The past three weeks have moved quickly because there have been rapid and very different shifts of public attention. First, there was Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” which showed that Trump had lied by denying just how bad the coronavirus would be, he said, not so as to create panic, as if the only alternative to avoid panic is to lie. But as is the case with many of Trump’s outrages, people just move on, as when he said he would not accept the election if he lost, other Republican politicians pooh-poohing the matter, the succession to be intact as it has been since 1792. Republicans treat Trump much less seriously than Democrats do. Then there was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone whom I much admired though I thought the accolades were a bit much, praise heaping over praise, perhaps because she is a model of probity as that is every moment implicitly contrasted to the current President. And then returned the public to an incident that awakens the issue of Blacks being unfairly killed by the police. There were no charges for the killing of Breonna Taylor, which led to public outrage and to the MSNBC regulars, who are sure that there should have been high criminal charges for the Louisville police officers. I am going to say something controversial about this last particular matter, even though it may give many people offense, that being the coin of the common realm. People are more concerned about whether they are rankled is more important than whether people are accurate or analytic, so deeply are deeply incurred to the solipsistic cliches of our times. Look carefully at the ways the choices of words spin the issues.
A good opening example of the cliches available in race relations that misconstrue race, by both whites and Blacks, are so familiar with the litanies that short circuit thinking about race. These phrases are a way of talking that has gone on for years rather than for three weeks and so make people comfortable with their utterances and not question whether they help matters. One adage, in fact, was said by Bob Woodward in his interchange with President Trump in “Rage”. Woodward said Trump and Woodward were both white and of the same generation and of similarly privileged upbringings and so were isolated from understanding the anger and pain of Black Americans. Trump was dismissive and minimized structural inequities between Blacks and whites. He came across as the bad guy while Woodward was of the decent sort.
But If you think about it, the Woodward approach is not the way to approach race relations, however sympathetic Woodward may express himself to be. First of all, people of white privilege are more likely to understand just how well racial discrimination operates than do the people who are oppressed, and so do not need to further engage to appreciate their understanding. However much it is that minority people may indeed feel their evident hardships. Hegel’s idea that the slave understands his situation better than the lord of the manor is plain wrong. The lord or the slavemaster understands the cost of the worth of slaves, and best when to go to market; they know better how to get their field slaves more amenable to working as much as they can make them; they understand the legal codes that can suppress revolts. All that the slave understands is just how onerous is the work and how few are the easements that they can get out of the slavemaster. Similarly, in the present day, white privilege has policemen to supervise and make safe their own areas. They know how to maneuver getting their children in the best schools, either by money or by getting selected into public schools. They may not know the details of redlining, but they are aware of which streets divide areas from one enclave to another.
Second of all, Woodward is suggesting that white people of privilege have to extend their sympathies for their Black and Hispanic brothers so as to improve conditions. This seems a modest effort of good will, but if you think about it, it means that social improvement comes about because of goodwill, which means that people have to counteract their prejudice, when the improvement of the understanding of racial relations is to go beyond prejudice or good will so as to conceive the situation as “institutional racism”, which means that the arrangements are set in place that maintain inequality regardless of whatever they think or feel and so the solution is to dissolve the institutional arrangements never mind how people feel about it. So there is redlining that is of long standing so that Blacks can’t find affordable housing and black girls do not get prenatal care that leads to lower birth rates and so may not be the result of nurses and doctors disregarding the aches and pains of Black pregnant women. It is more important to change legislation rather than express good feelings and expunge bad ones. Vote rather than feel.
Now with the misdirected rhetoric on the Breonna Taylor matter. People in the streets want justice. That means that the two policemen who shot Taylor should be prosecuted. But even those like Paul Butler present a weak case. They were allowed to enter the premises because of a no knock order that was duly certified even though they had apparently apprehended the person concerned about drug sales. The male companion of Taylor had shot at the police thinking they were just intruders and so the policemen used deadly force. The claim is that they did not have to continue to engage in deadly force and that the court rather than the Grand Jury should sort that out, though I thought that prosecutors do not move to an indictment unless they were convinced there was a crime. But there is the fact that taylor is dead and there is no recrimination for it. The anguished mourners of Taylor think, however, that something has to be done to accomplish “justice”. That term “justice” simply means that someone has to suffer. Indeed, there is no justice ever without suffering, whether to Jesus making up for the Original Sin, or through life imprisonment, or to grant reparations by Jews and Blacks. So someone has to be punished for Taylor because there is nothing else to do with justice even if it cannot bring back her death.
This is a wrong way to conceive of terms that are not criminal though very, very bad. Not everything is a crime that needs a punishment, but is simply a social problem in that there are ways to alleviate suffering, including being shot legally even if fatally. The Congressional Black Caucus has clearly and obviously suggested that there should not be any no knock warrants in police departments throughout the country because they are so likely to aid in mischief and will tend police officers to be high handed in their measures. But the call for justice is the term offered everywhere, anyway, because the term allows people to think of righteousness and of their emotion rather than thinking through the facts of the particular matters whereby numerous Black people die at the hands of police officers.
The term “justice” also has a way to eliminate the big picture and center on the details of what might indeed be a particular atrocity, those clearly enough such cases as Eric Garner and George Floyd show that the need to restrain people to their deaths are so clearly unnecessary. There are other cases, however, where the actual cases are ambiguous. Michael Brown, for example, seems to have been a petty hoodlum, though that does not therefore deserve the death penalty.. Liberals treat all such incidents as atrocities while Conservatives see all of them as excused or flukes. It is a mistake to fit the particular case to the ideology that presumes rather than to look at the actual facts. The way to deal with overall questions having to do with race relations is not to force the facts of a particular case but to look at the larger picture.
FBI statistics report in 2016 report that Blacks were killed by 2570 Blacks while whites killed by whites were numbered at 2854. The two rates would seem comparable except for the fact that Blacks are 13% of the population so that Blacks are, let us say, six times the number of whites. There are an awful lot of drive by shootings and random shootings which result in little Black girls dying when a bullet enters a window and kills herself in her bed. Where is the outrage, the blame, for those atrocities? It is easier to blame police violence because it seems racially unjust and creates a secondary effect whereby Black people feel victimized rather than responsible. Moreover, advocating against the drugdealers and the “gangbangers” (this last a term of art for corrections officials) is likely to be more dangerous than confronting the police who are mostly more responsible than gangsters. The gang problem seems so intractable that Black politicians treat it as a side issue that diverts people from the issues of police injustice. The side issue, however, is the other way around. Police violence is rare if horrific, let us say ten murders a year at most. What about the overwhelming brunt of the matter of Black on Black crime? Good social policy maker that I am, would work to reduce the numbers of Black on Black murder rather than expostulate about “justice”. But to do so is very hard. It would require jobs for those with few skills and an expensive educational system to improve people who have to rely on schooling more than family to improve their intellects, and very good prenatal nutrition and pediatric care. Those things are possible while crying in one’s soup doesn’t get much anywhere unless Biden is elected and the Senate goes Democratic. Then we can get rid of righteousness and, instead, legislate.