The participants of the sacrifice, having entered into a separate and sacred ritual sphere and having themselves been transformed and identified with the gods, are required to act accordingly...to leave behind the ways of human beings. – Theologian Brian Smith
They were taunting the overwhelmingly black community, daring it to spread word of the grisly murder. Ten days later, in broad daylight, 20 seconds after arriving, with bystanders recording, St. Louis police pumped nine bullets into another young black man, Kajieme Powell. Soon, protests erupted nationwide with the common gesture of “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”, implying that one posed no threat that could give a cop an excuse to escalate violence.
Police in Minneapolis (Ferguson was hardly unique), wanted you to see the evidence of their crimes. In the age of instant publicity, these murders became increasingly, audaciously, proudly, brazenly, public affairs.
So we must ask: Does this pattern have a function? What is the purpose of public state violence? Such questions are not simply sociological, legal or political. Since they invite us to consider how our society functions, they are profoundly mythological. And in America, they usually have theological roots.
Yes, state violence is certainly intended to serve as a deterrent and a warning. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor, and it requires enforcers to control it. American policing is rooted in pre-Civil War slave patrols. Following that war, Southern police colluded with the Ku Klux Klan as covert enforcement arms of white supremacist state governments, according to Black Police Chief K.L. Williams.
But we mythologists need to look deeper. Ferguson reminds us that modern America continues to engage in ceremonies that we prefer to think of as part of humanity’s ancient past.
We are talking about human sacrifice.
Studies of the Aztecs and the Hawaiians reveal that sacrifice (“to make sacred”) always occurred within a religious context. Common components of the rituals included consecrated places, fire (symbolizing the deity to be propitiated) and (in the absence of large temples) a tree where the deed was performed. “The victim,” writes sociologist Orlando Patterson, “mediated between the sacred and the profane.” His sacrifice created a compact between the people and their deity, expiating their sins and reinforcing both their values and their identities.
Throughout history, when a community needs to resolve a fundamental social transition, human sacrifice becomes a common method. American Southern whites faced precisely such a period of acute liminal transition after the Civil War, and they performed regular rituals of human sacrifice into the 1930s and beyond.
René Girard argued that every society develops rituals to protect its members from their own potential violence, periodically finding a victim whose violent death will cure the community. Once it has identified him as the source of the trouble, they can violently rid themselves of the pollution. This action reconstitutes
…a true community, united in its hatred for one alone of its number…any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat.
The community achieves temporary unity and restored innocence by focusing its shadow upon the Other (usually accused of having the Dionysian qualities of sexuality or irrational violence) and projecting it outwards where all can safely view it. However, as in all addictive conditions, the need to be cleansed of the unacceptable feelings always continues to build up. And, as nationalism grows, so does the need to institutionalize such rituals. America in particular, due to its foundation in settler colonialism and Puritanism, has long been subjected to a series of moral panics and witch hunts.
It becomes a matter of religion. Situations that threaten the existing social order are perceived as symptoms of divine displeasure, which must be propitiated and purged through sacrifice. Lethal police violence, as we will see, could be seen as arbitrary behavior if it were not repeated regularly. Repetition turns it into ritual.
In a demythologized culture (Joseph Campbell’s term) such as ours, children are socialized by destroying their experience of primordial unity and instilling the basic polarities (black/white, male/female, good/evil, sacred/profane, etc) upon which it is built. But this process, begun in original sin, left tremendous reservoirs of guilt. In response, the collective unconscious dreamed up mythic images of the killing of the children and projected them onto a long series of scapegoats who, in their righteous suffering, might cleanse us of our sins.
Long before the Epstein revelations, child abuse was the universal substrate for scapegoating in America. Now, no longer legally allowed to engage in literal child-sacrifice, we do so through mistreatment, negligence, rape and institutionalized hopelessness. Girls eleven years old or younger make up 30% of rape victims, and 93% of juvenile sexual assault victims know their perpetrators. A quarter of American children live in poverty; over a million are homeless.
But aren’t adolescents troublemakers? Adults estimate that juveniles are responsible for 43% of violent crime. Sociologist Mike Males, however, reports that teenagers commit only 13%. Yet nearly half the states prosecute children as young as ten as if they were adults, and over 40% of adults favor executing teenage killers.
If polls include the word “white”, the vitriol drops considerably.
In fact, argues Males, “aging baby boomers” are responsible for most drug addiction and crime, and most of them are white. But adults can deny the extent and causes of our social problems by falling back upon the mythically-charged war against the children, easily substituting the code word “teenage” for “black” or “Latino.” Youths consistently receive prison sentences 60% longer than adults for the same crimes. When adults are sex crime victims, sentences are tougher than when the victims are children; and parents who abuse their children receive shorter sentences than strangers who do so.
Where does the anger go in a culture that eats its children? We identify persons whose mere existence questions our notions of racial purity and gender, and label them as child-molesters. If they are guilty, then we remain innocent. This relieves us of the “terror of history,” says historian Teofilo Ruiz: “… at the very root of our making into civilized people lies always the fact of child sacrifice.”
