But they’re not the cops

Trigger Warning: anti-Black racism, gun violence, police violence, anti-protester violence, anti-labor violence

On the one year anniversary of the death of soon-to-be college student Michael Brown in Ferguson by police officer Darren Wilson happening this past Sunday, the tensions in the small Saint Louis suburb erupted once again. Notably, this time the presence of the Oath Keepers, a militant organization created after Obama’s 2008 election, was a strange third party not fully aligned with the interests of either the disproportionately White police force (and their supporters) or the predominantly Black population. This little-known group has become an increasingly visible presence in the town, made only flashier by their many and prominently displayed weapons.

An Oath Keeper member, gun in hand, atop a roof in downtown Ferguson, from here.

Founded to enforce (their interpretation of) constitutional law against the presumed threats to it by the country’s first Black president, the Oath Keepers themselves are an overwhelmingly White group of mainly former service members, but also many active duty ones, as well as police and other first responders. Even in only the immediate circumstances, they arrived in Ferguson’s predominantly Black neighborhoods as an obviously outside force, armed to the teeth. From their initial reasons for organizing, to their status as heavily armed White people patrolling Black neighborhoods, they clearly have their commonalities with those that many Black residents of Ferguson and many other parts of the United States live in a near constant state of fear from.

In fact, in recent publications, the Oath Keepers Movement admits that their involvement in Ferguson began in something like coordination with the police – where they “protected some businesses” from “rioters and looters” that the police allegedly weren’t keeping safe. That same announcement from a Missouri-based group of Oath Keepers criticizes the police from that angle, saying that they are violating the constitutional rights of people to seemingly defend their businesses and selves from alluded to alleged lawlessness going so far as to call it “criminal endangerment”. In short, “that’s why the violence problem in Ferguson is on-going.” In essence, they have grown critical of the police in Ferguson and other areas, but not from any sense of empathy for those faced with repeated police violence against their communities. Quite the contrary, their judgment of the police is typically that they are inadequately suppressant of presumed militancy.

In spite of this, federal mainstream coverage of their increasing presence in Ferguson has implied a common cause between them and the protesters against police violence, rather than a very arbitrary moment in which their different politics aren’t diametrically opposed. This misimpression of them only shrinks the events in Ferguson to an example of police violence, free from racial dimensions that can operate in other times and in other ways. While the killing of Michael Brown was a key catalyst in the building of the Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of its momentum from Brown’s death reflected the pain and sorrow in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Himself a self-appointed keeper of the peace in spite of having no official status or relationship with the police, Zimmerman is something of a dim reflection of the same sort of person involved with the Oath Keepers.

Black anti-racism activists appear to have recognized those commonalities and have for that reason emphasized the need to expunge anti-Black racism in all people, whether they are police, non-police who collaborate with police forces, or even those who actively seek to replace or otherwise disband current police forces. That racial dimension to the current conflict between residents and police in Ferguson is easy to erase given the largely White critical response to the police that the Oath Keepers represent, but fully understanding that is critical to responding to that faction.

The Washington Post was one of the few non-local sources which felt comfortable noting the growing relationship between the Oath Keepers and various business owners in the area, admittedly as a cheery, positive part of their presence. The ways in which that reinforces existing fears about Black violence which justified many of the recent killings of Black people by police and others isn’t part of the assessment. As long as fascism is a bit of buzzword in modern US politics, it’s important to note that this is how fascism began – as an organizational bargain between Italian and Spanish landowners and armed gangs, circumventing a state viewed as not hard-hitting enough to deal with socialist and anarchist agitators.

Migrant field workers in 1930s Italy, from here.

Scott Walker may be the quieter Donald Trump and consequently have his extremist positions overlooked, but the Oath Keepers, decked out in guns, are just as bombastic as Trump. But their contextual dissatisfaction with the police and momentary media spotlight have coincided, seemingly obscuring the nature of their politics. As fascism has been watered down to simply imply a constrained, dictatorial politics, those who very closely embody a revival of it have been able to escape being critically connected to it as long as their ideologies are framed through freedom and liberty. Make no mistake, however, what’s beginning in Ferguson is a historied relationship that we have a word to describe.

The fundamental danger

Trigger Warning: police violence, racism, suicide mentions

The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George ZImmermans.

— jay smooth (@jsmooth995) July 13, 2013

More than two years later and the wisdom in this tweet has only been further demonstrated. We are currently in the middle of an epidemic of deaths of people of color (and particularly Black people) while in police custody, which has been promoted by us focusing on anything other than the needlessness of those deaths.

Freddie Gray, a twenty-five year old Black resident of Baltimore was arrested the night of April 12, 2015. He was charged with possessing an illegal blade (which is now disputed as having been outside of legal size ranges) and according to various eye witnesses was subject to some form of police violence, corroborated by a cell phone video that shows him being dragged to a police vehicle. Some have theorized that his spine may have been damaged before he even entered that car. Regardless, the “rough ride” he was then subjected to apparently caused significant neurological damage, which led near immediately to a coma and his death within a week.

