I think we’ve got it now, that clear picture of what policing has become and how racism defines the gaseous mix that has made Swiss cheese of our justice system. People are gathering and marching around the nation, their i’s dotted and their t’s crossed by the lack of accountability in the death of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by one of several cops that landed on top of the big unarmed man, although he did not resist. Now “I can’t breathe” — Garners last words, repeated nine times — joins “Hands up, don’t shoot” as the protest meme of the twenty-teens.
As the choke hold has long been outlawed in New York, and because the entire distressing affair was filmed by a canny bystander, it was assumed that the grand jury would present a different finding from the one in Ferguson. Didn’t happen. Jon Stewart gave us the appropriate WTF response, and when Stewart gets serious, you know we’ve come to an impasse in credibility. The result of this ruling makes Obama’s call for body cams on America’s police force moot.
It’s difficult not to notice that the nation has one foot in (ghettoized) reality and one in (elitist) delusion. How else to explain that the white murderer of Michael Brown has been allowed to move on from culpability while Brown’s black stepfather is being held responsible for hostile comments made in his moment of grief and rage? How else to rationalize the fact that the grand jury has granted Garner’s white killers their freedom while the man (of color) who came forward with the recording has been scrutinized and indicted on old charges.
This boomerang effect — bouncing off white authority to land back on black victims — has become so obvious that an NAACP official, aiding the family of a black man in Phoenix who was killed when an officer mistook a pill bottle in his pocket for a weapon, warned against too emotional an outburst. Angry black citizens, as has become painfully apparent, are damned if they do — and if they don’t.
Perhaps that is quite literal. As Jon Stewart reminded us, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “The point is, these shootings are clearly not a manifestation of systemic inequality and mistrust between the African-American community and the somehow always-justified Police-American community, but […] merely an unending bizarrely-similar series of unrelated incidents.” And, just for a moment let me don my tinfoil hat to post this interesting link, putting in question the identity of those who decided Ferguson must burn. As I commented that day, I had the feeling that announcing the verdict late at night gave a perfect dark backdrop for the requisite fire that makes White America clutch her pearls. File under “Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm.”
There have been a number of excellent articles written, the totality of which sums up the problem itself, if not the solution. I was impressed with Chris Rock’s take on this, some of which came from his Rolling Stone interview. When asked about his comment that “even Nostradamus couldn’t see the end of American racism,” Rock responded:
“We’re never going to see the end of racism per se. But Obama is like the polio vaccine of racism – people still get polio and die, but there is a vaccine. They don’t have to get it. And my kids, you know, it’s been 12 years now and there hasn’t been one racial incident in my mostly white neighborhood – not even a tiny one.”
Rock — who admits his income gives him special status — continued his commentary on race issues in a fascinating conversation with Frank Rich, nailing the delusional quality of the elitist thought-process within the white community:
“Here’s the thing,” Rock said. “When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”
[…]
“To say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president,” Rock said. “That’s not black progress — that’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”
Despite fear of becoming a one-trick pony, writing only about these racial inequities and victimizations, I want to make sure we’re thinking big enough now to get a clearer glimpse of this problem. Easy enough to tear up — as I did reading Eric Garner’s final words — but that won’t change anything. Easier still to rage against what’s wrong without thinking outside the box, looking for a way to sway the whole of us back toward an ethical, humanistic future. Shaving this problem down to mere racism is leaving behind the larger “ism” I think we’re looking at today: classism.
Chris Rock is the only other person I’ve heard wonder about our leaving monarchies behind in this New World and then establishing a pecking order that mimics them. (You’ll find those comments early in the Rich interview.) This is the second time in our brief history that we’ve created a vastly rich upper class while dooming the lower class to slave-like working conditions, furthering class war. We can’t seem to help ourselves.
And it’s easiest to do that with communities of color, isn’t it! We’ve talked a bit about white privilege here at Planet Waves, but not enough in the nation at large, where people simply seem incapable of putting themselves in another’s place. We’re too busy voting against our own interests and hoping to win the lottery.
I remember reading/posting a dynamite article a few years back, written by a southern man, raised conservative, who had a life-changing experience when faced with shepherding a group of young black children through his church obligations. Taking them out to eat, he was shocked to discover that they’d never been in a sit-down restaurant, never ordered off a menu. He began to see life through their eyes and discovered that what he’d been taught was wrong, and their flippant and/or defiant behavior was simply ignorance of basic middle-class culture. He got to wondering what else he’d mistaken, and shortly after changed his political party. It was, he said, an ethical decision.
Yes, between these latest tragic poster children for black victimization and the egregious records of brutality in our for-profit prisons, it’s almost impossible to be anything but defensive if you still have faith in the justice system. (And I guess we can call our current conflagration progress, of a sort, since in decades gone by the majority felt absolutely NO need to defend brutal behavior toward those of a race or religion “less” than their own [sic.] We inch forward slowly — until we leap.)
The problem with being defensive, of course, is that’s exactly the way that rationale comes across, pouty and offended. That’s how it came across when nobody’s favorite congressman, Rep. Peter King of New York, blamed Eric Garner for his own demise, telling the world that Garner would probably not be dead “… if he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese.” He forgot to add black.
