Life in a Post-Ferguson World

A New Normal

In the Kübler-Ross model of grief (which, by the way, is complete bullshit), our reaction to a loss goes through "Anger," then "Bargaining," the "Depression" followed by "Acceptance."  I had originally intended in this blog post to discuss the Ferguson tragedy through this lens.  However, before I even embarked on this post, there has been a deadly shooting of a 12 year old boy followed by another non-indictment of an officer who used a deadly choke-hold, on camera, in broad daylight.  It's getting impossible to keep up with all the bad news!

So it is in this spirit that I'm just going to skip it all and go right straight to Acceptance, because, well, I am a realist, and there is no way to tease out things like Anger, Bargaining, and Depression in an environment of continual trauma.  All of those things will have to just be wrapped up into Acceptance of the New Normal.

I consider myself a realist, because:

1. I'm not the kind of idiot who thinks things are continually getting better.  It should be obvious, but things are just not getting better, for so many reasons.
2. I'm not the kind of idiot who thinks he can actually change the world by being part of a physical protest somewhere.  Very sorry, but the police state has gotten crowd control down to a science, as I've sadly witnessed firsthand.  They have all the money, all the equipment, and all the power.  The end result is that dude in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.  Not only will we never know who he was, but he has been deleted from all electronic versions of history.
3. I'm not the kind of person (I'm not going to say "idiot" here because I don't want to insult anyone's religion) who thinks there is an afterlife that will somehow correct the injustices that are currently going on.  All I know is that this world, the physical world, actually does exist, according to all my observational evidence, and as such, it is in my best interest to want to make it the best world possible.

Note that I haven't given up all Hope because, well, I'm writing this blog, and the box has to have something left in it.

Race Relations

In better terms than I could express, Chris Rock said this [interview link last accessed December 4, 2014]:
 

Here’s the thing. 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...So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Superb work, Chris.  But can we really produce nicer white people in this nation?  I have my doubts.  I haven't really seen attitudes change all that much, except a profound improvement in how easily we can tune out anything that makes us uncomfortable.  I know I have a tendency to blame social media for this self-selecting phenomenon, but it's really been around since the dawn of time.  Technology's only improved upon it.  We're the same assholes we've always been, only, we're much faster, more concentrated assholes.

I like to think of myself as having become "nicer" as a white person, but I'm not capable of really judging that.  I don't feel nicer.  If anything, I feel more angry because of the System's breakdown, what Attorney General Eric Holder says is testing the "sense of trust that must exist between law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve and protect."  In other words, "officer-community relations," in the Chris Rock / Ike and Tina concept of "relations."

The Scary Black Man

To me, what has been strikingly different about Ferguson, as opposed to Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, or even Trayvon Martin, was the audacity of the Ferguson police department's release of the robbery incident footage.  By releasing that footage to the media, the police department was unequivocally dog-whistling to white supremacist groups and openly using the Scary Black Man racial stereotype in an attempt to turn public sentiment.

It's rarely talked about, but the Scary Black Man is really what is driving the white man's support of police officers and purchases of guns.  It is interesting to me that the Scary Black Man is such a new stereotype.  Racial stereotypes from the 1930's and 1940's depict black people as superstitious, easy to manipulate, and scared of their own shadow.  The transition during the Civil Rights Era (and the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party) gave us this unfortunate new violent image.  Of course, it didn't help that in the decades that followed, many youth leaned on it for support and power, creating a very real gang culture (one that it still unfortunately very much alive in Oakland).

The Scary Black Man image has all but destroyed the average black man in the minds of white people.  Those of us who have black friends or who look at statistics know exactly how very rare the SBM is.  But, unfortunately, those in uniform have no idea how to tell the difference, and, worse, seem oblivious that there even is a difference.  It is plainly obvious from the Ferguson grand jury testimony.

America in Uniform

I want to make something absolutely clear: putting on a uniform does not immediately grant you "respect" or "honor."  I know it does for some people (I grew up in a military household, so I heard it often).  When someone is in an occupation that has to entail a certain amount of hostility, violence, or danger--that is something to be respected, without question.

But.

Respect is all about "what have you done for me lately?"

There's a joke about a Scotsman who complains about his name.  "I built twenty nice bridges, but did they call me John-the-bridge-builder?  Nooooo!  I raised over thirty huge barns but did they call me John-the-barn-raiser?  Noooo!  But if you fuck just ONE sheep..."

So it is with the military.  Once upon a time, soldiers may have been the Monuments Men, but half a generation later, they became more akin to the looters and pillagers of great art themselves.  Instead of protecting people from torture, they had become, a little too often, the very instruments of evil.  Again, "what have you done for me lately?"  Restoring trust and respect in the military takes more than a few words of apology.  Our reputation abroad may be, in fact, still broken beyond repair, because of just "one sheep."

But that's the military, not the police.  At least the military pretends to have a justice system with its courts-martial, but the police are, as we have seen, unaccountable today.

The Most Dangerous Job

Becoming a police officer should command respect, some argue, because it is such a dangerous occupation.  This might seem like a "straw man" fallacy, but I've actually heard people say exactly this.

