[Pod] The Veneer of Civil Society
Black Lives Matter.
Stop Murdering Black People
There really is only one story to talk about this week; 2020 has not failed to provide us with more historic events.
It’s only appropriate to start this story with the murder of George Floyd.
Recently a clip surfaced of a white police officer in Minneapolis forcing his knee down on a black man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while the life was squeezed out of him. It was truly horrifying to watch George cry out for his mother, and plead for his life with Eric Garner’s infamous final words: “I can’t breathe.”
And what crime did this cop deem severe enough to use inhumane and ultimately lethal force? Passing on a forged bill. Ridiculous.
The onlookers begged the officer to stop pushing down but he kept his knee there even after George appeared to lose consciousness and his pulse. That white cop clearly did not value his life; he treated him like an animal.
Quite simply, this was a murder. George Floyd was lynched.
This was a visceral image that symbolized the long, arduous, and painful dehumanization of black people that has existed in America since it’s inception.
The killing set off a wave of civil unrest and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The first night in Minneapolis was marked by large crowds and some rioting, looting, and arson as the police precinct and some other buildings were set on fire.
Afterward, the protests, the vast majority of which were peaceful, spread like wildfire. We’ve now seen demonstrations in all 50 states and even other countries (France, Netherlands, England, Australia, Germany). It truly is staggering to see the crowd sizes of people in America and other majority-white nations who are finally standing together with the black community to oppose this perpetual injustice they have to live with.
It’s important to remember also that all of this is happening in the midst of the pandemic so there is an increased health risk with all of these crowds in the streets, which is certainly ironic given the outrage around the lockdown protesters from a couple of weeks ago. I certainly hope that this complete flip of our attitude doesn’t go unnoticed, we should still be cautious, wearing masks and doing our best to keep social distance where we can.
I am definitely proud of the outpouring of support and how seriously this movement is taking itself, but its important to ask: what ends are we striving for? What action are we demanding?
First and foremost we want justice for George Floyd and all of the other black victims. I want to commend the protestors in Minneapolis for making a very clear list of grievances and demands asking for specific charges to be brought against George Floyd’s murderer which undoubtedly was a pressure that helped Prosecutor Keith Ellison bring up the charge to 2nd-degree murder and bring forward charges against the other officers.
We also want policy and policing reform. A number of other campaigns have become prominent like #8CantWait by Campaign Zero which is calling for 8 specific reforms that provably reduce violence and murder in policing. I’m also very proud of the local work in New York which has been focused on measures like repealing 50a which is a law that protects police secrecy (which has just passed in the State Senate and House and signed by the g overnor). It also seems now that the Minneapolis City Council is set to “disband the police department” in favor of a new model of public safety.
We haven’t really seen a national leader emerge but I was very happy when Al Sharpton announced a March on Washington that is being scheduled for August 28th, 57 years to the day after MLK’s famous ‘I have a dream speech’; we too will get a chance to stand up for justice and send a message to those in power. I am hoping that this march will be tied to specific policy demands at a federal level and that we use it as an opportunity to build momentum for our new vision for America.
Ultimately the movement is still amorphous, but I’m hoping that we all remain united and focused on demands. We have to be clear about what we want and make sure these protests aren’t just a public display of outrage like so many other protests during the Trump era have been. We also have to make sure that we don’t only focus on police and criminal justice reform so as to not lose sight of the economic policies that would actually lift the black community and tackle the core rot that we have left in their neighborhoods. We need to focus on improving schooling, health services, and environmental infrastructure and avoid creating more situations like the one in Flint Michigan where politicians chose deliberately to poison black families; for god’s sake clean their water.
We all need to be donating, calling, emailing, and rallying to continue to apply this pressure; it’s working. (Get Involved: #8CantWait, BLM General) And most importantly we need to be voting in our elections, not just the national fanfare every 4 years, but on the local level so we have a say in how our police operate, who our DA and county prosecutor is, and about the standard for public safety and justice we want to uphold locally.
