We Need a World Beyond Our Sins
Last week in Minneapolis, George Floyd, a black civilian, was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck while his colleagues looked on. This event, coming after a series of police and vigilante-killings of African-Americans, provoked massive protests that at the time of writing are ongoing.
The protests have formed along familiar lines and faced familiar responses. On the one side, there is the pain and the anger of communities of color, the left, and many people in big cities who say police violence is running unchecked. They are opposed by law-and-order conservatives and police organizations who say that there is little distinction between protesting and rioting. The neoliberal establishment is in the middle aiming for sympathy from both sides.
The politics and the postures strongly recall the intermittent protests following police killings during 2014-16. However we feel about that time when our country showed so much brutality, we have to acknowledge that our responses have been wholly inadequate.
In this moment, I want to speak to anyone who is concerned about what Floyd’s death represents, and say we cannot afford to repeat the patterns of the past: not the academization of debates about racism, not the dissipation of concrete collective politics into individual concerns. That is to say, we cannot afford to recommit to liberal antiracism.
*Allow me to pause at the beginning to say that this is not going to be a blogpost in which an orthodox leftist urges a race-blind class analysis of criminal justice in the United States— I won’t even be making much of any analysis. Even less is it a complaint from the left about liberal academia or PC culture— these grievances have nothing to do with the issues at hand, and these complaints have become as cliché as any part of middle-class liberalism they take issue with.
Suffice it to say that the mainstream consensus among people who study the criminal-justice system says that racism plays a significant role, with the caveat that of course “racism” is insufficient to explain the entire system. Because this is properly the work of historians and social scientists, I will leave it as is.
From my own scholarly preparation, I am only qualified to add that though overpolicing, underprotection, and police violence affect diverse communities, the politics that tolerates (even promotes) police brutality and has driven the growth of mass incarceration, has been promoted through the rhetoric and imaginary of black crime. Such rhetoric has been so normalized that this fall, Americans will have to choose between two men whose public careers have been shaped through this discourse and the racialized moral panics it has promoted.
It is for these reasons, both the violence of the system and the clear role of racism in this violence, that I am concerned with the how the rhetoric around the 2020 protests has mimicked the 2014-16 phase.
For one, my newsfeed has been filled with largely white liberals I have known for many years who are sharing exactly the same notable quotes. Let’s take two. One is Martin Luther King’s description of riots as the “language of the unheard”, and another is James Baldwin’s interpretation that they show “the despair of being in a static position”.
Now, Baldwin had a forceful voice in American letters, but it is unclear just from that quote, and others, what is to be done to empower or even comfort people who are feeling despair.
More importantly, though liberals have rendered King an almost apolitical figure, he had a precise and sweeping vision of material liberation that would counter racism by overcoming and undoing capitalism and state violence. The specific prescriptions of King’s liberatory agenda appear much less frequently in the media than this excerpt from his diagnosis. Surely, King is of interest to theorists, but what he did was politics in the making of a new church.
It is on the grounds of religion that I object to the most troubling aspects of liberals’ responses to police violence. So often, white liberals will present a self-punishing litany of all of the ways they are “racist” and thus complicit in the system. Their protestations are high-catharsis, but low-impact. Simply put, they are misplaced.
It is not politically helpful, or particularly reflective, for ordinary people, even ordinary white people, to look upon the violence enacted by the state and other powerful actors and then ask what they are doing wrong in their interpersonal and spiritual lives. It is rather up to citizens in a democracy to hold the powerful accountable in their public lives.
I call this exercise “religious” because it follows the American Protestant concern for the personal conscience and the individual relationship with the divine, with the transcendent and numinous. Most discourse of “racism” among educated liberals today is mystified, its object unfathomable in its nature but manifold in its effects.
How often have we heard slavery, along with the decimation of indigenous peoples, described as “America’s original sin”? If we follow Augustine’s account of sin, we inherit the guilt for slavery, but conveniently for racial liberals, slavery as an institution is no more.
So in effect, it is totally unclear how we are to expiate this culpability, and as normatively-Protestant Americans, we can practice our faith in our whatever way we choose. We can imagine so many possibilities of what might, and as liberal-Protestant subjects, we are free to choose whatever form of antiracism speaks to us most personally.
And after 2014, we were provided a panoply of personal means of reparations: from recommendations to read books by black authors or patronize black businesses, to incoherent playlists of the greatest hits of commercialist-individualist therapy-exercises.
I will take a moment here to say that I differ from the true partisans of Marxism-Leninism in that I actually do think it is valuable to, for example, decolonize the college curriculum and rethink museum curation. However, these are valuable projects when what we are doing is things like interrogating the limits of our imaginations, particularize and situate our universalisms —and all that good humanistic shit— in other words, these are valuable in the realms of the arts, literature, and culture. While these domains are of course not innocent of politics, it is impossibly narrow-minded to expect people to share our esthetic values and social sensibilities as a precondition of working together against manifest injustice.
In this, whatever we might imagine its merits to be, the discourse of “white privilege” does not invite anybody in. It exists as an in-group signifier of morality and edification and by 2020 it is only used among people who were already on the same side in 2014. I will say this for the term “privilege” however. The Latin roots of the word refer to a “private law”, in other words, to a group to whom different rules apply. The issue is the law— the specific functioning form of politics, not its motivation or ideological character.
At this point, you might object that the ideological character of laws and policies matters a great deal, especially when that ideology is racism. “How can we deal with one part of the system if we don’t understand what the system is fundamentally is and the ideas on which it’s premised?” you might be saying. “How can you live in a country like the United States, built on slavery and genocide, and where Donald Trump is president, and not understand that racism isn’t just the foundation of our country, it’s on every floor and ceiling in the building? Even the left’s most inveterate critics of antiracism acknowledge that racism, and other prejudices, “persist and cause harm”, so why at this moment should we shy away from confronting it fully and not piecemeal?”
I would only respond that we are not trying to tear down the building, but to make the building livable for people. I would also say that reasoning of the above kind too easily enables inaction. If we are fighting against the shaping force of history, against a deep-rooted and pathological character of US society, what hope is there to win, and what value is there in victories on any one front?
However, as is obvious to anyone who is facing police violence, or any other form of violence patterned and supported by the system, the value is individuals can stay alive and live better if the policies that protect their oppressors change. They should not have to wait for white people to right their souls or history to right itself, or be analyzed properly, or be analyzed at all. The victims of the system deserve the fighting will of anyone with a conscience horrified to see a human being crushed beneath a uniform. “People of conscience” is not a category limited to “people who subscribe to the New York Times and have attended a race-theory seminar at a fancy university.” People with a conscience need to be ready to fight.
So what are we up against and what is to be done? In the United States, a variety of legal and institutional factors make it almost impossible to hold police accountable for the kinds of violence that has inspired anger from Ferguson to Minneapolis. We need to get rid of these laws and permission structures where we can and counterbalance them where we can’t.
Once formulated like this, are different practical options for what to do. On the one end of the spectrum, Joe Biden, an architect of the criminal justice system in all its cruelty, is pledging that he will institute a police-accountability board if he is elected president (good luck on either score). On the other end, the idea of defunding the police is gaining more attention and traction, and even the police-abolition movement is becoming more visible from the mainstream.
For my part, democratic accountability mechanisms, such as are being debated in Chicago, are what I am most interested in. I won’t pronounce authoritatively on a real resolution to police violence, but the issue is clear and deserves our concentrated efforts. It does not deserve to be stuck in a spiderweb of personal recrimination and psychic interrogation. The emerging movement for police accountability, the movement to take control of our cities away from the institutionalists and the failed and fake reformers, deserves better than liberal antiracism.