"Racist Police Brutality is SYSTEMIC": A Grave Moral Judgement

Police Killing of an Innocent

Three years ago in Minneapolis there was a police killing of an innocent: Justine Diamond, an affluent, popular woman, recently engaged, was shot to death after she called in an alarm when she startled a policeman, Mohamad Noor. It was tragic; and clearly unintentional. A rookie, he had been  heralded as the first Somali police officer. His training had been shortened, possibly to expedite his entrance into the department and its diversification. He had complaints against him, including assault, and had been judged twice as unfit for police work. He may have been a "bad cop," prone to violence; or incompetent, due to poor training and a rush to diversify; or he may have just made a mistake, a "bad choice." No allegation of racism. You didn't see him and her on CNN for the following five days. The victim's family received $20 million in compensation; the perpetrator was found guilty of 3rd degree murder and manslaughter and got twelve and a half years. The Somali Policemen's Association alleged the conviction was racist.  (Thanks to my college classmate Tim Regan, a resident in Minnesota, for alerting me to this case. Tim is a successful, Stanford-educated lawyer whose intelligence is evidenced by the fact that he regularly reads this blog and converses with me. LOL!) The death of Justine is tragic; but uninteresting to the national media as it contributed nothing to their white racist narrative.

There is a large, thriving Somali community in Minneapolis. They are businessmen, skilled workers, and hard laborers. They have strong communal bonds; the men stay with their women; family structure is good; high school graduation rate is an amazing 98%. The Somalis in Minneapolis may not be marching against systemic white racism. Like many immigrants, they are busy building their businesses and raising families. Their homes and businesses may have been destroyed in the current explosion of violence. I know the type, like Ethiopian and Kenyan women who work for me: they are women of gravitas; they are confident, assertive, compassionate, deeply religious, energetic, generous. Outstanding women and ideal employees! They are nobody's victim. They do not complain of systematic bigotry. I would pity the white policeman or anyone who messed with them in any way.

We might, loosely, distinguish three distinct groups of blacks in our country: immigrants from Africa and the islands; upwardly mobile Afro-Americans; and the Afro-American underclass. The first two groups flourish here; the last is vulnerable, violated, and miserable. It is not about skin color. It is about class and culture: male fidelity, fatherhood, family stability, work ethic, bonds of community, faith life. The last unfortunate group is essentially the same as their white cousins in low income communities where broken families, abandonment by fathers, and disintegrated communities prevail.

Thought Experiment

Imagine: A video of a mail deliverer, in uniform, molesting a child goes viral on the internet. It is so repugnant that it cannot be shown on television. Graphic, repulsive, unforgettable! A small but clever media-savy group called "We Hate Letter Carriers" creates a narrative that pedophilia is rampant in the US Post Office. Statistic show that letter carriers (we will assume) are less prone to this condition than most other occupations, probably because their daily exercise of walking is psychologically as well as physically healthy and their relationship with the community is overwhelmingly positive. But, many families, already anxious from the pandemic and so nauseated from the image, become fearful for their children. They realize the postman is around every day; he can observe family routines; he can judge which children are vulnerable, he seems friendly in an unusual way which is said to be typical of predators. And so a protest movement is launched: media coverage, demonstrations, petitions. Their intention is only to protect the young, but they make a catastrophic error in judgment: they decide that mail carriers are systemically pathological. They join peaceful protests carrying signs like "Keep our kids away from the mail" and "Go with UPS or FED EX and keep America Great." Those protesting are overwhelmed with compassion and concern; their hearts are tender. Their judgment is: bigoted as they are stereotyping an entire group according to a single incident, however horrid; slanderous as they perpetuate an extremely serious falsehood against an entire group; and a rash judgment as they jumped from their feelings into condemnation without sober and judicious evaluation of all evidence. Imagine the harm unleashed by these well-intentioned, sentimental but imprudent activists: the mail carriers beaten and abused, the climate of anxiety and distrust, the children of post office employees who are humiliated!

"I Know He is Racist"

In a mimetic stampede, millions of Americans, from an 8 minute video, KNOW  Derek Chauvin is racist. How do they Know? They just Know. There is zero evidence. That is what is called prejudice: he is white, he is a cop, he looks tough like the bigoted cops in the movies. So they Know he is racist. We see on the video evidence that he combines violent propensity with lack of empathy and these may be increased under stress. But racist? You know this only if you know white police are widely racist. You may never have met a white racist cop but you know it. He may have a black wife and black children and two black girlfriends for all you know. This kind of moral certainty is bigotry pure and simple. Those sitting on the judgment seat are themselves making stereotypical generalizations, however warm their feelings.