Besides this, there is a much deeper demand that the Black community wants from all of us; self-reflection.
What we all have to do is not only wrestle with our history, but wrestle with how we understand that history, and how little we have challenged our traditional ‘social studies class’ narrative that leaves out real emotion, grief, dehumanization, politics, and systemic injustice. We have a long history of torturous slavery and racial oppression and discrimination, segregation and domestic anti-black terrorism, cultural devaluation, dehumanization, and a more recent history of mass incarceration, economic segregation, and whitewashing of the American story. A great writer Caitlin Johnstone eloquently described this moment as a “head-on collision between the story America’s political, media and educational institutions tell Americans about what their country is, and the reality of what their country actually is.”
White people from Europe literally came to this land, slaughtered 'redskin' natives, and looted the continent of Africa bringing black people to this country as property.
We had a bloody civil war where one side’s soldiers died to protect the right of whites to keep their human property. Even after the abolition of slavery, we had a pervasive anti-black culture that purposely segregated blacks physically and culturally from whites who still deemed themselves superior. Groups like the KKK terrorized these communities and people like Emit Till were hung from trees because they "thought they were as good as any white man" (and he and thousands of others had no smartphone to document the atrocities).
Despite major gains in the '60s we started a drug war and created a system of mass incarceration that exacerbated our abuse of the 13th amendment to essentially re-enslave the black population. Racist practices like red-lining have segregated black neighborhoods and targeted public austerity and neglect of public infrastructure has pushed black families systemically behind everyone else on the track to gaining personal and generational wealth.
The worst part is that we have convinced ourselves that our culture confronted this history when we got a black president, and got an excuse to push down the expectation that we need to take action to change the horrifying status quo. Both Republican and Democratic politicians are complicit in keeping the systemic racism in place and have done nothing to bring forward our history so we can all reckon with it as a society, together. Today we will need to face the anti-blackness that’s ingrained in our western culture and institutions and finally stamp it out.
We also need to look at our own lives and recognize our individual place and our privilege.
I myself as a white person who grew up in the affluent suburbs of New York have to reckon directly with why there were so few black kids in my school growing up, how I may have given into subconscious bias or failed to stand up against it, and how I may have failed to create an environment where the few black friends I had had space to honestly bring forward their feelings and their experience.
I have to hold myself and the people in my life accountable to the subconscious racial bias that we have been desensitized to. I have to challenge my perception of my own community as one which understands the plight of being black in America and see where I was misguided.
We need to find real empathy and understanding and not just signal our virtue at a tragic event. We need to get closer to our black friends, learn about their experiences, and explore their culture. We need to watch documentaries, read books, and listen to black music to find a deeper understanding of the human experience through their eyes.
To all my black brothers and sisters we don’t just see you and hear you, we are standing up against this with you. Be patient with us because it is hard to find the line between signaling and genuine action and more often than not we can only sympathize with your experiences because we just aren’t black. But make no mistake, we are not just here to post black squares on Instagram and get hashtags trending, we are ready to work with you to change popular consciousness and demand specific systemic change that ensures your liberty to be black in America without fear.
Police State
As I mentioned earlier, in the first few days of protest, in some areas we saw rioting, looting, and arson; though it was nowhere near a majority of people there was enough happening that shocked the sensibilities of many and elicited an aggressive response from the city governments and Trump.
The scenes have become steeped in irony as the protests which are focused on ending police brutality have been met with even more violence from the state and police.
We have seen clips of police beating protestors and journalists with riot shields and billy clubs. Flagrant use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flashbangs which have caused serious injuries to quite a few demonstrators. There's also a clip of an elderly man who was aggressively shoved to the ground for no reason and is now in critical condition. And I think probably the worst clip I’ve seen is the one of the NYPD driving their cars into a crowd of demonstrators which was exactly the kind of tactic we condemned when it was used in Charlottsville by neo-Nazi’s to try to kill people like Heather Heyer.
