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A Stark Divide: On Critical Race Theory in the Classroom

photograph of students studying at desks in classroom

“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist nation.” So declared Senator Tim Scott in his address last month. Refusing to acknowledge a messy explanation of how institutional racism contributes to significant racial disparities in criminal justice, healthcare, education, and economic outcomes, Scott chose the tidier, more familiar framing of racism as an all-or-nothing character trait. As though racism must always take the form of a conscious and deliberate act. As though offenders must have violence on their mind and evil in their hearts. As though longstanding inequities could be the simple work of a few bad apples.

But Scott’s pronouncement wasn’t designed for nuance, it was meant to serve a particular political function: contesting the need for race-based education in our schools.

“A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic. And if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”

Race-based education, Scott claims, is infected with the very same racial essentialism it seeks to expunge. Whatever their intentions, these educational programs are thought to be reductive — they reduce individuality and personal responsibility to a matter of skin color and treat race as though it were the only relevant characteristic defining one’s social identity. But, as Scott argued, “It’s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination.” As such, race-based education stands accused of being divisive. By focusing exclusively on our differences, it pits us against each other rather than bringing us together. Perhaps most damning of all, race-based education challenges an article of faith: that the social, political, and economic rewards reaped in this life are proportional to the sweat of one’s brow.

These charges, however, misunderstand (and sometimes willfully misconstrue) the purpose and aims of race-based education. Critical race theory, the unnamed villain in Scott’s address, is designed to question the ways we perceive our society and the ways we are perceived. These reflections provide us the opportunity to develop and strengthen our racial and social literacy. At its very core, critical race theory challenges each of us to appreciate our situatedness (or perhaps “thrownness”). There is no view from nowhere; we all speak from a specific perspective informed by a unique lived experience, and we each possess a particular point of view. If we are to truly come together and bridge that gap, then we must learn to recognize these differences and begin to develop a shared language with which to communicate — identifying the barriers to the inclusive and just society we wish to share, as well as articulating the work needed to dismantle them.

Critics often assert that critical race theory is not a proper pedagogical model because it focuses on what to learn rather than how to learn. In truth, however, it offers us an alternative lens by which to gain perspective on our social situation and consider the ways things could be otherwise. In this way, critical race theory delivers real educational goods: the civilizing of students, the enlargement of imagination and empathy, the cultivation of rich and meaningful autonomy, and the development of independent judgment by challenging dogmatic ways of thinking and perceiving.

The political war being waged on race-based education is not new. Senator Scott’s statements echo Trump’s proclamations that critical race theory represents “radical indoctrination,” and Scott’s words speak in support of Trump’s (since rescinded) ban on the “un-American propaganda” in diversity and inclusion initiatives. Critical race theory is smeared as left-wing proselytizing, the toxic by-product of the Great Awokening spilling out of the ivory tower and threatening education reform from grade school on up. To escape being swallowed up by PC culture and white guilt, there is but one recourse: Resist. And many conservative state legislatures are responding by outlawing any and all attempts to broach the subject of slavery and segregation in American history in the classroom.

In the wake of recent events, many schools have been prompted to reconsider their traditional course offerings. Unfortunately, proposed changes to the education curriculum are continually cast as a struggle over the soul of the nation. Just last month, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate referred to Howard University’s dissolving of its classics department as a “spiritual catastrophe,” signaling the “spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness run amok in American culture.” Contrary to faculty’s explanation, they depict Howard’s decision as a loss of faith. Lacking the strength of conviction to defend the sacred texts, Howard succumbed to pressure from the woke mob. The barbarians are at the gates.

In defending the discipline from would-be reformers, West and Tate emphasize the formative power the study has for its disciples. “Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage” they argue, “is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.” But the idea that one must assimilate oneself into Western culture in order to find one’s true identity and have anything meaningful to say is precisely the problem. It may very well be true that only through understanding our place in history can we ever hope to know ourselves, but the question that remains is: whose history?

This question is especially pressing for a discipline like classics. Even scholars within the field are beginning to question the ways in which the study lends itself to supporting white supremacy narratives, promotes Eurocentrism, and is instrumental to the construction of whiteness. As classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta has argued, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.” So how might we separate the meat from the bone and dismantle the power structures that seem inextricably fused to the life-blood of the discipline?

This discussion regarding what should be excised and what can be rescued within the classics curriculum reflects the substantial difficulty facing us in the larger societal conversation. Unfortunately, these questions are often explored in terms of who is cancelling whom — is the left out to expel all conservatives from the academy, or is the right suppressing academic freedom by claiming that all education is merely liberal ideology? But this way of assessing the debate only encourages us to retreat to our separate political corners. Commentary devolves into scorekeeping: whose tribe is winning? At present, public debate is paralyzed, consumed in accusing the other side of one of two untenable extremes: continuing to actively ignore an oppressive status quo, or burning everything to the ground.

Do Police Intentions Matter?

photograph of armed police officer

Imagine if it became widely-reported that police officers had been intentionally killing Black Americans for the expressed reason that they are Black. Public outrage would be essentially universal. But, while it is true that Black Americans are disproportionately the victims of police use of force, including lethal force, it seems unlikely that these rights violations are part of a conscious, intentional scheme on the part of those in power to oppress or terrorize Black citizens. At any rate, the official statements from law enforcement regarding these incidents invariably deny discriminatory motivations on the part of officers. Why, then, are we seeing calls to defund the police?

The slogan “Defund the Police” has been clarified by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza on NBC’s Meet the Press: “When we talk about defunding the police, what we’re saying is, ‘Invest in the resources that our communities need.’” The underlying problem runs deep: it is rooted in an unrelenting devaluation of communities of color. Rights violations by police are part of a larger picture of racial inequality that includes economic, health, and educational disadvantages.

The sources of this inequality are mostly implicit and institutional: a product of the unconscious biases of individuals, including police officers, and prejudicial treatment “baked into” our institutions, like the justice system. That is, social inequality seems to be systemic and not an intentional program of overtly racist policies. In particular, most of us feel strongly that the all-to-frequent killing of unarmed Black citizens, though repellent, has been unintentional.

But does this distinction matter? A plausible argument could be made that the chronic, unintentional killing of unarmed Black men and women by police is morally on a par with the intentional killing of these citizens. Let me explain.

Let’s begin with the reasonable assumption that implicit racial bias, specifically an implicit devaluation of Black lives, impacts decisions made by all members of our society, including police officers. What is devaluation? Attitudes toward enemy lives in war throws some light on the concept: each side invariably comes to view enemy lives as less valuable than their own. Even unintended enemy civilian casualties, euphemistically termed “collateral damage,” become tolerable if the military objective is important enough. On the battlefield, tactical decisions must conform to a “tolerable” relation between the value of an objective and the anticipated extent of collateral damage. This relation is called “proportionality.”

By contrast, policing is intended to be a preventative exercise of authority in the interest of keeping the peace and protecting the rights of citizens, including suspected criminals. Still, police do violate rights on occasion, and police officials operate with their own concept of proportionality: use of force must be proportional to the threat or resistance the officer anticipates.

Ironically, rights violations usually occur in the name of the protection of rights; when, for example, an officer uses excessive force to subdue a thief. Often, these violations are regarded as regrettable, but unavoidable; they are justified as the price we pay for law and order. But, in reality, these violations frequently stem from implicit racial biases. What’s more, the policy of “qualified immunity” offers legal protections for police officers and this disproportionately deprives Black victims of justice in such cases. This combination of factors has led some to argue that police authority amounts to a form of State-sponsored violence. These rights violations resemble wartime collateral damage: they are unintended consequences deemed proportional to legitimate efforts to protect citizen’s rights.

Now consider the following question posed by philosopher Igor Primoratz regarding wartime collateral damage: is the foreseeable killing of civilians as a side-effect of a military operation any morally better than the intentional killing of civilians. Specifically he asks, “suppose you were bound to be killed, but could choose between being killed with intent and being killed without intent, but as a side-effect of the killer’s pursuit of his end. Would you have any reason for preferring the latter fate to the former?”