Although several police officers present at the scene of his arrest have been indicted and charged with manslaughter (with a pending acquittal or conviction), the current public discussion of responsibility of Gray’s death is alarming. A Fox News reporter already openly approached the Baltimore police with the pitch that he would cover them positively, while others have clearly attempted to frame the response protests to Gray’s death as the actual problem. The Baltimore police appear to have encouraged this closing of public discussion of their culpability, allegedly having prevented Rihanna from holding a combined protest and concert in the city. Heading into the trial, efforts appear to have been made by the Baltimore police and others to downplay Gray’s death.

The cost of shutting down that conversation is already mounting. Eleven people – overwhelmingly people of color – have died in police custody in the past month. Most publicly discussed has been the case of Sandra Bland, an activist who was arrested for failing to use her turn signal while being pulled over by the police (and subsequently resisting arrest – meaning challenging police conduct that violated standards). According to the police, she committed suicide in a holding cell. Bland, who was six feet tall, supposedly hung herself in a rather low ceiling part of her cell. Her death came not long after she allegedly made a phone call in which she discussed feeling unsafe in police custody.

Many aspects of Bland’s death are becoming recurring in the most recent cases, with many activists in communities of color being targeted for arrests and their and others’ deaths being presented as suicides. Choctaw activist Rexdale Henry died in police custody earlier this month as well, and so far the police have refused to release autopsy reports, compounding critical questions about his mysterious death. The lingering unwillingness to condemn what was done to Freddie Gray has seemingly encouraged cavalier attitudes at best and malicious violence at worst, now specifically targeted at not only fairly randomly selected people of color, but activists organizing (among other reasons) to reduce and stop the deaths in their communities at the hands of the police.

Some have pointed out that even the police’s treatment of Freddie Gray didn’t happen in a vacuum. Many other apprehended people of color were given “rough rides” before him. As Jay Smooth’s tweet can remind us was done in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin and countless other acts of violence against people of color and particularly Black people in a policing context. These are ripples that don’t dissipate, they magnify each other.

How the upcoming trials for many of these cases – vitally those of the police charged with manslaughter against Freddie Gray but also a similar case in Cleveland – will affect the responses to this horrifying, new rush of deaths and to a degree whether there will be more deaths in the coming days. Currently, Baltimore is sounding as it has been forced into an uncomfortable silence and the Cleveland police union is auctioning off a weapon to raise funds for the police officer under legal scrutiny. Those are not the best of signs. It’s easy to hear that and think of rioting and other direct responses to these on-going patterns of violence, but the real danger is the same as it always was: more George Zimmermans.

The criminalization of Black women

TW: racism, racist criminalization, sexual violence, sexism, sexist invalidity

You might remember my previous annoyance over something Melissa Harris-Perry said, which while rooted in a lot of complex and revealing problems (namely an inability to properly contextualize assimilationist strategies among queer people) fundamentally boiled down to it feeling like a superficial way of looking at an issue that (despite her conflation of her interracial parents of yesteryear with queer parents of today) hasn’t personally affected her. In the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal, one of her statements seemed much more baffling to me, in that it was specifically rooted in her and her family’s experiences: “I will never forget the relief I felt – I’m a sexual assault survivor, and yet, the relief I felt at my twenty-week ultrasound when they told me it was a girl. And last night, I thought, I live in a country that makes me wish my sons away, wish that they don’t exist, because it’s not safe.”

There is something important there in what she’s said – Black men are prioritized as targets of policing violence as arguably the cornerstone of racist criminalization. Trayvon Martin, Kimani Gray, Jordan Davis, and countless more Black men and Black male teens are dead because of those ideas about race and violence. But is it really the best approach to understand racist criminalization in isolation from other, complicated social factors?

From Cece McDonald to Marissa Alexander, there’s clear indications to how self defense by Black women is criminalized as disproportionate, unnecessary, and ill-advised – in short, unjustified, in a way that White women thankfully don’t necessarily have to consider. This seems particularly salient as action has finally been taken (somewhat) in response to the assault of two Black Texan women by police officers, who claimed they were searching for marijuana hidden in their vaginas.

(A promotional poster going around tumblr about their on-going case against the local police, from here.)

There’s a conversation to be had there about how femininity both rendered them acceptable targets for a uniquely intimate type of violation as well as trivial enough that the concern was merely possession and not a violent one. It may be worth asking if their gender made the officers less likely to kill them because they weren’t concerned about repercussions from attacking them. It seems that the sexism and racism clearly involved in the situation intermingled to their detriment in a way that can’t be either of those abusive power structures.