Seemingly this is all justified in the name of ‘law and order’ and as a response to the looting which admittedly was a serious issue in many places and affected small businesses as well as large ones. But the clashes have sparked a new debate over the measures that the state can and should take in order to quell violence and looting.
I myself am of the belief that the rioting and criminal activity does a disservice to the peaceful protesters; violence is never the answer. Traditionally it gives an excuse for the state to respond with force and many police departments across the country, particularly in the big cities, have been quick to dole out that force which I described earlier and that you’ve no doubt seen flooding your social media feeds.
This situation has been a frightening reminder that our police don’t see themselves as protectors of our communities and our rights but as part of a law enforcement institution separate from the citizenry who protect “law and order” and answer to anyone who’s giving orders at the top. We have also been able to see how militarized our police have become as a result of actions by both parties as cops now show up in armored vehicles and riot gear as if they are being prepared to crush an insurgency rather than to safeguard our freedoms.
This was all made much worse by Donald Trump who ordered police to beat and tear-gas peaceful protesters in front of the White House to clear out a path for him to walk across the street to a church for his Christian fascist PR stunt and threatened to use the Insurrection Act to send in troops to address the violence which he attributed to far-left political groups like Antifa.
This is a toxic mix of a police force that has otherized their own community and a brazen authoritarian that solidifies America’s transformation into a police state that infringes upon people’s first amendment rights with violent force.
Some on the right may bring up the use of the Insurrection Act in the past which have been justified like the order given by Eisenhower to bring in an Airborne division to help integrate schools in Little Rock Arkansas. In that case, troops were brought in to protect those black students who faced threats from their white community members. But Donald Trump is a uniquely flagrant and dangerous character who can’t be trusted with this kind of power. He certainly isn’t a level headed leader and he has made it clear with his actions against the protestors in front of the White House that he is the most likely person to blur the line between criminals and peaceful demonstrators and that he is willing to escalate violence and use military occupation tactics against his own citizens. His actions have proved to be as destructive as his words and we have to be very careful with the precedent we set today.
While these protests have been focused specifically on violence by police against black people it has raised this important question around law enforcement during times of civil unrest and we would be foolish to ignore the slippery slope we are on with regards to state-sponsored violent force, censorship and oppression.
The NYT reportedly even approached Tom Cotton to write an op-ed entitled "Send in the Troops" which made this right-wing case for domestic mobilization of troops in a situation like this but that was met with a backlash from staff and the woke-twitter army and was ultimately censored.
I understand the high stakes of this debate but censoring these ideas is certainly not the answer. We need to be ready to challenge arguments like this which we see as authoritarian without responding with authoritarian tactics of our own. The moment we start shutting out voices we don’t agree with we are setting a precedent that will most certainly come back to hurt us in the future, especially those of us that are advocating for structural change and who are opposing powerful interests.
There has also been a new movement to #DefundThePolice which can appear to be similarly misguided. I wholeheartedly understand this idea and agree that it is absurd that some urban police departments like the one in New York have been way over-funded, but we can’t be so ham-handed with this argument. We have to be very clear about what that ‘defunding the police’ means and what new models of public safety actually entail in practice to make sure that those on the right cannot accuse us of endorsing lawlessness. I would definitely start by de-militarizing our police so that our communities don’t resemble a warzone every time we need large-scale patrols.
Author of The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale, explains how there a deeper issue with our decision to use the police to solve many community issues. What many are calling for is not getting rid of the police, but it is reallocating money to ‘community-identified’ needs like funding for schools and mental health services, that lift the people in the community vs criminalizing them.
It seems obvious to me that this is exactly what we need from our leaders, even at the national level; invest in us, and empower us instead of criminalizing and literally beating down our attempts to reclaim our democracy.