Imagine two police officers, each of whom has killed a Black suspect under identical circumstances. When asked whether the suspect’s race was relevant to the use of force, the first officer says, “No, and I regret that deadly force was proportional to the threat I encountered.” The second officer says, “Yes, race was a factor. Cultural stereotypes predispose me to view Black men as likely threats, and institutional practices in the justice system keep the stakes for the use of lethal force relatively low. Thus, I regret my use of deadly force that I considered proportional to my perception of the threat in the absence of serious legal consequences.”

The second officer’s response would be surprising, but honest. Depictions of Black men in particular as violent “superpredators” in the media, in movies, and by politicians, are ample. Furthermore, the doctrine of qualified immunity, which bars people from recovering damages when police violate their rights, offers protection to officers whose actions implicitly manifest bias.

In the absence of damning outside testimony, the first officer will be held blameless. The second officer will be said to have acted on conscious biases and his honesty puts him at risk of discipline or discharge. Although the disciplinary actions each officer faces will differ, the same result was obtained, under identical circumstances. The only difference is that the second officer made the implicit explicit, and the first officer simply denied that his own implicit bias was a factor in his decision.

Where, then, does the moral difference lie between, on one hand, the foreseeable violation of the rights of Black lives in a society that systemically devalues those lives, and, on the other hand, the intentional violation of the rights of Black lives? If the well-documented effect of racial bias in law enforcement leads us to foresee the same pattern of disproportionate rights-violations in the future, and we do nothing about it, our acceptance of those violations is no more morally justified than the acceptance of intentional right-violations.

That is, if we can’t say why the intentional violations of Black rights is morally worse than giving police a monopoly on sanctioned violence under social conditions that harbor implicit racial biases, then sanctioning police violence looks morally unjustifiable in principle. That is enough to validate the call to divert funding from police departments into better economic, health, and educational resources for communities of color.

It’s Just a Game: The Ethics of Tom Clancy’s Not-So-Elite Squad

image of man in military gear firing weapon

Video game company Ubisoft has recently received a fresh wave of backlash, this time for its latest mobile game app: Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad. The mechanics of the game are nothing revolutionary – tap here to make person X shoot person Y – and has received a number of poor reviews for its heavy-handed monetization and boring gameplay. The problem is not so much the style of game, as it is the backstory. Here is how the plot is described in the game’s introduction:

“The world is in an alarming state: wars, corruption and poverty have made it more unstable than ever. As the situation keeps worsening, anger is brewing. From between the cracks, a new threat has emerged to take advantage of escalating civil unrest. They are known as UMBRA: a faceless organization that wants to build a new world order. They claim to promote an egalitarian utopia to gain popular support, while behind the scenes, UMBRA organizes deadly terrorist attacks to generate even more chaos, and weaken governments, at the cost of many innocent lives. Simultaneously, they have been hacking social media to discredit world leaders and rally people to their cause. Under immense pressure, world leaders have come together to authorize a new international cross agency unit designed to combat UMBRA. It is clear, playing by the rules will not win this fight. The leader of this unconventional squad will need to recruit elite soldiers from every corner of the world, including the criminal underworld. As commander of this unprecedented squad, we need you to put an end to UMBRA’s campaign of chaos. Welcome to Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad.”

In addition to sounding like it was written by a middle-schooler who used a thesaurus for every word except “squad”, many critics have noted that the message of the game itself is a dangerous one, in that it appears to lend credence to right-wing conspiracy theories that protesters are somehow being controlled by evil members of the deep state. Additionally, it seems to advocate for violence against those protesters – after all, “playing by the rules will not win this fight” – who are villainized for, bizarrely, wanting to create an “egalitarian utopia”.

(You control the guys shooting the people waving the flag reading “freedom”)

It gets much worse: the symbol that Ubisoft chose to represent the antagonists bears a striking resemblance to that used by the Black Lives Matter movement. So close, in fact, that Ubisoft issued an apology, and promised to remove the symbol from the next update. Of course, the plot of protesters being secret terrorists remains central to the game.

Hanlon’s razor states to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” That being said, there might not be enough stupidity available to adequately explain Ubisoft’s choice of plot and imagery. It seems clear that not only was an apology warranted, but that significant changes to the game ought to be made. Outrage online has been widespread, and deserved.

But wait: why make such a big deal out of this? It is, after all, nothing more than a dumb mobile game from a franchise whose best days are likely long behind it. And it’s not like we haven’t had Tom Clancy’s work glorifying the military for decades already, in the forms of books, movies, and TV shows – featuring protagonists with jaw-droppingly original names like “Jack Ryan”, “John Clark”, and “Jack Ryan Jr.” – not to mention dozens of video games. These are works of fiction, though, and people are able to differentiate such works from reality. So really, we shouldn’t be bothered by the latest in a long line of predictable Tom Clancy-branded properties.

There is, I think, something to be said about the “it’s just a game” response. For instance, while research on the effects of violent video games on their players is ongoing, there is a good amount of evidence that long-term exposure to such games has no effect on levels of aggression, pro-social behavior, impulsivity, or cognition in general. So the thought that a mobile game in which one shoots protesters is going to have a direct impact on the number of people who are going out and shooting protesters – something that has become a real problem as of late – is too quick.

The relevant worry, then, is not so much that the game will be a direct cause of future violence, but rather that the fact that a company would create such a game, with such a premise, at this particular moment in time, helps to normalize a false and dangerous narrative of events that is very much taken seriously by some people.

Here, then, is a difference between Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad and the kinds of video games that have historically received moral outrage and are the subject of studies that mentioned above: those falling into the latter category do not tend to promote any kind of narrative that actively promotes a particular political agenda. Consider, for example, a violent videogame like Mortal Kombat (which was one of the games that sparked early congressional hearings into depictions of violence in video games in the early 1990s) that involves graphic acts of decapitation and pixelated blood. These acts are obviously so far removed from what are generally considered good societal values that it is easy to see how one could separate the acts promoted in the video game from those promoted in the real world. On the other hand, when a game tells you that protestors who wave a flag remarkably similar to that used by the Black Lives Matter movement are driven by ulterior motives, are “hacking social media”, and ought to be dealt with in any way possible – a message that seems to be condoned by right-wing media outlets – the lines between fantasy and reality become much less distinct.

In one sense, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is just a game. In another sense, it is a symbol of an uninformed and intolerant worldview that has potentially real and damaging consequences. With any luck, Ubisoft’s decisions will turn out to be the result of an enormous amount of stupidity, and not an equivalent amount of malice.

‘Bon Appetit’ and the Politics of Food

photograph of halved fruits and vegetables arranged around yellow plate in the center

In the same way that the #MeToo movement encouraged women to speak out about sexism in their workplaces, the return of the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of mainstream consciousness has given BIPOC a platform to start a conversation about racism in their fields. Notably, one such conversation is currently unfolding in the food industry. In early June of 2020, Adam Rapoport stepped down from his position as the editor-and-chief of Bon Appétit magazine when a photo of Rapoport wearing brownface at a party surfaced on Twitter. In the last few years, Bon Appétit has been steadily amassing an online following through its YouTube channel, which has helped the magazine present itself as an inclusive and diverse brand to its massive twenty-something audience. In an article for Vox, Alex Abad-Santos describes how

“A dramatic part of Rapoport’s resignation was watching the wall tumble between what he was presenting to the outside world—socially conscious, thoughtful, empathetic—and his real-life actions, which according to staffers included microaggressions, underpaying staff, and taking advantage of his assistant. The ousting of a man who wrote about the killing of George Floyd and standing in solidarity with immigrants and minorities while he was, at the same time, treating his black and brown staffers inequitably, feels a lot like justice.”