A Grave Moral Judgment

Our entire country was nauseated by that brutal 8 seconds. But to jump from that to a judgment of systematic police racism is a huge, monumental leap. To accept that condemnation on the basis of visceral feelings and input from the media and without sober study of the facts is a grave violation of the eighth commandment: Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness.

Perhaps I am wrong in withholding my approval of the white racism narrative. But if I am right, those accepting it are slandering an entire group of people. And not just any group: the police are among the very most courageous and important of us. They risk their lives daily. They protect us. They deal with the quagmire of misery, violence, and chaos in which we have cast our black adolescents ...as the rest of us rest comfortable and safe in our segregated residences. And yet we presume to condemn them. There was a crucifixion of George Floyd; since his death there have been a litany of crucifixions of police and blacks and other innocents, all under the banner of "Black Lives Matter."

This narrative serves to undermine legitimate police authority, deplete the confidence and trust they need to do their challenging job, and deter the young from choosing a career which should have our very best. This is, of course, part and parcel of the broader discrediting of masculinity, paternity and God-given authority, a discrediting that is has possessed the soul of our culture since the cultural revolution.

Who suffers most when the police are stigmatized? Black communities. In the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, police understandably stood down from strong enforcement and crime rates in poor neighborhoods escalated. Protests like "Black Lives Matter" hurt the black communities.

The narrative also strengthens the perverse image of the black man as victim, passive, impotent, lazy and incompetent. It feeds passivity and lethargy, even as that explodes into senseless, irrational violence. The demand for reparations has a similar logic: not only the materialistic dogma that money with solve things, but the positioning of the black male as wanting and needing a large handout for no effort of his own...the dependency syndrome that was unintentionally supported by the war on poverty and the welfare culture.

Most evidently, in light of all the current rioting, is that the narrative is a classic example of what Rene Girard called "a myth of sacred violence." In this logic,  the chaos of anxiety, conflict, resentment and envy resolves itself by contriving a scapegoat, without or without some rationale, and the community finds itself in a harmony of euphoric righteousness as it condemns the pariah and vents its anger. And so, our scapegoat: the white racist police. This figure works so well because it blissfully marries the rage of the fatherless black youth at all masculinity and order with the limousine liberal's insecurity, repressed guilt and resentment of discipline, sacrifice, order, accountability, authority and order. Together they despise, in the spirit of the 1960s, the "pigs."

I Just Don't See It

We have been hearing about systematic police racism for half a century:  I just don't see it. I have known a half dozen or so white racists: they are abnormalities, anachronisms, usually harmless but deformed and pathetic persons. Since my youth, late 1960s, I have been fascinated by "structures of sin and injustice" which have been a burning topic in Catholic intellectual discourse. I could rattle off a litany of them and pour out a five-page essay on each. Regarding race, what I see is institutional anti-racism. UPS where I worked for 25 years gave preference to women, blacks and minorities in its anxiety to be inclusive. We were put through hours of diversity workshops. My oldest granddaughter will be applying to colleges this year: with her achievement, she would stroll into the ivy league school of her choice if she were black; but since she is white most will be out of her reach. I am fine with these "institutions" of racial preference in light of the history of slavery and discrimination. But I just don't see the institutional white racism. The writing of Heather Mac Donald (article in WSJ this week) shows that the statistics unequivocally disprove the narrative.

The Success of the Civil Rights Movement

Structural racism collapsed swiftly, almost immediately in the 1960s. In this it resembles the fall of Communism in 1989, Vatican II in 1962-5 and the triumph of gay rights in recent decades. These changes were not sudden disruptions, but had been percolating for decades. Gay liberation is an inevitable result of the hegemony of contraception: if heterosexuals are practicing sterile, non-unitive, non-committed sex, why can't homosexuals do the same. The reforms of Vatican II were already pervasive in Catholic culture in the 1950s when my generation was growing up. My family and education raised me in the "Spirit of Vatican II" so that the so-called "reforms" were by 1965 common sense. The Latin mass people were the freaks! Communism was in an advanced stage of decline by the time of Reagan although it still presented itself as a powerful empire. And so, the post-War period in America was a privileged time of national unity and inclusion: having suffered a depression, waged a world war, and engaged in building an extraordinary economy, there was already an easy if inarticulate acceptance in our country of Catholics, Jews and blacks. The hegemony of the WASP was in collapse: this is why they were frantic to develop a birth control pill to stymie the fertility of Catholics and blacks. When Martin Luther King came marching down the street, the entire culture welcomed him...it was so obviously obscene that black people must go to the back of the bus. The universities, churches, media, Hollywood, law, politics, the labor movement...all the respectful cultural institutions outdid each other in their denunciation of structural racism.  This was a good thing.