The Veneer
In heated times like these, it can be easy to lose sight of the larger historical context of the moment. Though these protests very much are focused on systemic racial injustice and police reform, there is a deeper reaction from the public which is expressing its extreme distrust of the institutions and leaders that govern American society.
We should acknowledge too that this is a generally fertile environment for protest. Donald Trump is in office so we all have this symbol of authority that a majority of us very clearly and obviously oppose. In the last decade since Occupy Wall Street, we have seen a slow growth of grassroots movements which really heightened in the last 4 years with the March for Our Lives, Climate Movement, Women's March; people are willing to get in the streets. And coronavirus and the economic collapse have forced many people to stay at home so suddenly more of the masses have the time to organize.
The backdrop is a global pandemic and economic conditions akin only to the great depression. The majority of Americans have had to sit at home for months watching their federal government fail to put together a coherent and adequate response to the crisis and prioritize providing liquidity to financial markets and large profitable corporations while leaving them out to dry. Many people are still recovering from the effects of the last recession where they also were fleeced at the expense of the capitalist class and the global financial system. We are fresh off a democratic primary cycle where the younger generation’s agenda was crushed and spat on and our choices in November again are more authoritarianism from Trump and the neo-cons, or an archaic relic who embodies the neoliberalism that blindly paved the way for Trump. It has never been more clear to the majority of Americans that their institutions do not work for them.
Cornel West had a great appearance on Anderson Cooper’s show in the midst of the first few days of unrest and he crystallized the situation very well. He said that we have to recognize that “we’re living in a moment with this capitalist economy [which has been a failure when it comes to delivering the needs, the nation-state, failure to protect, criminal justice system, failure to be fair.” A population that had no say in the architecture of their social systems is finally saying they’ve had enough with what they have inherited; they are demanding that their voice is heard and that their grievances are addressed.
The Black Lives Matter movement is the perfect lens with which to see this dynamic. The black community in America has never had real justice; we have never atoned for the sin of slavery, even after its abolition. Blacks were still treated as second class citizens, the larger culture dehumanized and devalued them and certain white sections of the country terrorized and murdered them with no accountability. They barely had a say in how the system worked and as a result, it marginalized and segregated them. Slowly there was more black representation in governing institutions as the Civil Rights Movement shifted consciousness, but even then our system still produced an economy that forced most black Americans into an underclass and systems like mass incarceration to undo all of our perceived progress. Still to this day very few leaders, black or white, have actually fought to address the systemic racial injustice. Structural change was and is still nearly impossible in our system.
It looks as if the system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places, too often our black politicians [in the] professional class [and] middle class, become to accomodated to the capitalist economy, to accomodated to the militarized nation state, to accomodated to the market driven culture … often times these black faces are losing legitimacy too, because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, black attorney general, and black national security, and they couldn’t deliver.
This lack of representation is common to all of us. We are all waking up to that feeling of powerlessness that the black community has endured for centuries. No one is coming to save us. If we want our society to be run in a different way we will have to take the initiative and engage in our democracy, and more often than not, get in the streets to make our clear demands and sustain pressure on our institutions.
We have learned that the veneer of civil society is very thin. We have entrusted the operation of our social systems to a small group of largely white men who have allowed private interests to loot the public coffers and to erode our social fabric. We have failed to hold them accountable for so long, that that thin fabric is now tearing at the seams. In a historic moment of devastation like this, one spark can flip a society like ours from order to chaos; and George Floyd’s murder was that spark.
We will have to tread cautiously and courageously through the coming months because it doesn’t seem like our leaders want to repair that social fabric, but rather upholding the status quo and perverse capitalist economic system that created this mess. Chris Hedges, who has been through his fair share of domestic struggles as a war reporter, has a dire warning.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga.
I am certainly hopeful but want us to heed Chris’s warning because this is the only beginning of this fight. I believe that our collective consciousness can be focused on the emerging movement so we can put up a fight against these oligarchs, but they will come in with divisive and violent tactics to protect themselves and it will be up to us to have the backbone to keep standing up.