However, many former employees have pointed out that Bon Appétit’s problems cannot be solved merely by firing Rapoport. The magazine (and the food industry at large) are still built on a foundation of structural racism, a foundation which is obfuscated by gestures towards multiculturalism. Despite these hollow gestures, BIPOC within the industry have been undermined by their editors in insidious ways. Assistant editor Sohla El-Waylly, for example, claimed in an Instagram post that she would be “pushed in front of video as a display of diversity,” and that only white editors were paid for their video appearances on the magazine’s YouTube channel. Former employees like Alex Lau felt pressured to only make food from their culture, and were told by their editors that “ethnic” food would not be interesting enough to the magazine’s audience. Nikita Richardson, a former black employee, struggled with the emotional toll of working in such a toxic work culture, explaining how “You see your coworkers every day of your life, and to go into work every day and feel isolated is misery-inducing . . . Nowhere have I ever felt more isolated than at Bon Appétit.

It is especially important that this interrogation of white hegemony is happening within the food industry. We tend to think of food as apolitical, one of the few neutral grounds where all people can meet without cultural or ideological baggage. There’s a reason that cooking shows are a safe bet for major networks hoping to attract the largest possible audience. Cooking shows are generally innocuous and uncontroversial, and because food makes up such a large part of our daily lives, it’s impossible for all viewers not to relate on some level. However, food is a deeply moral and political subject. The foundational story of Christian moral philosophy, the story of Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis, is, after all, a story about eating, which indicates that food is a central symbol within philosophical discourse.

Food is political chiefly because it connects us to the world and reveals our place within larger structures of power. As scientist Louise Fresco explains in her book Hamburgers in Paradise,

“Every mouthful we eat connects us with those who long ago started to domesticate plants and animals, with the migrants and traders who spread them across the world . . . with the farmers who are proud of their land and their work, and with the laborers who pick beans and mangoes and pack them and in some cases endure appalling working conditions.”

Food is such a potent way of conceptualizing how social networks function under capitalism that in the 2017 play Young Marx, a fictionalized version of Marx uses the ingredients of his breakfast to explain how capitalism (and the things produced by it) alienate us from other people. He says, “Before capitalism I could see my brother’s hand in the labor content of my breakfast,” pointing out the division between factories that produce food and the tables those items eventually end up on. “A sausage could explain my life,” Marx exclaims, because food (as a young Engels chimes in) “maps your social relations.”

This relationship between food and consumer becomes even more muddled when we consider the online cooking-as-entertainment industry, which Bon Appétit participates in. Even when produced for the sake of entertainment and not consumption, food doesn’t lose its ability to map social relations. Media critic Dan Olson points out in a video released shortly before Rapoport’s resignation that

“Cooking entertainment can’t avoid [food politics] . . . any show is going to inherit those meanings and symbols purely by virtue of the kinds of food the show considers normal, what it considers exotic, and what it assumes the viewer is familiar with or has access to.”

Olson explains that spectacle is generally the main element of online cooking shows. The spectacle can be the chef’s outrageous or charismatic personality (popular celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has built his entire brand on this) or outlandish ingredients (donuts draped in gold-leaf or five hundred-dollar steak dinners, to name a few examples). Bon Appétit’s most popular series, Gourmet Makes, is about a pastry chef who attempts to recreate processed snack foods like Twinkies using high-quality ingredients, a spectacle which draws in millions of views per video.

But the spectacle can also be an “exotic” dish or regional cuisine unfamiliar to American viewers. Travel food shows, both on television and on the internet, often participate in this not-so-subtle racism. A white foodie will visit a non-Western culture and “discover” dishes unfamiliar to Westerners, emphasizing how new or outlandish such dishes are. So-called “superfoods” often rely on the same racist assumptions. Labeling goji berries or acai a superfood gives those products a veneer of the unfamiliar, even imbuing them with magical properties. Bon Appétit has specifically come under fire for this practice. An apology released by the magazine on June 10 in the wake of Rapoport’s resignation acknowledges that “Our mastheads have been far too white for far too long. As a result, the recipes, stories, and people we’ve highlighted have too often come from a white-centric viewpoint. At times we have treated non-white stories as ‘not newsworthy’ or ‘trendy.’” Non-white labor has historically been invisible in white kitchens and restaurants, which is why the tokenization of non-white food and culture for the sake of a magazine spread is especially wrong.

It’s difficult to say if Bon Appétit will actually follow through on its promise to be better. Matt Hunziker, a white video editor who has vocally challenged the racism his colleagues experienced at Bon Appétit, was suspended from the company on June 25, supposedly because of his willingness to speak out against the company. If Bon Appétit is unable to change its ways, one possible response would be to decenter massive media conglomerates like Condé Nast (the company that owns Bon Appétit, as well as Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and GQ) by investing more material resources in BIPOC chefs and food writers working outside of mainstream food discourse. Only paying lip-service to non-white food without giving chefs the material advantages will only perpetuate an unequal and immoral system.

Protest Selfies and the Wrong of Grandstanding

A group of six people holding signs at a protest, gathering to be included in a selfie taken with a phone

On June 5th, Kris Schatzel posted a picture to her Instagram account showing herself holding a sign reading “Black Lives Matter” while at a protest in California. Shortly thereafter, Schatzel became the target of heavy criticism when a video surfaced showing how she staged the photo with a friend without actually participating in the march. As a so-called social media “influencer,” Schatzel has been accused of selfishly treating the crowds of people protesting the murder of George Floyd as just a scenic background for another picture to send out to her more than 240,000 followers (a charge Schatzel denied before restricting public access to her account).

But what might this story say about the hoi polloi of social media feeds? If you attend a protest, should you take a picture of yourself and post it on the internet? Or are you doing something wrong by sharing your protest selfies (even if your follower list is considerably shorter than six digits long)?

It seems like such social media posts could be defended in basically two ways: insofar as protest selfies continue to spread awareness of the protest’s mission and demonstrate your personal support for those goals, these pictures might play a role (however small) in promoting the interests of the protest in general. The importance of the internet (and, in particular, hashtags on social media) cannot be overestimated in contemporary social activism,and protest selfies fuel a significant portion of that. If one goal of public protests is to maximize visibility for a cause, then increasing the number of digital artifacts associated with a protest can indeed help to maximize outreach about the protestors’ message. Furthermore, on an individual level, personally aligning yourself publicly with a protest signals your support of the cause to your peers in a way that can serve to promote further conversations and explorations of the protestors’ message. If protest selfies are taken and posted in earnest, then they might indeed be fruitfully situated within the topography of contemporary activism (particularly when contrasted with the relatively effortless forms of “slacktivism” that now pepper the internet).

However, at least three other factors should be considered when weighing the ethics of protest selfies: the possibility of endangering protestors, the potential to objectify protestors, and the problem of moral grandstanding.

The first issue is clear-cut: though often unintentional, posting pictures and videos of any kind (selfies or not) from a protest runs the risk of exposing protestors to retaliation from employers, law enforcement, or others who would look negatively on their involvement in the protest. Even when rudimentary privacy measures (like face-blurring) are employed, digital fingerprints like picture metadata are routinely scraped by programmers of all stripes; posting your photos can contribute to coordinated efforts to expose the identities of protest participants.

More problematic, however, is the potential that your protest selfie objectifies the very people whom you might be seeking to support. Even if your picture isn’t simply staged (and you do genuinely participate in the protest) you might still be using the people around you as framing devices for a photograph that centers you more than the message that the protest is meant to amplify. Particularly when such framing is done intentionally (a practice which happens more frequently than some might think), treating other people like simple stage props is clearly morally wrong.

Which leads to a third way that protest selfies might be criticized: as examples of what has been dubbed “moral grandstanding.” As Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke describe it, this is what happens when someone makes public declarations of moral judgments for the express purpose of drawing favorable attention to themselves; that is to say, to grandstand is “to use moral talk for self-promotion.” Such a move is sometimes referred to colloquially as “virtue signalling” and serves as a subclass of Harry Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit (where a speaker makes a claim simply to provoke a particular response in their audience): moral grandstanding co-opts ethical discourse on a topic to instead draw attention to the speaker rather than the topic itself. 

