Month: June 2020

Law and order

It has been very interesting to listen to Donald Trump respond to the protests following the lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers: Trump has made calls for “law and order.” For anyone who remembers Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon, in the not-so-distant past a call for “law and order” was code for using police to keep African Americans in their place. But that history goes back before Goldwater and Nixon, as is made clear in this excerpt from “O Say Can You See,” the blog of the National Museum of American History:

“William J. Simmons, a former minister and promoter of fraternal societies, founded the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in 1915. His organization grew slowly, but by the 1920s, Simmons began coordinating with a public relations firm, in part to chip away at the (accurate) perception that the Klan was an outlaw group involved in extralegal violence. Membership in the Klan exploded over the next few years. As part of this PR campaign, Simmons gave an interview to the Atlanta Journal newspaper in January 1921. While explicitly advocating white supremacy, Simmons played up his group’s commitment to law and order … and even boasted of his own police credentials. He claimed members at every level of law enforcement belonged to his organization, and that the local sheriff was often one of the first to join when the Klan came to a town. Ominously, Simmons declared that ‘[t]he sheriff of Fulton County knows where he can get 200 members of the Klan at a moment’s call to suppress anything in the way of lawlessness.'”

This blog post ends with a pertinent question in Latin, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Here’s my free translation of this phrase: “Who will police the police?”

And don’t forget…

As reported by Religion News Service: Breonna Taylor, a black woman, was killed by police on March 13, yet…

“‘Despite the number of unarmed Black women killed by police or who have died under police custody under suspicious circumstances, none of them, with the exception of maybe Sandra Bland, has brought a lot of widespread attention, whereas consistently we see that men get more attention,’ said Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, womanist theologian and associate professor of pastoral care and counseling in the McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University.”

Why is this so?

“‘Black women are often romantically imagined. We are “warriors.” We are “mothers.” We are “queens” … People don’t consider us as human. And our institutions, including churches, schools, workplaces and even our movements are guilty of exploiting the labor of Black women. We are forever invisible and, yet, simultaneously, always to blame,’ said [Baptist minister Candace] Simpson.”

Back to Walker-Brown for a final quote:

“‘We believe when Black women are free and when Black women’s lives matter, everyone’s lives will matter.'”

Environmental destruction and COVID-19

The BBC reports that scientists are expecting more pandemics like COVID-19. Why?

“Many scientists agree that our behaviour — particularly deforestation and our encroachment on diverse wildlife habitats — is helping diseases to spread from animals into humans more frequently. According to Prof Kate Jones from University College London, evidence ‘broadly suggests that human-transformed ecosystems with lower biodiversity, such as agricultural or plantation landscapes, are often associated with increased human risk of many infections’.” 

In other words, COVID-19 is a result of environmental destruction and mismanagement. And those of us in the wealthier countries are especially culpable:

“The current crisis, Prof Eric Fevre [from the University of Liverpool and the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya] said, provides a lesson for many of us about the consequence of our own impact on the natural world. ‘All of the things we use and take for granted — the food we eat, the materials in our smart phones; the more we consume, the more someone will make money by extracting them and moving them around the world. So it’s incumbent on all of us to think about the resources we consume and the impact it has’.”

A word to my fellow white guys

On Saturday, Clarissa-Jan Lim, a journalist with BuzzFeed News, reported on the violent protests against police violence and George Floyd’s murder:

“In a video that has been shared online widely, [Tay] Anderson [a Denver school board director and activist], who is black, is seen confronting a white man with a cloth covering on his face after the man spray-paints ‘ACAB’ — ‘all cops are bastards’ — on public property. Anderson said he was doing a news interview when he saw the man vandalizing, so he turned around and tried to stop him.

“‘I said, “We asked allies to step back so that we can make sure that you’re following what we’re asking you to do,”’ he recalled. ‘And he was like, ‘I’m not your ally, you guys want to protect the status quo….”’”

Well, actually — that white guy is doing his best to reproduce the status quo.

We white men are brought up to believe that we always know best, that we always have to be in charge. Just like that white guy that Tay Anderson confronted in Denver. I get very skeptical when I hear about white men talking about joining or helping organize protests against racism. Us white guys need to — to paraphrase Tay Anderson — step back and follow the lead of people who are not white guys. If we can’t do that, for all we may talk about being allies we’re actually just protecting the status quo.

How does this protect the status quo, you ask? Let’s go back to Tay Anderson:

“Anderson … said he knows that others ‘are going to blame black people for the violence and destruction, whether or not they started it. When we aren’t asking people to destroy things in our name and people do it anyway, we know that this is something that’s going to blow back on us,’ he said. ‘I’m pissed that this is going to blow back on us, because we don’t deserve this. We didn’t ask for this.’”

You see how this works, right?

White guys go to a non-violent protest march organized by black people. The white guys can’t stand not being the center of attention, so they start getting violent. This displaces the center of authority from the black organizers of the protest march to the white guys. Suddenly, it’s no longer a non-violent protest march organized by black people, it’s a violent protest organized by white guys. And as usual, if anything goes wrong, black people get blamed. The status quo of American racism is preserved yet again.

Here’s a word of advice to my fellow white guys:

If you really want to change the status quo, then when you go to one of the protests, make sure for once in your life that you’re not in charge of anything. In fact, if you go to a white allies protest, let white people of other genders run it. When you’re at a protest, don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t do anything to cause others to photograph you. Don’t be a rugged individualist or a lone ranger. Don’t even go bragging all over social media about what a social justice warrior you are because you, a white guy, were brave enough to attend a protest. In short, for once in your life, you’re not going to be the center of attention. I’m a white guy myself, so I know how hard that will be; but that’s what we need to do.

Because if us white guys could actually stop trying to be in charge all the time, that would go a long way towards changing the status quo.