I got some news for you: it's not that dangerous.  By most lists, it's not even in the top ten.  Here is one such list, from Forbes in 2012 [accessed 12/04/2014]:

1. Logging workers
2. Fishers
3. Aircraft pilots
4. Roofers
5. Structural iron and steel engineers
6. Garbage and recycling collectors
7. Electrical power line installers
8. Truck drivers
9. Farmers
10. Construction laborers

In other words, Mr. Police Officer, by this measure, my garbage man is more worthy of respect than you.  To be fair, in this list (2013, accessed 12/04/2014), it does manage to sneak past construction into the #10 slot.  But you are twice as likely to be killed or injured working on steel, or five times as likely on a fishing boat, than you ever are on your beat.

Soft Power

I rather enjoy reading the works of P. G. Wodehouse, specifically the Jeeves and Wooster series of books.  One thing I've noticed is that, during the time it is written about, police officers are seen as ineffectual, bumbling fools.  And yet, when a suspect is cornered, the suspect announces, "it's a fair cop" and is taken in without a struggle.  The depictions of American police officers in the books are a stark contrast--armed with a gun, shooting first and asking questions later.

Coined in 1990 by political scientist Joseph Nye, soft power was defined as the ability of an entity to influence the behavior of others to get the outcome you want.  In essence, it is the only truly important measure of power, since traditional "hard power" is fleeting.  Simply put, the soft power of our peace officers is quickly eroding.  This is not only going to make it harder for police officers, but for citizens as well.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Who watches the watchmen?"  Not only is accountability eroding (if it is ever said to have existed at all), it should concern us all that our police have become increasingly militarized.  One solution proposed would be to increase surveillance by requiring police to have cameras while on duty.  While I think this isn't a bad idea, it reminds me of something Alan Moore said in an interview [accessed 12/04/2014]:

To me, one of the biggest surprises of these recent surveillance revelations is how surprised people are. The level of surveillance we’ve had over here for the past 20 years now is ridiculous — and useless, I would add. Eerily enough, the security cameras on every street corner of Britain was instigated by the incoming Blair government in 1997, which was when I decided, back in 1982 or so, to set the first episode of “V for Vendetta,” which had cameras on every street corner. So yeah, we’ve had those for awhile; they’ve proliferated and multiplied for decades. More recently, there have been troops of police who have said that all these things are useful for is alienating the public. [Laughs] They are not actually useful in the prevention of crimes, or even actually apprehending their suspects.

Here’s the thing: If you’re monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. [Laughs] How are you going to process that amount of information? That’s when you get all these wonderful emerging paradoxes. Recently over here, there was a case where it was suspected that the people who monitor security screens were taking unnecessary toilet breaks and gossiping when they should be watching us. So it was decided that the only sensible thing to do was to put a security camera in the monitor room. [Laughs] This is answering the question that Juvenal asked so succinctly all those years ago: Who watches the watchmen? The answer is more watchmen! And yet more watchmen watch them, and of course it will eventually occur to them to ask: Can those people who are watching the people doing the watching really be trusted? Much better if they were under surveillance.

So, we have the Surveillance State as well as the Police State.  Great, this all keeps getting better and better.  Even scarier is not the possibility that there is an endless, useless surveillance, but the realization that the slippery slope quite likely ends in the domain of artificial intelligence.

A Post Ferguson Dictionary

I didn't want to write this part, because of how angry, cynical, and plainly offensive it is.  But after all that's happened, how could I not?  The police have already given us this gift.  I am merely passing the information along to anyone who might be listening.  Please don't shoot the messenger, but welcome to the dictionary of the new age.

• badge: a nigger-hunting license.  "Hey, did you hear that Jeb just got his badge from St. Louis Academy?"
• broom handle: a sodomizing device used to keep black prisoners in line.  "Don't make me get out the broom handle."
• grand jury: the mechanism to clear the murder of a black man through white channels.  "That grand jury really convinced me!"
• hands up: a gesture that requires a victim to apologize to their abuser.  "The St. Louis Rams are always giving the hands up!"
• speed bump: a dead black man in the road.  "I don't drive in Missouri anymore, too many speed bumps."
• stolen: an object that, if in possession of a black man, means a death sentence without a warrant or a trial.  "That cigar was stolen!"
• taser: putting a bullet in the brain.  "I really tasered that kid on BART the other day."
• wallet: a dangerous weapon, meriting a barrage of forty or more shots.  "Did you see that guy just reach for his wallet?"

Again, I didn't come up with these definitions.  These are already in use.  I'm just documenting them.  I'm especially upset about the usage of the "n-word."  It's not a word I like to use ever, even when quoting people.  I feel I don't have the right to use it.  I grew up in the South and had a great-great-grandfather who apparently owned a KKK hood.  I prefer Spike Lee to Quentin Tarantino any day of the week.

Acceptance

This brings us back to Acceptance, that last stage of grief.  I have to accept the things I cannot change, after all, just like everyone else.  Welcome to the New Age.  I'm white and I'm very, very sorry the world hates black people so much.  To quote Ben Folds, "it never was my idea.  I just drove to the store for some Preparation H."