This seems like what Schatzel was guilty of (in addition to objectifying the protestors and, by suggestion, lying): by invoking the language of the Black Lives Matters protests while centering herself in her Instagram post, she certainly seems guilty of seeking positive, self-focused affirmations in the characteristic manner of the grandstander. Insofar as protest selfies perpetuate similarly dishonest projections fueled by egotistical attitudes, they can also be criticized as morally corrupt.

However, because the key difference between the grandstander and the sincere person speaking earnestly from her heart is one of motivation that is entirely inaccessible to external judges, Tosi and Warmke warn against focusing on diagnoses of others’ faults;  instead, “thinking about grandstanding is a cause for self-reflection, not a call to arms…it’s an encouragement to reassess why and how we speak to one another about moral and political issues.” If we are sharing pictures of ourselves simply to seek some form of social capital, then we might indeed have another reason to pause and think twice before tapping the “Post” button. 

But if our motives are genuinely altruistic — and we have considered the safety and dignity of those whom we might affect with our actions — then we could well be morally justified in sharing our protest selfies and continuing to promote a cause worth defending.

The Vigilante “True Man” Is Not a Good Man

photograph of crime scene tape with police car in background

To be a vigilante is to take upon yourself at least the role of a police officer, assuming that your goal is simply to enforce existing laws. Vigilantism can, and often does, go further, effectively assuming both legislative and judicial power as well. If a vigilante or “vigilance committee” detains people for violating laws that don’t exist, but which they believe should exist, or enacts any form of pseudo-punishment on people for either existing or imaginary laws, then they further effectively usurp legislative and judicial power respectively. Vigilantism is undesirable in the extreme, and statutes or rules that encourage it a likewise undesirable. Generally, police power should be kept out of citizens’ hands.

The dangers of laws that facilitate and encourage vigilantism can be seen clearly in the cases of both Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin. Both were killed while doing nothing wrong because they were suspected of wrongdoing by overzealous citizens who took matters into their own hands. On top of the laws themselves, racially-based inequality in the execution and adjudication of the laws further emboldens vigilantes to pursue their own “justice” against Black Americans and other vulnerable populations. 

George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin, but was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter. The DoJ stated that Zimmerman’s actions did not rise to the level of a hate crime as defined by federal statute. Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William Bryan were all arrested on charges of felony, murder, and false imprisonment pursuant to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. However, these arrests did not occur until more than two months after the incident. Arbery was killed on February 23, 2020 and the McMichaels weren’t arrested until May 7, 2020. William Bryan was arrested on May 21, 2020. The men charged for Arbery’s death will likely use the same affirmative defense that Zimmerman did. That is they will admit that they committed the action of killing, but assert that the action was legally excused or justified because they were defending themselves from bodily injury and death. 

Laws and rules allowing people to claim self-defense against charges of homicide are desirable. A person may not have the time or opportunity to depend on police or fellow citizens to help them. Reasonable self-defense laws allow a person to prevent death or serious bodily harm to themselves or others due to the wrongful actions of another person by use of necessary and proportional force. For example, if a person forcibly enters a home and corners you and an acquaintance in a room, both of you should be immune to both civil and criminal liability for any harm inflicted upon the assailant necessary to prevent them from harming you, necessary to cause them to flee, or necessary to subdue them until police arrive. 

The right for a person to defend their life and property, sometimes with deadly force, is deeply engrained in U.S. society. However, the free rein given to use of legal force differs from one state to another. For altercations in public spaces, as in the killings of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery, the operative question is whether there exists a duty to retreat. If a state, either by statute or case law, imposes a duty to retreat on people, that means that they cannot claim self-defense against charges of homicide unless they were not plausibly able to flee from their assailant. Every state recognizes some form of exception to the duty to retreat when a person is in their own home or property—the so-called “Castle doctrine.” If a state does not impose a duty to retreat from altercations in public spaces, then it has some form of “Stand Your Ground” law or rule. 

Both the Castle doctrine and Stand Your Ground laws emanate from another doctrine, the so-called “true man” doctrine. This is meant to serve as a principled reason in favor of rule concerning self-defense. The idea is that a person who is doing nothing wrong, who is acting wholly within their rights, should not be obliged to give any ground to someone engaged in wrongdoing. Florida has a Stand Your Ground statute under which George Zimmerman was able to assert that he was defending himself from the aggression of Martin, even if that aggression was caused by Zimmerman’s nighttime pursuit of Martin. It is also likely that the killers of Ahmaud Arbery will also claim self-defense as Georgia also has a Stand Your Ground statute

The idea that a morally faultless person shouldn’t, or at least shouldn’t be required to flee is not obvious. This smacks of a sort of recklessness that is expressly disavowed by at least one central moral theory, namely Aristotelean virtue ethics. One of the central tenets of this ethical system is the doctrine of the mean, which states that every virtue—that is, every morally positive character trait—lies at a midpoint between two extremes, which are vices. On one side there is an extreme of deficiency—of doing too little. On the other side there is an extreme of excess—of doing too much. Courage is one of the central virtues that Aristotle discusses, and it is, like any other virtue, in between two extremes. Cowardice is the vice of deficiency and recklessness is the vice of excess between which lies the virtue of courage. However, the true man doctrine appears to endorse recklessness. Whereas Aristotle’s ethical sage will fear and flee from some dangers, the true man of common law will not.  

Both the Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin killings also involved citizens engaged in attempts to detain people they suspected of criminal activity. Comments from Georgia District Attorney George Barnhill suggested that Gregory and Travis McMichael were acting within their rights under Georgia’s laws concerning citizen’s arrest. However, the need for citizen’s arrest originally stemmed from the lack of professional police forces—a need that has long since disappeared. Moreover, as the standards of evidence for criminal conviction have become more complex and the protections for people being placed under arrest have become more extensive, the plausibility of a citizen making a legitimate arrest has become more ludicrous. As a matter of bare law, most state statutes require that an arresting citizen have direct or immediate knowledge that the person they are arresting has committed a crime. Whether a given arrest meets such a standard is a legal question most citizens are not equipped to determine. 

Just Stand Your Ground laws abet and endorse a kind of physical recklessness, as do citizen’s arrest laws that abet and endorse a kind of epistemic recklessness. Even the sporadic acts of vigilantism they spawn swamp any civic value they might create. People’s right to defend themselves, their property, and others can be upheld by better means. 

Black Lives Matter: Australia

Protest in Australia; two signs are visible: one reads "lest we forget the frontier wars, black lives, white lies" and one shows a black and red image of Australia with the word "genocide" written on it

Our public discourse [is] full of blak [sic] bodies but curiously empty of people who put them there. Alison Whittaker

This weekend protestors for Black Lives Matter in Australia took to the streets in contravention of Covid-19 health warnings to join worldwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd to highlight police violence against people of color and to once again raise the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

The statistics and the stories of Black deaths in custody is a vexed issue in Australia, and a national disgrace. In the 30 years since a royal commission was conducted, successive governments have failed to implement many of its key recommendations; and in that time 432 Aboriginal Australians have died in police custody. Despite the manifest violence, negligence, and displays of overt racism around these deaths, charges against police are rarely brought, and there has never been a conviction for an Aboriginal death in custody in Australia. 

Indigenous activists and families of victims have been trying, with only incremental and limited success, to elevate the issue in the wider Australian public. Most of the names and stories of these people are not known to most Australians. 

In a piece for The Conversation, Alison Whittacker, law scholar, poet and Australian Indigenous activist, writes,

“Do you know about David Dungay Jr? He was a Dunghutti man, an uncle. He had a talent for poetry that made his family endlessly proud. He was held down by six corrections officers in a prone position until he died and twice injected with sedatives because he ate rice crackers in his cell. Dungay’s last words were also “I can’t breathe”. An officer replied ‘If you can talk, you can breathe.'”

The statistics for Aboriginal incarceration in Australia are mind-blowing. In some areas in the country, Aboriginal people are the most incarcerated people on earth; They make up roughly 3.3% of the overall population but account for 28% of the prison population. Aboriginal women represent 34% of the overall national female prison population.

