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Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same shit, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different.
So this time, the videotape of the police officer shooting the unarmed black man (or child, in the case of Tamir Rice) will lead to that officer’s conviction and imprisonment. And then the alarm goes off and we are awakened from our dream state, just like we were the time before and the time before, forced to reckon with a seemingly endless repetition of horribleness.
Or this time, as we watch tens of thousands stranded in New Orleans during Katrina — disproportionately black and poor — the nation as a whole will finally come to understand what those left behind had already known, and for a very long time: namely, that black lives really don’t matter, and won’t until we demand they do. And again, the alarm disturbs our slumber. And again, we hit the snooze button.
Or this time — when yet another white kid shoots up his classroom, or another white serial killer murders a dozen people, buries them under the house or cannibalizes them — we will have our eyes opened to the fact that pathology and deviance are far from the exclusive purview of persons of color. So too when rich white men nearly bring the economy to its knees with financial chicanery so egregious as to make the most industrious of black or brown street criminals seem like rank amateurs by comparison. But then comes the alarm, a clarion that shakes us from our stupor, allowing us to go right back to fearing the usual suspects all over again.
And now, with the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, we hope that out of such a tragedy we may finally come to appreciate the sickness of racism, and the indelible stain still besmirching the soil and politics of our nation so many years on. But in order for people to learn they typically require teachers who are qualified to lead them to enlightenment. Events alone rarely do the trick and wisdom infrequently emerges fully-formed from the well of good intentions, let alone fervent aspiration. Some assembly is required. Sadly, we are in a classroom, so to speak, being taught by a man lacking even the most rudimentary pedagogical skills, devoid of content knowledge too, and without the temperament to convey even the most obvious of lessons. It’s a lesson one might think we had learned by now, but no: namely, that white supremacy is a death cult–a truth attested to by the bodies of millions of people of color through the years, not to mention more than a million whites who died either fighting that cult or defending it, from the Civil War to World War Two. This cult cannot be accommodated. It cannot be excused. It must be condemned and it must be defeated as a mentality, as a movement, and as a structurally ingrained social and economic reality. And if its adherents cannot be de-programmed, well then, they must be defeated to, without the least bit of sentimentality.
If, as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, then hoping against hope that this time an officer who shot a black man in cold blood would be held to account, is a type of insanity most profound. Or at the very least evidence of an overactive imagination rivaling that of the most creative screenplay writer. But rest assured, this movie does not have an alternate ending. It has been screen-tested before jury after jury, and it is quite clear by now which conclusion the audience prefers. Expecting anything different is to expect the things that have always happened to stop happening, and for those which never have to become the norm: like believing that any day now, hummingbirds will walk and pre-schoolers take flight.
Philando Castile is dead because Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot him. And Yanez shot him because he claims he feared for his life. And he feared for his life, supposedly, because Castile informed him he had a gun and was ostensibly reaching for it. But this makes no sense, and surely in a society less infected with the pathogen of what Jody David Armour calls “Negrophobia,” all would see why. Aside from the fact that Castile had no criminal history that would suggest he posed a threat to Yanez (something about which Yanez could not have known at the time) there is one thing the officer most assuredly should have been able to discern: namely, that when a man intends to shoot you, he does not announce the presence of his weapon first, so as to give you time to draw yours. This was not, I beg to remind you, a duel.
And so we are left with the ineluctable conclusion that Yanez feared for his life because Philando Castile was a black man with a gun, and for no other reason. Although licensed to carry it — a point he made to Yanez in what would constitute some of his final words — such a thing means little, either to police, the NRA, or those “All Lives Matter†folks who by their silence over Castile’s killing and the acquittal of the one who killed him have made quite clear whom they mean, and don’t mean or include, in their definition of “all.â€
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they see the world and others in it.
Those who view the world and its inhabitants as basically good, and who remain relatively hopeful about the better angels of our nature, though occasionally caught off guard by the less salutary aspects of the human condition, tend to believe in the capacity of everyday folks to solve problems and make the world a better place, given the right incentives and resources. Not to mention, their ability to smile, to laugh, and to find light-heartedness even amidst great pain makes them considerably more pleasant to be around. Although given to bouts of deep melancholy — after all, the optimist is perhaps more dismayed than others by evidence of their miscalculations, when they are occasionally and quite rudely disabused of their buoyancy — these are the kinds of individuals who nonetheless typically inspire us to be better than we are and who have little doubt that we can be.
Alternately, those whose disposition is gloomy, and who see the world as a mean and nasty place filled with equally mean and nasty people, though occasionally proved right — there are, after all, such people and life can be tragic — tend to inculcate a defeatist cynicism and a harshness of affect counterproductive to the building of compassion, empathy or community. Their utter inability to smile, laugh, or reassure others marks them as not merely hard-headed rationalists reluctant to dwell in the occasionally unrealistic optimism of the perpetually cheerful; rather, it suggests a dystopian mindset fundamentally at odds with a functioning belief in democracy, however messy, and freedom, however chaotic. It is not merely a Debby Downer-ism into which we all fall from time to time, but a seriously maladjusted persona, almost constitutionally incapable of joy.
In short, if you believe, as Dr. King did, that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” you will have a different disposition and manner of engaging that universe and its problems than one who believes the same moral arc to be, as with most of those who live beneath it, brutish and unforgiving. The former encourages one to meet people with a certain equanimity and good faith, while the latter inspires a view of others as adversaries who are, all of them, out to get you: as writer and eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen says, the “fuckers and the fucked.” And if one views the world that way, one aspires to be the one doing the fucking—to get others before they get you.
Which Dr. King do you honor today? The one who said that white Americans had betrayed their professed commitment to ethicality and equality — and that the country had bounced a check to black folks, which black folks were coming to cash — or the bland and sanitized apostle of color-blindness sold to you by the media? Which Dr. King?
The one who said that America had become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” or the whitewashed infantilized proponent of pacifistic forgiveness in the face of oppression and brutality, made popular by a culture uninterested in accuracy or truth?
Which Dr. King do we honor? The one who said “private charity is no substitute for public justice,” or the milquetoast advocate of abstract “service” and volunteerism peddled by colleges, universities, high schools, church groups and the non-profit industrial complex?
Sadly, I know which one most of our elected officials honor. Which is why they ought not darken the door of any King commemoration at all, so great is their hypocrisy, their venal disregard for the legacy upon which they trample every day they draw breath.