It seems that the Blackness of Harris-Perry’s daughter can be used to justify violence as easily against her as against her hypothetical brother. It’s just that their respective genders would shape the resulting violence. And rethinking my previous critique of Harris-Perry’s unintentional heteronormativity, what could be more cisnormative than the assumption that the declaration of a fetus’ gender will match that person’s gender (both as they feel it and as others interpret them) years later, when they find themselves being criminalized for their Blackness?

Discussing the unique way that racism harms and even kills Black men shouldn’t come at the cost of dismissing how that same phenomenon is expressed differently against Black women, and genderqueer Black people of all genders.

Brooks and Cohen, peas in a pod

TW: racism, racist criminalization, islamophobia

It’s only been only two weeks since David Brooks’ staggering statements in the New York Times about the intelligence and “political DNA” of Egyptians (phrased vaguely enough to mean anyone Muslim or Arab, which is an incredibly broad insult). In a similar theme, Richard Cohen’s blathering insistence in the Washington Post (that I won’t link to) that George Zimmerman just couldn’t have known that Trayvon Martin wasn’t a criminal, since he was Black, is the sort of bigotry we simply shouldn’t pay to see in the papers (or provide ad revenue to online). Wonkette has a great summary of the article if you’re concerned that I’m misrepresenting its argument, which apparently Cohen has been parroting in one form or another for decades.

(The opening paragraph to Cohen’s piece is comparatively conciliatory, but still revealing. From here.)

The cast of This Week in Blackness has argued that it’s actually something good to have these unfortunately common sentiments made public, as a means of showing how racism has not been “solved”. While that’s obviously true, it seems important that this bigotry as a source of funds to the Post and as a rallying cry for bigots is still something to contest as acceptable for the Post to have publish. There’s a petition much like the (unsuccessful) one for Brooks to be fired, which I’m hoping the utterly unbelievable attitude Cohen’s displayed here might actually have repercussions for him.

It’s not just Trayvon

TW: George Zimmerman’s acquittal, racism, racist criminalization, police brutality

By now you’ve hopefully realized that a defining feature of the still on-going Zimmerman case (there’s always civil suits!) was how racist ideas about Black people create an image of them that’s inevitably, invariably criminal. This phenomenon has a terribly academic name, racist criminalization, that unfortunately rolls off the tongue about as easily as a brick does. In spite of its regrettable inaccessibility, it’s a really useful term for describing the fears that are now rippling out of this specific case and into the depiction of Black people’s reactions across the US to it.

As Jenée Desmond-Harris, herself Black, put it – many White people seem almost disappointed in the lack of a riot, since that would have confirmed every idea about Black people as violent, criminal, and unstable (never mind the context of yet another man getting away with murdering one of them). A lot of attention has been placed on a few sporadic instances of vandalism in Oakland, with minimal to no attention paid to more dangerous conditions which were typically created by police in response to protestors.

Below is one video account of a confrontation between protesters on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles and LAPD. Obviously, the mostly young and of color protesters weren’t the most polite as at :57 they begin to loudly greet the police with the chant “I believe that we will win” (that is, that Zimmerman will eventually be convicted). By 1:14 however, they’ve begun moving away from the police, only for a loud noise to interrupt the few remaining chants. At 1:30 it’s revealed that the noise was a police officer driving through the crowd on a police-issued motorcycle which elicited shouts of “be careful with that”. A confrontation ensues, resulting in the protesters shouting various slogans (including the Vietnam War era favorite, “how many kids have you killed today?” and the more modern “stop killer cops”) at the police.

By 3:51, shouts for people to move on from the confrontation had caused almost everyone in the crowd to look away from the police and move away from the area where they had been arguing. As they’re leaving, however, one officer, who appears to be the same one that initially drew the crowd with his reckless behavior, raced through the group and grabbed one particularly young, Black teenager. He pulls the teen away from the others who begin shouting at him to stop, and one of whom (at 4:04) pulls him out of the officer’s grip. You can hear the protesters at this point calling for someone (it’s unclear if they mean their fellow protesters or the police) to “back up”. The police move forward and begin firing “warning” shots at 4:14. The tape ends shortly after, once the protesters have fled out of range of the police amid calls to “keep marching”.

To be clear: there were multiple points where the crowd began moving away from the police – once before the incident with the motorcycle, after they decided that that incident wasn’t worth arguing over, and during the calls for people to “back up” after a police officer grabbed a young Black person. That indicates pretty strongly that the protesters, while clearly wanting to criticize the behavior of the police then and generally, also hoped to avoid a physical conflict. The police officers, on the other hand, indicated otherwise through their unprofessional endangerment of the protesters (first by using a motorcycle in the crowd, then by grabbing one protester with a nightstick in the other hand, and finally by using warning shots against a retreating group of protesters).

It’s important to hold on to those facts in the next coming days, if what coverage has happened so far is an indication. The narrative of Black people as violent criminals is an extremely established one.