The 460 deaths in custody since 1990 is a terrible number, and to each belongs a story – a life, and then a death of indignity, of violence, of neglect. As in the US, in Australia it belongs to an historical legacy of rapacious, brutal colonial expansion. 

May 27 to June 3 is Australia’s National Reconciliation Week. These dates mark two significant milestones for Aboriginal people. One is the 1967 referendum, which for the first time recognized Aboriginal Australians as citizens. The other is the High Court native title decision known as Mabo, which overturned the legal doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ – the principle by which the Crown acquired sovereignty of the continent in 1788, on the basis that the lands were lands ‘belonging to no one.’ 

But there is still a long way to go for Australians to come to terms with the history of frontier wars, which morphed into state maintained forms of oppression and violence, and then into official government policy of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. This history is not visible enough to, nor unflinchingly acknowledged by, wider Australia. Nor are the tendrils visible which reach through that history into the present, holding Aboriginal people in all sorts of disadvantage. Disadvantage that is reflected in the statistics. As the Uluru Statement from the Heart says:

“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.” 

What, at this time, now, can be said and done about the work of reconciliation? In 2000, 300,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for reconciliation. This year, then, marks the twentieth anniversary of ‘the bridge walk’. Yet material change has been frustratingly slow, and in some indicators, things are going backwards. 

The 2018 Close the Gap report on Indigenous health and education targets and outcomes found child mortality at twice the rate for Aboriginal children, school attendance rates declining, and a persistent life-expectancy gap of almost a decade between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. 

Perhaps reconciliation has had its moment. It was maybe only the first word Australians have learned in the lexicon of change and of justice. Recognition of the nation’s shameful history is a starting point on the long road to equality and justice. But perhaps it has become a platitude, a way for white Australians to settle the ledger of their guilt, a way to paper over deep-seated systemic injustice that is thwarting real progress for Aboriginal lives and that continues to create privilege for settler Australians.  

The problem, as many voices have been saying (for a long time but) especially in the weeks since the BLM protests broke out in the US following the murder of George Floyd, is that white and settler oppression of Black and Indigenous people is thoroughly baked in to the system; baked into the system of colonial expansion– which included slavery and dispossession under terra nullius (both mechanisms used to dehumanize people for the purpose of wealth creation) – and it is baked into its neoliberal iterations. 

Perhaps the problem, rather, is that we have been reconciled to these things, to the reality of Indigenous disadvantage and risk of police violence and incarceration, for too long. 

How, then, can we reimagine and re-engage the concept, the work of reconciliation, or do we need to move beyond it to another stage? The national conversation in Australia has been painfully slow to get going. 

National Sorry Day is marked on May 26th, began in 2007 when the Australian Government, following the release of the Bringing Them Home report, formally apologized to Aboriginal people who were forcibly removed as children from their parents in a government assimilation policy. 

Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita writes that the findings of the report “[were] a source of deep shame for many Australians, and for some a source of guilt” ( A Common Humanity, 1999, pg. 87). While, as Gaita observes, many people feel shame and guilt, many also resisted such feelings, and felt that they were being asked to take responsibility for past wrongs they felt no part of. 

The refusal of shame sometimes takes the form of national pride, in which being proud of one’s nation is mutually exclusive with acknowledging its brutal history and recognizing the remnants of that history. 

Those who hold this conception of national pride take the view that history in which racial injustice is afforded a more central place in our story and our journey to self-understanding is overly bleak. It is known by its detractors as the ‘black armband view of history’ and they argue that we should be focusing on trying to fix the current inequalities rather than looking backwards into a troubled past. This obviously ignores the fact that these current inequalities, created by that past, are able to continue because it has never been reckoned with. 

Therefore the corrupted, shallow conception of national pride can never do anything other than let the deep national wounds fester. To be authentic in our attempts to reconcile, we should not contrast our national truth telling with our national interest, and reconciliation cannot be about ‘moving on’ until the appalling statistical gaps between white and black Australia are well and truly closed. 

But the injustice is not just expressed in the material conditions (by these gaps), or even the systemic problems. Simply moving forward means that there is no proper acknowledgement that those who suffered —  and continue to suffer these injustices — are wronged, and that to be wronged, is itself a distinctive and irreducible form of harm. 

Jacqueline Rose, on the 2018 conference on ‘Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation’ in Stellenbosch, South Africa, wrote: “thinking was not enough. Not that ‘feeling’ will do it either, in a context where expressions of empathy – ‘I feel your pain’ – are so often a pretext for doing nothing.”

Guilt and shame are part of a pained acknowledgement of wrongs we have committed or in which we are in other ways implicated. But they must also be part of what forces us to change the system and ourselves. 

As protests in response to George Floyd’s murder and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racialized violence and oppression raged across the US last week, a Sydney police officer was filmed handcuffing and then sweeping the legs out from under a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal boy who had just issued a vulgar verbal threat; the officer slammed the boy’s face into the pavement. 

Shortly afterwards the New South Wales police minister defended the officer, saying he was provoked and threatened. The minister, in public remarks, expressed far more outrage at the verbal abuse from the teenager than at the officer’s brutal response. 

How can reconciliation occur if such blatant power differentials cannot even be recognized, if the historical weight of wrongs done to a people and the humiliation and disadvantage they continue to suffer is totally invisible? Nothing, then, has been reckoned with. 

The worst thing about this story from Sydney is the grim, horrific moral equivalence being drawn between a lippy teenager and an officer of the law, whose duty is to ‘protect and serve’ using brutal and retributive force.  

When a teenager can be face-slammed for giving a mouthful of foul language to a police officer and this act can be defended by his superiors as a response to a threat, we are nowhere. 

When We Forget Our Dignity

Young person sitting on cement wearing a mask and holding a sign, turned away from camera. More people also sitting and holding signs are visible in the background.

The death of George Floyd should not have happened. An independent autopsy requested by the family concluded that Floyd died of asphyxiation from sustained pressure, disputing the Hennepin County medical examiner’s conclusion that he died from the combined effects of being restrained, underlying conditions, and possible intoxication. Based on footage now widely circulated, it is clear that Derek Chauvin unnecessarily knelt on the neck of a nonviolent offender who used a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. According to the criminal complaint against Chauvin, the sustained pressure continued for 3 minutes after Floyd stopped moving and 2 minutes after another officer failed to find a pulse. 

Chauvin has been arrested and was charged with 3rd-degree murder and 2nd-degree manslaughter, which has now been elevated to 2nd-degree murder. Protests ensued soon after Floyd’s death, engulfing many American cities. Many protesters are not simply mourning the wrongful death of George Floyd but are also targeting their demonstrations against the systemic racial injustice that permits regular police brutality against people of color

The protests are not necessarily about Floyd’s killing in particular, but about the savagery and carnage that his death represents,” Charles M. Blow writes. “It is an anger over feeling powerless, stalked and hunted, degraded and dehumanized.”

This anger over this degradation and dehumanization has manifested in peaceful protests, destructive riots, and reciprocal violence. As a video revealed Derek Chauvin’s neglect for Floyd’s pleas for air and his sustained pressure on the unconscious man, other disturbing clips posted on social media reveal violence by police against demonstrators and by demonstrators against other civilians and police officers. Viral clips are prone to misinterpretation because they exclude proper context and limit the complexity that often accompanies the captured event. Opinions can be formed on erroneous or partial recording of events. Even so, one thing is clear: the violence captured by these videos display violations of human dignity. 

Such an observation may seem so banal, so obvious that it is not worth even mentioning. But at a moment when protesters are lashing out against racial injustice and violence is increasingly justified as an appropriate response, the assumption of human dignity is no longer obvious. Therefore, it is worth contemplating what respect for human dignity entails, how it is violated, and how it can be protected.

