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