What Do We Do?

Skin color is no longer a problem. But we face a monumental evil: the under-culture, multi-colored, of poverty, powerlessness, addiction, male infidelity, broken families and communities, promiscuity, pornography, unemployment, under-education, poor work ethic, resentment, inferiority and despair.

What do we do?

Jesus said: "The poor you always have with you." The reality of suffering, injustice, violence and vulnerability is beyond our control. Intractable and invincible: There is no solution. We are (as 12-steppers will recognize) powerless and overwhelmed in the face of inexorable, abysmal suffering. But not absolutely powerless!

I am suspicious of the social engineering of the left: the conviction that we can politically, by governmental action, resolve such problems. Often, state solution is as bad as the root problem: the war on poverty gave us a welfare culture of dependency and family breakdown and may have increased poverty; the war on drugs gave us astronomical numbers of imprisoned male fathers and decimated the black community; the war on the Covid demolished our economy and leaves us with incalculable psychological damage.

In our complex society we cannot avoid social policy, but we should have modest, minimal expectations: we will not solve things; we can mitigate slightly; we must be vigilant lest we make things worse. I appreciate the paralysis in D.C. since neither side can impose their horrific visions on us.

An example of positive policy: police brutality, essentially inclusive and non-discriminatory, is a persistent  reality given the self-selection by violent types and the chaotic, stressful nature of the work. It is a good suggestion that we sternly prosecute police who tolerate excessive physical force by their fellows. This may somewhat deter brutality, mitigate the "blue code", elevate police culture, and protect vulnerable young men from the underclass.

My conservative instincts prefer minimalism on the part of government (even as I prefer smallness in business): less done, less damage. Last week Supreme Court Justice Roberts ruled against the freedom of the Churches to open: this issue was dear to me and I was disappointed. But, true to his modesty and restrain, he deferred to the judgment of elected officials of the executive branch (governors) and did not impose his own views. (Although my belief is that freedom of religious expression is so sacred that repression of it requires the very strictest scrutiny.) Earlier he upheld Obamacare, similarly disappointing conservatives, in a show of humility and deference. In recent Sunday NY Times piece Ross Douthat perceptively pointed out that Trump used the pandemic to indulge his insatiable vanity but did not centralize power. He allowed governors, mayors and private industry a maximum of leeway. This made for a less efficient "war" on the Covid; but it preserved liberty and enhanced a wholesome subsidiarity. A Democrat would have instinctively centralized state power; further reduced freedom and the efficacy of smaller, mediating institutions;  amplified state control and atomized the isolated individual; even if they may have decreased the death toll by a percentage. I will take the deaths; and the free way of life.

I have long cherished the distinction (I learned 50 years ago from Hannah Arendt) between authoritarianism and totalitarianism: the former monopolizes political control and represses any opposition but leaves largely untouched cultural/social organisms that do not threaten him: schools, businesses, churches, families, traditional and voluntary organizations. Far worse is the totalitarian who imposes an absolute way of life and destroys all alternate, independent, subsisting institutions including family, and religion. Saddam Hussein was authoritarian; Isis is totalitarian. Franco authoritarian; Hitler, Stalin, Mao were totalitarian, as are China, North Korea and Iran. Trump shamelessly displays his authoritarian impulses; but the entire Democratic Party disguises in righteousness the totalitarian compulsion...to make the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraception and abortion and some little born-again baker to make the gay wedding cake.

But again: what do we do?  Rather than policy, protests, ideology and moral crusades, I prefer the concrete, the immediate, the personal. I am inspired by Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day and Catherine Doherty. My prescription: draw close to a person who is poor and afflicted: smile, look in the eye, listen, smell them, relax in the presence of God. My approach would be the opposite of the war on the Covid: in place of social distancing, draw close; in lieu of masking, unveil yourself and let the other present herself; instead of quarantining lets mix it up, poor and rich, black and white, educated and ignorant; instead of a lock-down, lets open ourselves up.  Drawing close you will be overwhelmed and powerless in the face those who don't bath, who steal, who dirty themselves, who lie, who clutter their rooms with filth, who are tormented with anxiety and anger. You will not be able to stay close to such unless you are close to God. But in His Merciful presence, you will overflow with serendipitous delight in the beauty of His children.