I
am not going to be able to do today's post justice.
I
am running late, which doesn't help, but also I am probably too emotional about
it.
In
the previous two posts, there is an element of dehumanization that focuses on
the killer, and nurturing their ability to kill. Grossman mentioned that one of
the techniques was vilification of the enemy, but it kind of sounded like that
was one of the older and less effective techniques. Still, it seems like it can
be effective.
He
had also mentioned that in addition to the military not having a high enough
shoot to kill rate, the police found a similar issue in the 60s, and that was
something that they and the FBI worked on, and improved.
I
don't want to sound anti-police here. I tried an experiment recently where for
ten minutes you were shown scenes, and then there were people holding
something, and you had to decide within a second whether to shoot or holster
your weapon. That was the longest ten minutes of my life, and it was just a
keyboard and computer screen. For when the danger is real, I don't envy anyone
having to make those decisions.
The
purpose of that experiment was to look for racial bias in shooting. I did not
get results for that, but I do know overall that most people are quicker to
pull the trigger on a black man than a white man.
That's
nothing new. I remember back in college, over twenty years ago, Professor
Taylor saying that officers test results showed that the most frightening image
for them was a black man. What's the common defense for shooting? I feared for
my life. Since black men are scary, it often works as a defense, and lots of
black people get shot even though they don't have guns.
What
I want to propose is that there is conditioning at work there too, and there are
societal factors that reinforce it, and we need to stop that.
There
is an overall devaluation of black life. I am going to focus on some recent
information related to the Mike Brown case, and most of these are things that I
have seen today.
I
need to give a lot of credit to Shaun King for collecting information. One
thing they worked on was getting all of the eyewitnesses to the shooting with
their accounts together. Most of them did not know each other previously (I
think two were coworkers, but did not know Brown), they saw the shooting from
different vantage points, but their stories align with each other and with the
audio recording of the gunshots and location of Brown's body.
Even
if you discount the friend, there are three other people appearing on camera
with their full names, and one with audio evidence speaking through an
attorney, but still capable of being deposed. There are still people who would
rather believe a radio caller only giving a first name and saying that she
heard from a friend that Brown attacked and Wilson was injured. There are
still people who are contributing to a fund for Wilson, and before the
comments were turned off, there were references to rewards, bounties, animal
control, and one down with more to go.
(I
will not link, but as I type 5930 people have contributed $235525.)
It
looks like GoFundMe no longer has the page for Daniel Holtzclaw, the officer
accused of raping black women, but it was also doing well.
There
is a lot to be said about the specific abuse of black women, and rape culture,
and I don't even have the energy to go there, but there are a couple of things
that I do want to get down.
One
is that there has been a horrible culture in Ferguson. Not only have the poor
been exploited as a way of funding the city budget, which, especially with the
racial disparities, is going to create more social tension, but there has also been
complete willingness to cover up abuses. The links below are mainly about Ferguson, or at least Saint Louis, but these issue are
not unique to them:
One
of the comments that keeps coming up is that Brown's body was left in the
street for four hours. It seems unlikely that time period was needed for investigation
in a case where the shooting officer has apparently not even filed a report. It
certainly doesn't take long to snap pictures. You could just look at it as a
lack of respect for Brown's life or his family or really any black life. You
could also look at it as lynching, like bodies hung up for display and having
postcards sent around after a lynching.
I
don't know how much the police force was thinking. The response to the protests
was certainly an attempt at intimidation, and suppression, because they don't
want to lose their power. The black people are a source of income and a source
of ego fulfillment, and people don't like having the power structure disrupted
when they're not on the bottom.
That
sounds ugly, and it is, but if the response keeps being a willingness to find a
way in which Brown deserved to die, than anyone participating in that is an
accomplice. Borrowing stock footage as "proof" of Wilson's injuries and
releasing video footage of an incident that had nothing to do with the traffic
stop is trying to make the murder okay. The stop was for jaywalking, which does
not carry the death penalty. If it had been for shoplifting, that also does not
carry the death penalty. Someone kneeling on the sidewalk with their hands up,
you don't shoot! He doesn't have to be an angel to make that murder. It doesn't
have to be premeditated for there to have been a long path leading to it, but that
path is not Brown's fault.
As
long as we try and justify each individual incident, then we are saying that
it's okay that a woman whom a Wal-Mart employee thought might be shoplifting
(though she had no merchandise, nor weapons, on her dead body) was shot. It's
okay that a guy in a store talking on the phone was shot before he even had a
chance to realize what was going on.
(Not
linking to an article on Shelly Frey's death, because the headlines are all
calling her a shoplifter, and I read that she had no merchandise. Well, getting
shot is the best way to have people assume you deserved it.)
It's
okay that a man on his way to a pre-Emmy party, which is a good moment, is held
for six hours, even though they apparently arrested a woman for the burglary,
indicating that he couldn't have fit the description that well, because he does
not look that feminine. But then a call on a car full of black men got a woman
and her children pulled over, and her handcuffed, because the car fit the
description, except it was a different color and I bet the license plate wasn't
even close.
Actually,
even just running by work can be dangerous:
That's
what you do, right? Black means criminal! That's why you have Ben Stein and Linda
Chavez saying that you can't call Mike Brown unarmed, really, because he had
his big black body.
That's
racism! That is structural racism. It's a real thing.
You
want to talk about the black on black crime rate? It's very similar to the
white on white crime rate. We need to quit justifying all of the ways in which
it can be okay every time a black person is shot.
Someone
posted recently that whites are reluctant to discuss racism because they take
it as an accusation. You know what? It can be uncomfortable to talk about white
privilege. I didn't actively set it up. I don't do anything to try and maintain
it. But my comfort is not worth black lives, and that's what it comes down to. People
die and get harassed and abused because the people who don't actively take
pride in racism are too embarrassed to talk about it. That is not good enough.
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