the 1990s, the moral panic over the
emergence of youthful, implicitly African-American or Latino “superpredators,”
a phenomenon which never materialized, had given rise to widespread support for
increased spending for police and new prisons, mandatory minimum sentences for
drug offenders, and similar punitive policies.
When I say “widespread,” I mean widespread
among those segments of American society which are eligible to vote and
exercise said right. Poor people and
people of color vote at lesser rates than well-off whites. These same demographics are
disproportionately charged with and convicted of felonies which in several
states effectively serves as a bar to the franchise years or even decades after
the sentence is served. Deprived at a
seat at the table and faced with a heavy-handed law enforcement presence, how else are communities of color supposed to respond? Considering the possibilities based on past experience, perhaps we should listen carefully to what these new activists have to say.
I have my fingers crossed that Black Lives
Matter prospers and grows as a movement, and that it opens eyes and opens hearts along the
way. Because as long as the white community
labors under the assumption that black victims of police violence somehow
deserved it, there is and will be no way forward.
© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar
