Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

And So It Begins...

You’re checking your email.  It’s the week before the semester begins, and you’ve neglected your messages as of late.  It’s summer break, after all.

Buried in the middle of your unread messages is one from a student in your summer class last month at Verdant Meadows Community College.  The subject, predictably, is “Grade?”

From: Lindy (annoyedstudent@me.com)

Sent: Friday, August 5, 2016 3:21 am

To: Unassuming Scholar

Subject: Grade???

Mr. Scholar,

I’m emailing you directly because you haven’t answered my Whiteboard messages.  Why haven’t you lowered the points possible on Whiteboard for homework and participation like you promised?  Checking my grades, my percentage is 89.2%.  You said you’d round up the points and you didn’t!

Please get back to me ASAP.

Lindy Smith

Ah, the sense of entitlement is strong in this one, you think.   You’re not sure which to curse first—the Whiteboard feature which renders student grades as percentages and cannot be disabled by the instructor, or the grade-grubbing student.  ASAP?  You kick yourself, having once more forgotten the new rules of the higher ed game.  In a time when students slip off to Cancun or the Bahamas midsemester with nary a word to their profs only to rematerialize weeks later wanting to know if they missed anything, no faculty member dare take time off or be unavailable ever.

However, you know there really isn’t a problem.  Perhaps the young princess has seen her final grade report in the intervening two weeks and has discovered everything’s okay after all.

You dash off a short reply:

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@vmcc.edu)

Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 12:15 pm

To: Lindy

Subject: Re: Grade???

           Lindy,

As I said in class, count the points and ignore the percentages.  With the extra credit you submitted, you finished with an A.

Prof. Scholar

You figure this should be the end of it.  But it never is.  The response pops up within minutes.

From: Lindy (annoyedstudent@me.com)

Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 12:24 pm

To: Unassuming Scholar

Subject: RE: Re: Grade???

           Mr. Scholar,

I’ve been waiting for your answer.  Why did you take so long?  I don’t understand your explanation.

Just so you know, I posted a review of your class at [That Website Which Shall Not Be Named].  People need to know how unfair you are.

Lindy

Now you are simply flabbergasted.  Positively gobsmacked.  You marvel at your ability to inspire ingratitude.  While you couldn’t care less about the bad review she said she wrote, since as a professional you are accountable to your colleagues and institution and not to the personal opinions of the “customers” in the classroom, you do wonder how such allegedly intelligent people cannot understand a simple arithmetic concept you’ve explained time and again to every section each semester.

On the other hand, you would be most interested if this particular student lodged a complaint with your department.  “I got an A, and I’m outraged!”  That would be one for the books.

But you wouldn’t be surprised one bit if she did.  The new academic year is upon us.  You can only wonder what new horrors it will bring. 

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

No Good Deed

You checked your messages after arriving home from a week out of town.  The first one hit you like a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

The message was from the dean’s administrative assistant at Snowflake College.  Specifically, it was from the executive dean’s office at the Quartz City campus.  Quartz City up until now had been the unblemished bright spot in your teaching itinerary.  The students are bright and inquisitive, and you get along great with your teaching colleagues and the classified staff. 

You are informed that Dean Stacy would like to meet with you in person to discuss an “incident” involving you several weeks ago while you were an evaluator at the Quartz City early college high school’s senior project presentations.  One of the other judges, a local community member, had made an allegation about you.  Please call back at your earliest convenience to schedule an appointment.

While you were expecting this, your heart sank nonetheless.  It has become the inevitable cost of doing business.  You’re good at your job, and although you are maybe a touch unconventional in your presentation most of your students like or are at least accepting of your teaching style.  You also are well aware that not everyone finds your personality appealing.  It even elicits hostility from a few individuals from time to time.  Your openness tends to leave you vulnerable to those whom you politely refer to as jerks and to people with issues.

Your accuser appears to straddle both categories.  You know what the charges are, since he pulled you aside after the first day’s presentations and told you what he thought.  (You are thankful that at least what he accused you of did not involve a student.)  Unnerved, you got away from the guy as quickly as possible and lay awake in bed most of that night trying to figure out what the hell had happened.  Before leaving campus that day, you made sure the school secretary scheduled you for a panel other than the one this son of a bitch would be participating in during the next day’s session.

You return to Quartz City the next day to find yourself beckoned into the principal’s office.  The principal, a dark, serious young man, informed you that an allegation had been made.  You deny it as a matter of course, a trifle annoyed by the principal’s condescending demeanor.   You have found through experience with your sons’ schoolteachers that many of them not only talk down to kids, but tend to do so with adults as well.  This gentleman seemed to have lost sight of the fact that you and your fellow college instructors are supposed to be the value added by an early college high school. 

The principal stiffly thanked you for volunteering your time after informing you ominously that he had to inform Dean Stacy of the allegation.  The rest of the day went mercifully well in spite of its awkward beginning.  Several of your former students shook your hand afterward, and introduced you to their parents.  They had heard great things about you and were glad to finally meet you.  One mom even told you her son had chosen your field as his major after taking your class. 

All this notwithstanding, the next couple of weeks were clouded by the accusation against you as you wait for the other shoe to drop.  Naturally, as all bad news seems to in your life, it fell when you were not quite at your emotional best.  In this case, the news arrived after you got home near midnight, jetlagged and facing the glum prospect of waiting all the next day for the airline to recover your inevitably lost baggage.

You call Quartz City the following morning, schedule your appointment with Stacy, and then spend the next couple of days rehashing events in your head trying to make sense of it all.  You consider yourself a man of integrity, and you become rattled and indignant whenever someone calls your character into question.  Your task now is to avoid appearing rattled and indignant.  However, your resentment festers.  Your family has had some degree of association with Snowflake College for nearly forty years.  You’ve taught for them for more than ten.  You gave your time freely and this is what happens?  You seriously consider never giving Snowflake another unpaid second of your time again.  You have already resolved privately to exclude the college foundation as a beneficiary of your will when you found out it had taken money from a certain real estate developer who has lobbied and worked to run public schools like private businesses.   Maybe you should just show up and just teach your scheduled classes from now on.

The distraction of your resentment notwithstanding when the day of the meeting arrives, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.

Stacy, a tall, rather elegant woman around your own age, smiles warmly when you walk into her office, motioning you to a seat at a conference table.  You’ve never had a discussion with her beyond ordinary small talk, so you don’t know quite what to expect.

Stacy opens the discussion by coming right to the point: “So, tell me in your own words what happened.”

You take a deep breath and tell the story as calmly and clearly as you can.  You relate how you were seated next to your accuser at the first day’s panel.  You describe how, upon finding out the man was a former Marine you mentioned you were a veteran yourself.

“Oh, you’re a veteran!” Stacy exclaims.  “Thank you for your service.”  You smile awkwardly in reply. 

You never know how to respond to this, because thanking vets profusely for their service and describing them as “heroes” even if they were cooks or truck drivers or personnel clerks has become a social obligation of late.  You pride yourself on not having become what you call a “professional vet,” someone whose whole existence, like that of the high school football hero who never is able to recapture his past glories, centers upon that one fact in their lives.

Your accuser is just such a guy.  You’re all too familiar with the breed: overfed, loud mouthed, and jockeying constantly to be the alpha male in every situation.   He regaled you during the breaks between presentations with tales of his storied career as GI Joe with a kung fu grip, before his back gave out on him.  (If it isn't their knees, it’s their back.)  He tells you he’s active in the American Legion, AMVETS, the VFW, the DAV, and the rest of the alphabet soup of veteran’s organizations.  He tells you he served on the county veteran’s affairs commission.  He offers to help you upgrade your disability rating, a result that you know is between unlikely and impossible to achieve.  All the while your eyes are darting across the room looking for someone to catch your eye and rescue you from this blowhard’s narcissistic monologue.

Wincing slightly at the unpleasant memory, you continue your account.  You also point out your unblemished teaching record and your excellent classroom evaluations. 

Stacy, her head attentively tilted slightly to one side, pauses a beat before speaking.  “I see.  You know we have to take these allegations seriously, even if they’re unfounded.  Principal Nathan investigated and could not find any evidence against you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yes, and when I called the man—”  Stacy laughs slightly, then continues, “and I don’t even remember his name—“

“That’s all right.  I do,” you reply with a wintry smile.

Stacy goes on, “Anyway, he wasn’t very convincing and some of what he said contradicted what Nathan had told me.”

“That’s because it didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry about all this.  In any case, since it occurred while you were off contract no mention of this incident will go into your personnel file.”

“That’s a relief.”

“You know, we really value the efforts of adjuncts like you.  Did you know I started out as an adjunct?”  Yes, you know.

The conversation wends on for a few more minutes before petering out.  At the end comes something you don’t expect.  As Stacy shakes your hand before you leave, she thanks you for coming in.  Then she says,

“Please don’t let this incident discourage you from volunteering with Snowflake College in the future.”

While you reply with a smile and a nod, a solitary thought runs through your mind:

Never again.  No fucking way.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Current Events, Old Attitudes

“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

In Memory of Mr. Deadwyler (…and Others)

On a day slightly more than fifty years ago, a young black motorist was stopped by the LAPD.  His name was Leonard Deadwyler.

Mr. Deadwyler had led the police officers on a 50-block pursuit before stopping.  He had good reason: His pregnant wife Barbara was in labor (though this later turned out to be a false alarm).  The officers were unimpressed by the young man’s urgency.  One of them, 23-year old Jerold Bova, leaned inside the car’s driver side window, gun drawn, to discuss the matter.

In his haste, Mr. Deadwyler had neglected to take his car out of gear.  The car edged forward a bit.  Officer Bova, thinking his suspect was making a break for it, fired his gun into the car, killing Mr. Deadwyler.  Bova claimed at the coroner’s inquest that his weapon discharged “accidentally.”

This tale from the distant past has a sickening familiarity about it.  As everyone knows by now this week has witnessed the senseless-to-inexplicable shooting deaths of two young African American males at the hands of the police.  Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge was selling CDs outside a convenience store when accosted by the police, supposedly after Sterling had threatened an anonymous tipster.  Much like Leonard Deadwyler, Philando Castile was shot dead in his car by police in a Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb during what should have been a routine traffic stop.  

The Deadwyler incident happened less than a year following the 1965 Watts Rebellion.  Popular reaction to the shooting was comparatively muted, though there were a few street disturbances in protest.  Thomas Pynchon, in his own inimitable style, wrote of the Deadwyler case in the West Coast edition of The New York Times.  Pynchon portrayed the image of a black Los Angeles as an unwelcome intrusion upon the popular culture notion of an LA of palm trees among opulent houses with well-manicured lawns overlooking pristine beaches teeming with well-scrubbed blonde haired, blue eyed youth. 

It’s a point hard to argue with.  The mainstream view of America remains very much a white perspective.  People with dark complexions still scare the living daylights out of millions in white society, not to mention the very thought of anything connected with Africa.  (Don’t believe me?  Just recall last year’s Ebola outbreak when a Liberian man thought to be infected with the virus was reported to have visited a Texas school.  Within minutes of the media report the streets around the school in question were jammed with polo shirted and khaki wearing tract house dwellers in SUVs anxious to save their precious spawn from the dark peril lurking among them.) 

Pynchon wrote that black encounters with white America entailed a plethora of negative presuppositions on each side; it’s pretty clear that this is as much the case in 2016 as it was in 1966.  Even as the Obama administration draws to a close it is still a mistake to claim we live in anything close to a post-racial society.  Two years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and a little over a year after Freddie Gray died in the back of Baltimore police van, it doesn’t seem as if minority communities have made any progress in their relations with law enforcement.  In fact, an already deep chasm has merely gotten deeper.  The Black Lives Matter movement has raised the hackles of certain Americans, further deepening the racial divide and, I think, implicitly increasing their support of cops involved in the deaths of African American citizens.

I’ve had several conversations with white acquaintances on this subject in the past year, one of whom was a retired police officer, and none of them wanted to have a serious discussion concerning law enforcement’s lack of accountability in incidents of police-on-citizen violence.  Each person I spoke with misinterpreted the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as meaning the only lives which matter and that those of police officers somehow do not.  There was a strong undercurrent of besieged white privilege in their words, leavened with a more than a hint of resentment. 

The killing of five Dallas police officers by Micah Johnson in response to the deaths of Sterling and Castile can only make us more apprehensive.  It also underscores how little we’ve learned from decades of such incidents.  A half century ago Barbara Deadwyler was widowed and left to raise her son on her own.  At the televised inquest, featuring a young Johnnie Cochran channeling questions on Mrs. Deadwyler’s behalf to the witnesses via the investigating deputy district attorney, Leonard was portrayed by the police as being responsible for his own death.  The autopsy report said that Leonard had an improbable blood alcohol level of .35 when he died.    

His wife struggled with the question of guilt long after the inquest cleared the officers involved and a wrongful death lawsuit against the LAPD was lost in court.  Fourteen years after her husband’s death, she was described in a story published in The Washington Post as struggling to make her way in the wake of the tragedy.  Mrs. Deadwyler admitted that she blamed her son for his father’s death for a number of years. 

The blame for many if not most of police shootings of unarmed people of color then and now actually lies with mindset.  Law enforcement in minority communities resembles a military occupation; the community’s residents in turn perceive themselves as living under occupation.  The militarization of policing reflects an entrenched self-perception of law enforcement personnel as being under constant treat of attack. It doesn’t help that for the last twenty years the Department of Defense has made surplus equipment, including semi-automatic rifles and armored vehicles, available to state and local police agencies.  The siege mentality which has taken hold among law enforcement, bolstered by its military trappings, can only lead to trouble should there be any challenge, real or imagined, to their authority.  I get nervous every time I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror, and I’m a law abiding middle aged white guy driving a late model car.  God knows what was going through Philando Castile’s mind when he was pulled over. 

Compounding the problem is that police violence against people of color is that it appears to have given license to white civilians who suspect minority individuals of criminal activity; one need only remember the controversy surrounding George Zimmerman’s stalking and murder of Trayvon Martin several years ago to recognize this.  The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils may be thought figments of a vanished past, but racism itself is alive and thriving.  Half the country still cannot come to grips with the fact that a black man is President.  A thinly disguised rhetorical code has replaced the white hood, manifested in doubts over Mr. Obama’s religion or national origin and allusions to his early work as a community organizer. 

Much like the epidemic of school and workplace shootings, the use of excessive force and the wrongful killing of citizens by law enforcement has become so commonplace as to scarcely merit notice.  And why not?  We are products of a violence worshipping culture.  Might makes right, or at least it does in the stories we’re told through literature, movies, and TV.  Whoever shouts loudest wins the argument.  If something bad happens to you, it’s your own damn fault.  Sterling and Castile were probably asking for it, right? 

Until our collective mindset toward race and violence shifts, we can look forward to a bleak procession of more victims in the months and years to come.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Another Reason I'm Glad the Academic Year is Over

Campus shootings (and shooting sprees generally) have become so commonplace that I don’t usually bother to comment on them.

But yesterday’s incident at UCLA, in which a former graduate student killed an engineering professor and one other person before killing himself, caught my attention.  You see, one of the shooter’s reasons for killing the prof was over a grade he had received from the victim.

According to news reports, the professor was well respected and actually popular with students and staff alike.

There but before the grace of God go I…

Mondo Cane

As if we needed any more insight into our national character, this item from Reuters provides us with still another clue.

A 7 year old boy returning from a vacation with his terminally ill father suffered an attack from an allergy to dogs soon after boarding a flight with the cut-rate airline Allegiant Air.  As father and son were removed from the plane the other passengers broke into applause.

Give me convenience or give me death, I guess.  And the smirking, unsympathetic remark from the flight attendant who escorted them out that dogs were on every flight just underscores the odd relationship Americans have with their pets that puts them above the welfare of other human beings.

It’s one more sign that we are gradually losing our humanity…