They Had It Coming

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