I’m wondering how such a statement plays with the one-in-twelve asthma sufferers, the 24.7 million living with heart disease and the one-third of the U.S. population that is obese. Not all of those with these problems are people of color, hold different religious views, or are immigrants. A good many of them are white, living in areas of poverty that offer them no opportunity, voting against their own good and defending their “freedom” to the bitter end.
Obviously those of us out here in the “reality community” need to acknowledge that rational thinking, factual information and logic will not win the day. We are up against something quite different than the lefties, as a group, can grok in fullness — or at least haven’t been able to, up to this point. We need to begin to tell our story differently. We need to build a better mousetrap!
Take that sentence above: one-in-twelve with asthma, 24.7 million with heart disease, one-third of the US population obese. There’s a story there about cultural and environmental norms in this nation. There’s a finger pointing at the corporations that make money off these people not just by folding them into an opportunistic health care system, but by adding to the cause of their maladies on almost every level.
You may recognize the name George Lakoff. He is a renowned cognitive linguist and Berkeley professor who introduced a baffled nation to the conservatives’ convincing use of language — and the Democrats misunderstanding of it — in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant.
Lakoff wrote the following in a recent interview, not about my sentence but about the corporate dominance that led to it:
Oil companies – our wealthiest corporations – are destroying the planet for their short-term profit. Corporations govern your life by putting hidden carcinogens and other poisons in your food, cosmetics, furniture, etc. for their profit, not your health. For details, go to ewg.org. These are facts. In isolation, one-by-one, they are just a laundry list. Isolated facts don’t help. Together they tell a truth: Corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, in all those ways. Name it. Repeat it. We need reform at the deepest level.
The political world is spinning itself into knots based on basic ethical considerations, and — although the progressive wing of the Democratic party has lately begun to reinvent itself — politics to the left of the spectrum has lost its moral authority. Lakoff urges the left to reclaim its dedication to the public good, to speak from the heart, communicating values instead of pointing out evidence of the hypocrisy on the other side of the political spectrum. The result of years of that has had as much effect as spitting into the wind. If we are to foster change, we have to make an effort to engage these people in a genuine dialogue.
Looking at brain science, Lakoff suggests that democracy means vastly different things on each side of the aisle. Conservatives frighten more easily, are more aggressive in self-protection. They do not stray from what Lakoff calls “strict father morality,” which is what we see at work in almost all of the punitive laws we’ve established in the last few decades, enjoying a renaissance now in this hateful business of blaming the poor for their poverty, the uneducated and unassisted for their inability to break through the barriers that hold them. Says Lakoff:
“In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.
If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.”
Conservatives are absolutely assured by their faith that they hold the moral high ground, which gives them liberty to keep women in their place and treat children as property, while infantilizing the patriotism that fuels the NRA on the homefront as devotedly as it does the machinery of war around the globe. Like the Federalism that keeps states rights in place, conservatism is a close-knit, private affair.
This unquestioning belief in the patriarchy as defined by their godhead, which favors the stern father prototype out of the Old Testament, wounds us all. Notions of god-space have no ability to evolve when defined not as love, but conditional love. Clearly, the progressive empathy and nurture that drive moral convictions on governance serving the totality of the public good fly in the face of the limited conservative “tough love” mentality.
I have a hard time understanding how compassion can be argued against, personally, but we have to find the right tone to begin that conversation. Paul Krugman, for instance, tells us, “Today’s immigrant children are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and neighbors. Condemning them to life in the shadows means that they will have less stable home lives than they should, be denied the opportunity to acquire skills and education, contribute less to the economy, and play a less positive role in society. Failure to act is just self-destructive. But more importantly, it’s (Obama’s immigration proposal) the humane thing to do.”
That’s a progressive argument. It isn’t just an idea, it’s actual human children who need something from the society in which they find themselves. If we can begin a conversation about what to do with the undocumented who are already here — many of whom work for the people who would vote them out of the country — insisting that there must be some ethical solution we can develop between the two political camps, then we can begin to close the class-gap between both the immigrants and the population, as well as those on each side of the aisle.
Yelling at one another over the divide will not work; trying to sooth ancient and ignorant fears won’t, either. But engaging a conversation in what we should MUTUALLY do to solve problems, side-stepping the obvious traps of partisanship while inviting real solutions to the ethical challenges we face, just might. It would take real discipline, but it’s do-able. Getting to the table is the first step, one that will require not just willingness but dedication to civility.
Read Lakoff. Get a sense of how to use progressive language without reinforcing conservative jargon. Find some moderate talking points in which to begin a conversation with those who refuse to hear you, anticipate how to respond to hostility in a way to defuse it. If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, my dears, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Once upon a time we could say that this was the work of government. Now? It’s ours to do, person to person: aware, awake, purposeful.
There is no stopping a good idea once it has legs. We need to build that better mousetrap of an argument, one that engages the emotions of those who hear it, that appeals to the higher angels of anyone in shouting distance, the one that fosters a change of mind as an ethical decision. We need to create a story that points to peace, that soothes the anxiety of those who fear the progress that must come — inevitably — and when we do that, the world will find the heart-space to hear it.