Human dignity is defined as “the recognition that human beings possess a special value intrinsic to their humanity and as such are worthy of respect simply because they are human beings.” It is thought to be inherent, indivisible, and inviolable. The dignity of each human being is a basic foundation of Christian social thinking and enjoys broad consensus in many cultures and philosophical traditions. While the term “dignity” as used is thought to be a product of the Enlightenment, the notion the term conveys predates the Enlightenment by many centuries. Other philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Cicero imply the inherent value of human beings in their writings on natural law. 

It is this assumption of the inherent value of human beings that underpins human rights as a part of international law; dignity transcends state boundaries and is the fountain from which other rights flow. The concept features in the preamble of the Charter of the United Nations: “We the people of the United Nations determined […] to affirm the faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of human persons, in the equal rights of men and women”. Human dignity is the first article of European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights: “Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected.” Countless constitutions of various countries contain some reference to dignity. Of course, simple observation demonstrates that mere codification of this ethical concept does not ensure its protection. 

“[T]hat same human dignity is frequently, and deliberately violated all over the world,” Professor Paul van Tongeren observes. “When people are murdered, tortured, oppressed, or traded it is indeed a flagrant violation of their dignity”. Other violations are argued to include humiliation, instrumentalization, degradation, and dehumanization. 

In response to the death of George Floyd and the resulting demonstrations, Robert P. George, an American legal scholar who has written about human dignity, wrote the following in a statement released on behalf of Princeton’s James Madison Program: “What unites us—what makes us ‘out of many, one’—is our shared commitment to principles we believe to be essential to the full flourishing of human beings, the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution. If we were to distill those principles to a core idea, it is, in my opinion, this: the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. When we truly embrace that idea, we know that racism and racial injustice are unacceptable and must be resolutely opposed.”

Racism and racial injustice could then be understood as one of the many abhorrent effects of a failure to embrace the core idea of human dignity. The degradation and dehumanization of people of color observed by Charles M. Blow is another. Unjust murder is another. So, what can be done?

While institutional reforms are being demanded, social crises, such as the one the U.S. is enduring, also reveal the need for something more basic, more fundamental: ethics education. But this need must contend with the decline of philosophy, the relative absence of ethical training for students in academia, and the growing irreligiosity of America. The traditional reminders of human dignity are slowly dying and their death ought to be mourned, if not reversed. The U.S. is ablaze; a man was unjustly killed; peaceful protesters are met with force, tear gas, and rubber bullets; rioters exert physical violence towards their fellow civilians; a legacy of racism endures. Because this is what happens when we forget our dignity. 

Malum in Se: The Use of Tear Gas by Police

two police officers dressed in riot gear holding smoke grenade guns

Whenever police use tear gas against protestors and rioters, someone invariably asks, “Why, if tear gas is banned for use in war, is it allowed for use in law enforcement?” Ultimately, the justification appears to be, “Because there aren’t any better options.” However this practical excuse is undercut by some of the fundamental considerations of Just War Theory, which underpins international law governing warfare. 

In the nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism sparked by the killing of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, tear gas has been used by the police departments of numerous US cities, including Atlanta, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Tear gas is a name that refers to a variety of different chemicals, including pepper spray. All tear gas compounds act by rapidly and severely irritating people’s eyes, skin, nose, mouth, throat, and lungs. This causes people’s eyes to swell and water (hence the name “tear gas” and “lachrymator agent”) and leads to difficulty breathing. Lachrymator agents are one among many “less than lethal” weapons used in riot control, alongside rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, flash-bangs, and many others. If tear gas is non-lethal, why is it forbidden for use in warfare?

Weapons that are banned for use in warfare by international law typically have one of more features which make them mala in se (i.e., evil in themselves). Means which are mala in se are morally unacceptable for use in warfare according to Just War Theory provisions concerning jus in bello, which refers to rules governing morally appropriate conduct during the course of war. What makes a weapon malum in se? Relating to tear gas, one criterion sticks out clearly. Any weapon the effects of which cannot be controlled is malum in se. Gases are inherently not controllable because to where they drift is determined by wind speed and direction, rather than user intention. Hence police using tear gas on a group of rioters in a residential area, or a non-residential area upwind from a residential area, will likely end up affecting people nearby, and in completely different areas who are complying with the law. In the context of war using weapons that fail to discriminate, or using weapons in a manner that fails to discriminate, between combatants and non-combatants is illegal. Why then is it acceptable for police to use weapons that fail to discriminate between law-breakers and law-abiders? 

Another criterion for determining whether a weapon is malum in se is its proportionality for achieving a legitimate goal. In Just War Theory, a war that has been justly entered into (jus ad bellum) allows those on the just side to use only the minimum necessary force to achieve victory by incapacitating the enemy (who is, if the war has been entered into justly, unjust by definition). Weapons and munitions that cause excessive harm to enemy combatants are prohibited in Just War Theory (and correspondingly outlawed by international accords). For example napalm and white phosphorous are both banned because they cause tremendous pain to combatants and maim them, rather than incapacitating or quickly killing them. Being exceedingly charitable to police, the use of tear gas can be seen as a proportional measure. Police, who are often outnumbered by rioters, need a method to promptly subdue rioters and restore peace without resorting to lethal means. If lethal force is the only viable alternative to weapons like tear gas, then it appears that the use of tear gas may be justified (ignoring that tear gas is malum in se because of its inherent indiscriminateness). 

While tear gas is “less than lethal,” both it and the delivery system for it can cause long-term harm to people. Even people with no underlying respiratory conditions can, with extensive exposure, suffer chronic respiratory issues. Likewise extensive exposure can lead to blindness. It is an indiscriminate chemical agent that has been banned for use in warfare. Under what circumstances, if any at all, could it be acceptable to use it? If we can imagine a group of rioters recklessly or intentionally committing serious crimes, but not doing so in a place from which the tear gas is liable to spread and affect innocent citizens, then we would have found an acceptable situation. Is there any such situation? Prison riots come close to the mark. Indeed, this is one of the situations in which the US Military reserves the right to use tear gas and in which the international laws governing chemical weapons allow militaries to deploy tear gas. However the use of tear gas by police on peaceful protestors or even on rioters in close proximity to peaceful protestors or densely populated urban areas is clearly unjust. The inherently indiscriminate nature of gaseous chemical agents makes them an evil in themselves.

Black Lives Matter

photograph of Black Lives Matter demonstration

Our mission at the Prindle Institute for Ethics is to foster ethics education, dialogue, and research. We spend our days discussing questions that expand our understanding of morality, our own values, and the values of the communities we live in.

Sometimes these questions are abstract and help us clarify what sorts of values we think are most important. Would you sacrifice one person on a trolley track to save five on another track? Most of the time, though, we discuss questions raised by real-world problems. In 2020, our nation faces an overwhelming number of ethical questions.

The questions we face as a nation relating to police violence and use of excessive force are not abstract. They are urgent. Some of these questions raise difficult moral dilemmas for which the answers are not clear. How much power should police have? What is the role of a police force in a just society? The answers to these questions are not easy to find, and we will continue to join in the work of figuring out the moral answer for as long as it takes.

However, we also face issues that are not in question, that are not up for debate. They are deeply concerning to our Institute because the point of ethics education (and higher education generally) is to help sustain a free democracy and a just society. Those of us at the Prindle Institute and anyone working in higher education should never lose sight of that purpose, and when our country seems to fail in that purpose, we should not be silent. There are unequivocal statements of value that we can make:

Black lives matter.

American’s rights are being violated by some of the very people who are appointed to safeguard those rights. We extend our deepest condolences to the families of Mr. Arbery, Mr. Floyd and Ms. Taylor, and to the victims of unjust violence everywhere.

 

Dr. Andrew Cullison, Phyllis W. Nicholas Director of The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University

 

Lessons from ‘Queen and Slim’

close-up photograph of police car on street at night

[Beware of spoilers. Though if you didn’t see the film at this point, I don’t know what to tell you.]

Police brutality against black people is nothing new. Since slave ships docked in the U.S after the Middle Passage, law-enforcing entities have been antagonizing them. The only difference between then and today is that more and more of what is happening now is being documented. Back in 2015, it was reported that unarmed black people were killed 5x that of their white counterparts. Out of the 1,134 black males that were murdered by police that year, some of the standouts include Laquan Mcdonald, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and a constitution-length list of names that suffered similar fates. 

Most recently, former police officer Amber Guyger entered the apartment of Botham Jean, a 26-year-old accountant, and murdered him claiming she mistook his apartment for her own. In turn, Melina Matsoukas’s film Queen and Slim seems to speak on all of the recent injustices against black people as it follows the story of two fugitives after they murder a police officer. However, despite the positionality of Matsoukas and her take on Queen and Slim being an activist film against police brutality, the film’s narrative takes a unique and ethical approach that considers all sides of the issue of police brutality and provides an honest take on blackness in the midst of it. 

Just as police brutality is nothing new, Queen and Slim is not the first film to comment on the issue. It seems like Spike Lee was ahead of his time with his 1989 classic Do The Right Thing, where the character Radio Raheem was murdered by NYPD, leaving a bitter ending for the film’s conclusion, and an equally bitter sense of resentment towards law enforcement. There’s a similar sentiment in Queen and Slim, but Matsoukas manipulates perspective and audience emotion through the different moral situations that Queen and Slim face. During the routine traffic stop that acts as a catalyst for the rest of the film, the officer that stopped Queen and Slim was inexplicably hostile and was looking for reasons to get violent with the protagonists. After drawing a gun on Slim and shooting Queen, there’s a brief sense of relief after the police officer is killed, as if the scene provided justice for the lives of those lost in the real world. That is until the implications of murdering a police officer come into full effect and Queen and Slim suddenly become fugitives.

Despite the brief moment of triumph, Matsoukas makes it clear to address the fact that the issue of police brutality is not one sided. In the latter half of the film, a teenage black boy murders a cop at a protest in solidarity of Queen and Slim’s run from the police. Not only was the officer that the boy killed African American himself, but the boy murdered the cop for no reason. The scene seems reminiscent of a real world instance, where police officers were murdered following the fatal shootings of black men. 

Perhaps Matsoukas was trying to convey the fact that anger in response to police brutality can exacerbate the issue rather than push for reform. On one hand, there’s the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has been advocating for justice for black people since George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s murderer, was acquitted. But like the boy who killed a cop in Queen and Slim, and the man who killed cops in real life, there are those whose anger is misplaced and works against the cause for getting justice in the face of police brutality.

At the end of the film, right before Queen and Slim make their final escape, a black man who Queen and Slim thought were helping them, sold them out to the cops for a bounty placed on their heads. For the entire film, black people that were strangers to Queen and Slim helped them as they ran from the police, as they all believed in what the two protagonists did. How ironic, that it wasn’t a white person that ultimately led to Queen and Slim’s downfall, but someone that looked like them. But maybe to Matsoukas, this turn of events was necessary. When we think about police brutality, we think of a unified black community–one where people uplift one another in the face of tragedy. And to some extent, this image is true. But then, there are still those who, like the man who sold out Queen and Slim, simply don’t care. They have their own agendas, their own list of things they care about. 

In turn, maybe that’s why Queen and Slim should be considered as an honest take on police brutality and a glimpse of the black experience. The heroes of the story weren’t really heroes. They weren’t martyrs either. At the end of the day, Queen and Slim were two black people trying to survive in a world that thrived on the disenfranchisement of their bodies and sought revenge for their struggle to survive. Their actions ignited a fragmented consciousness that ultimately lead to their downfall. Perhaps Matsoukas was suggesting (or rather blatantly saying) that all black people have the potential to be Queen and Slims, and in the United States, blackness is the antithesis to justice.

What Does It Mean to Be an Ally?

Photograph of protesters holding "Stop Police Brutality" banner

Despite the social progress the United States has made, it still has many shortcomings. Amidst its many flaws, race is always one that persists–specifically regarding the treatment of black people. As long as black people are judged and disenfranchised because of the color of their skin, race will remained unresolved in the United States–a mass of prejudice, discrimination, and injustice that dates back centuries. But there is some progress that has been made and some racial tension in the country has been assuaged. After all, white Americans have showed their support for black people as they struggled with police brutality, the killings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. But is the support shown enough? The term ally has often been used when referring to an individual who supports a marginalized group of people. Regarding the injustices done to African Americans, many white people have declared themselves avid supporters in their struggle. What form does this support come in and to what extent? What does it really mean to be an ally?

A year ago, DePauw University invited actress Jenna Fischer to speak as an Ubben Lecturer, serving as part of the Ubben Lecture series where notable public figures are invited to campus to interact with students and give a public address. Only about a week or two prior to Fischer’s arrival, a series of racially charged incidents occurred on DePauw’s campus. Racial slurs had been written on campus bathrooms and some large stones in DePauw’s nature park had been rearranged to spell out the n-word. Students of color on campus were infuriated and felt as if the campus administration was not doing enough to ensure the safety of students of color. The campus was filled with racial tension, and it finally erupted during Fischer’s lecture. In the middle of her address, one by one, students of color began standing up and declaring “we are not safe.” Eventually, the whole auditorium was filled with “we are not safe” chants. The protest left campus on high alert as tension between students rose. The protest also brought media coverage, with black students standing at the forefront.

Not too long after the Ubben Lecture protest, white students on DePauw’s campus began to show their support for students of color by taking to social media. All across Instagram and Facebook, white students declared that they stood in solidarity with students of color. On a tree in the middle of campus, white students also made a sign declaring that they stood with students of color. But even as white students expressed their support, was it enough? Did their actions embody allyship? Heather Cronk, co-director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a network of activists that organizes white people to fight racial injustice, stresses that allyship, in terms of supporting black people, needs to consist of trusting black leadership to direct white allies in ways that are helpful to the movement. Cronk goes on to explain that allyship also means building deep relationships with black people and other people of color. The willingness to discuss controversial topics such as police brutality and educate oneself are other integral components to allyship as well. Simply being a physical presence also represents allyship. In photos of Black Lives Matter protests, white people can be seen marching with their black counterparts holding up the Black Lives Matter banner.

With allyship in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement in mind, did white students on DePauw’s campus really demonstrate allyship? Taking to social media and posting something on one’s Instagram story and hanging a banner in the middle of campus can have meaning and influence, but the extent of that meaning and influence is questionable. When people post to their Instagram and Facebook stories, they last for 24 hours and then disappear. It is likely that both the people who viewed the story and even the person who posted the content eventually forgets about it. Did the same situation happen when white students at DePauw posted about standing in solidarity with students of color? The social media posts are a form of support, but it could be argued that the white students who made them were simply trying to deflect any criticism from themselves. Perhaps the question of allyship comes down to the old saying “actions speak louder than words.” It’s so easy to declare one’s support, but how does one demonstrate it? What if the same white students on DePauw’s campus who declared their allyship passively watch as their friends use racial slurs and disregard the struggle of students of color? What if the same white students who showed support to students of color don’t understand the importance of recognizing the difference between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter? Is that still allyship?

If more white students on DePauw’s campus stood in black spaces and were willing to have tough conversations with students of color, would that be enough? Possibly. But the support that white students demonstrated through social media and the use of the banner cannot be ignored. Regardless of what the true definition of allyship is, perhaps it can be agreed that in order for racial issues to be resolved in the United States, black and white bodies must come together.

Why We Shouldn’t Have to Have the White History Month Conversation

A close-up photograph of a section of dates on a calendar.

In 1915, Carter G. Woodson, a historian from Harvard University, helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). A little over a decade after the organization’s founding in 1926, the group sponsored Negro History Week, an event where communities across the country would come together to celebrate, host lectures, and conduct performances to commemorate the legacy of African Americans who had broken race barriers and made extraordinary achievements. A little more than thirty years later during the 1960’s, also the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month. To this day, Black History month is a time to recognize the accomplishment of African Americans who helped make the United States what it is today. However, as with every topic regarding race in the United States, there is always controversy, confusion, and opposition. In terms of Black History Month, it is the controversy is between African Americans and their white counterparts. Why is Black History Month so crucial, and what differentiates it from cultural pride? Consequently, why shouldn’t we ask why there is no white history month?

Continue reading “Why We Shouldn’t Have to Have the White History Month Conversation”

The Ethics of Taking to the Streets and Punching Nazis

The days since the inauguration of President Trump have been filled with demonstrations and protest. The inauguration itself was viewed significantly less than those prior, and what may have been the largest protest in our history followed the next day. It is noteworthy that while over three million people gathered in the Women’s March nationally, it was “peaceful,” with no arrests at the main locus of the protests in Washington, D.C., or at the sister marches in Los Angeles and New York City.

Continue reading “The Ethics of Taking to the Streets and Punching Nazis”

Diversity in Medicine

Issues of race and discrimination transcend social interactions and permeate important institutions in the U.S., and the field of medicine is no exception. Recently, concerns about how patients of color may be receiving treatment differently, and less effectively, than white patients have become more frequently studied. Medical schools have implemented diversity initiatives in cultural sensitivity and awareness of subconscious bias to combat these issues and decrease the prevalence of racism in the medical field. However, according to Jennifer Adaeze, medical school student and writer for Stat News, these initiatives are not enough .

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Chicago Protests and Social Movement Arrogance

“And these children that you spit on,
as they try to change their world”

The observation goes back at least to Bertrand Russell of an inverse correlation between how adamant a person is in their opinion and how much they know about the topic, but nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than when we come to questions of grassroots movement strategy. It seems every pundit this week – from the Daily Show to the New York Times to Fox News – has felt the need to weigh in on the protests that shut down Trump rallies in Chicago and elsewhere. And the consensus is that the protestors are SOOOOOO naïve. As Trevor Noah so respectfully put it: “It’s like trying to put out a fire by putting wood on it.” … “Ah yes, trust Bernie Sanders’s fans to have an unrealistic view of what is actually happening.”

Why this systemic condescension? In the NYT case, we are treated to a poll suggesting that many of those on the other side are really angry about the disruptions. In other cases, it is little more than a priori intuition, or some vague reference to the fact that Trump says he has enemies and now protestors are proving it.

But the question of how to effectively respond to a growing neo-fascist movement – one that has been building in this country for the last 30 years, involves a deeply disaffected and heavily armed population in control of many local governments and with a disproportionate representation among police and the military – is an empirical one. And in the case of most complicated empirical questions, it isn’t a bad idea to actually look at some research before launching into a lecture.

There are a number of routes to gaining knowledge of movement strategy, to a more informed judgment about the likely long-term effects of tactical decisions in a movement. You could read historical accounts of movements around the world and try to discern patterns. (One might start with books like Guns and Gandhi in Africa – ed. Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer; or Protest, Power, and Change ed. Roger Powers, et al.)

You could read the extensive social science literature on how movements develop and when and how they succeed. (See, for example Why Civil Resistance Works and other work by Erica Chenoweth, or Stellan Vinthagen’s A theory of nonviolent action: how civil resistance works, or a text like Social Movements, by Suzanne Staggenborg, just for starters.)

Or you could gain some skills “on the job” by actually participating in the work over a long period of time. (Or at least read some of the experiences of folks who have, for example the
marvelous collection We Have Not Been Moved, ed. Elizabeth “Bettita” Martinez et al.)

People who are most knowledgeable in all these ways tend to be epistemically humble – to realize that it is very hard to predict the long-term effects of various actions. But they do, at least, realize that there are many complex and often competing dynamics and come to recognize some of the issues that go far beyond the local and immediate reaction. For example, one point of many movements is to make structural violence explicit and obvious. In the Civil Rights Movement, the daily indignities, oppression, and thwarting of life by segregation inflicted all manner of violence on blacks. But this daily violence of the system was easy to ignore. When people sat down in segregated restaurants, or walked together over a bridge, however, preserving the Jim Crow order required the use of literal guns, fire-hoses, chains, beatings, and jail. And the violence of beating children was something that others could see and react to far more easily than daily indignities and “dreams deferred.” Critics then, as now, said that these confrontations precipitated violence. And in one sense, of course they did. That was the whole point. They brought out direct, person-to-person violence. But the violence was always there, just operating in the shadows, where oppression always grows best.

And by pulling violence out of the shadows – turning in-group organizing to deport Latinos, ban Muslims, reintroduce torture, bomb more civilians, demean and oppress women, etc. into an open direct confrontation – one forces the masses of apathetic or undecided Americans to confront the situation. Yes, many of the readers of this blog hear of nothing else, but the majority of Americans do not vote, and are woefully ignorant of what is going on either in towns like Ferguson or in Trump rallies and Klan meetings. The long-term effects on this population is far more important to the evaluation of a movement tactic than the short-term effect on someone already convinced of neo-fascist ideology.

Or consider the way that movements put issues and concepts into the public debate. Would everyone talk about “the 1%” without Occupy? Would anyone be debating “Black Lives Matter” without Black Lives Matter, Ferguson Frontline, and other militant protests?

But the main point is that if you haven’t made an attempt to educate yourself in any of these ways, you really should consider the possibility that you have no opinion worth listening to. Rather than jump on a soap-box and lecture people who have been studying and practicing movement politics their entire life, might I consider listening and learning instead? It may, in the end, be a bad idea to directly confront Trump’s neo-fascist rallies, but the pundits insisting on this haven’t a clue. They aren’t even so much as attending to the complex long-term dynamics of how right-wing movements grow in in various political contexts, of how left-movements are nurtured, developed, and given confidence, or the way that apathetic or ignorant people are pulled into the conflict.

Take a moment to hear from the organizers about their goals and strategic vision. Take a social movements course. Take a movement history course. Take a peace studies course. Take my course Nonviolence: Theory and Practice, or one of the hundreds of similar courses around the country. Go to a meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Otherwise, seriously, just stop. The “children” “are immune to your consultations.” And that is a very good thing.

“Okay Ladies, Now Let’s Get in Formation”

The Super Bowl happened last month, but the media still has not quieted down over Beyoncé’s half time performance, particularly the debut of her new song, “Formation.” For those who haven’t seen the music video or her Super Bowl performance, it is unlike anything the singer has done to date. It was culturally provocative, emotional, highly stimulating and an reminder of where Beyoncé came from. From Beyonce on top of a sinking police car in what seems to be New Orleans to her riding around in an old convertable with her hair in braids, the images leave little doubt in the viewers mind that Beyonce is black.

In the music video, released a day before her Super Bowl performance, Beyonce takes on all African-American stereotypes and does so in her own way. Beyoncé and Jay- Z, her husband, have been publicly quiet on the racial conflicts of the past few years, including the Black Lives Matter movement. But the couple has taken a more public role in racial dialogues. Beyonce’s “Formation” in combination with Jay-Z’s business Tidal donating $1.5 million to the Black Lives Matter program makes their position on these issues fairly clear.

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Bernie Sanders and #Blacklivesmatter

Late last week, activists affiliated with the #Blacklivesmatter movement interrupted presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at a Seattle rally. What they had to say was important, yet the substance of their protest was often sidelined in commentary about their actions. Even after their protest worked, and Sanders’ website posted a detailed campaign plan for racial justice, many still condemned the disruption. Examining why reveals the dangers of viewing such events from a single perspective – a perspective that ultimately helps reinforce sexist and racist stereotypes.

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Should You Watch Samuel Dubose Die?

The articles are everywhere. Headlined by an eye-catching, caps-locked “WATCH,” they offer the reader the opportunity to watch someone die. The person in this case is Samuel Dubose, a Cincinatti resident killed by a policeman at the University of Cincinatti, Ray Tensing. The video is powerful, offering a disturbing look into police brutality in America. Its role is also central in bringing Tensing to justice, as his arrest was paralleled by the prosecutor office’s release of the video. But should you watch the video – one that graphically captures the last minutes of Dubose’s life?

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