America persecutes minorities, gays, transgenders, women and youth. Three of these streams of bile converge on black, teenage girls (all four if they are gender-nonconforming). The “welfare queen” still bears the burden of the puritan tradition in which the legal system equated lack of chastity with untrustworthiness.
Long before our concern over child molesters, however, a uniquely American pattern of scapegoating existed: the grizzly murder of thousands of black men.
Part Two
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life. – Senator Orrin Hatch
Sociologist Calvin Hernton wrote in 1966 that the image of the black sexual beast was so extreme in the mind of the racist that he had to eradicate it, yet so powerful that he worshipped it:
In taking the Black man’s genitals, the hooded men in white are amputating that portion of themselves which they secretly consider vile, filthy, and most of all, inadequate…(they) hope to acquire the grotesque powers they have assigned to the Negro phallus, which they symbolically extol by the act of destroying it.
The threat of lynching kept both black men and white women immobile in the rigid southern hierarchies. It also kept poor blacks and whites from uniting politically. Patterson, however, wants us to look more deeply into the sacrificial nature of lynching. Of 5,000 cases reported (there were certainly more) between 1880 and 1930, 40% were clear examples of human sacrifice.
Lynchings were usually not spontaneous, quick mob-violence; they were carefully orchestrated events. All social classes participated, clergymen presided and Sunday was the favorite day. The site, chosen in advance and advertised in newspapers, was usually a tree in the center of the community. For millennia, trees had been sacred to pagans and then to Christians. Both Adam’s fall and Christ’s death were associated with tree-symbols. Christianity itself had been founded upon a human sacrifice.
If the mob couldn’t apprehend the accused man, they’d randomly select one of his kinsmen, torturing him for hours before burning him at the stake. Then they distributed his remains like religious relics, for his death and dismemberment had cleansed and unified them.
Theologian James Sellers argued that white supremacy was much more than an economic system. It was a religion, and therefore all threats to it took on mythic importance.
Segregation is a system of belief that would protect its devotees from…‘the powers of death and destruction’…It becomes a holy path, complete with commandments and priests...
The myth of the Old South, writes Patterson, stated that the presence of the Other, not slavery, had caused its shameful defeat. The ex-slave symbolized both violence and sin to an obsessed society. His skin invited a fusion of racial and religious symbolism. His “black” malignancy was to the body politic what Satan was to the soul. “The central ritual of...the Southern civil religion…was the human sacrifice of the lynch mob.”
From pre-war slave patrols to the present day, police – agents of the state with license to kill – have carried on this tradition, very often by deliberately hiring the worst of white supremacists:
Turning to Greek myth, we recall the scene in Euripides’ The Bacchae when the crazed Agave and her sisters dismember her son Pentheus:
…shrieking in triumph. One tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe. His ribs were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with blood...
And we remember the delight in detailed imagery taken by the Puritan writer who chronicled the massacre of 500 peaceful Pequot Indians in 1636:
…to see them thus frying in the fryer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice…
Two hundred years later, Herman Melville saw Indian hatred as so fundamentally American that he called it a “metaphysic”. Making the slaughter of the Native Americans the subtext to Moby Dick, he named his doomed ship the Pequod.
Like Pentheus, Dionysus was torn apart. As we approach the archetypal question of Dionysus in America, we confront the potentials for horror as well as ecstasy that lie within us all. We must first know who we have been – and still are – before we can imagine what we might someday be. In 1899, before torturing him to death, ten thousand Texans paraded their black victim on a carnival float, like the King of Fools, like Dionysus in the Anthesteriaprocessions,or like Christ at Calvary. Patterson writes, “…the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded…”
Two generations later, as the Founders had done in 1776, Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to unify northern liberals and southern conservatives. But he also had to maintain silence on race, or his coalition would disintegrate. Between 1882 and 1968, Southern politicians demonstrated their power by defeating over two hundred anti-lynching bills.In 1998, white supremacists dragged a black man to death behind their truck. In 2000, they hanged three Black men. Congress only declared lynching a hate crime in 2022.
Nearly alone in the world, America executes people, 80% of them minorities, and many of them die innocent. 200 Death Row inmates have been exonerated since 1972. Race, especially if the accused is black and the victim is white, is the overwhelmingly primary factor in death penalty decisions. “Today,” writes Patterson, “we no longer lynch in public rituals supervised by local clergymen. Instead, the state hires the hangman to do it.”
Part Three
Now, there’s a woman on my block She just sits there as the night grows still She says, “who’s going to take away his license to kill”? - Bob Dylan
Gradually, literal sacrifice became socially unacceptable. Legal executions – which had always been public events – went indoors after the Civil War. Displays of state cruelty were no longer considered fit for decent, Victorian folk to see. At the same time, however, lynching increased dramatically. Eventually, however, even Southern politicians acknowledged that the practice was embarrassing their region.
America found subtler means to quarantine its national shadow, especially since 1970, when the backlash against Civil Rights began in earnest. Mass incarceration is our symbolic underworld. With 5% of the world’s population, we have 25% of its prisoners, over half of them men of color. Well over 500,000 are employed in corrections, overseeing a prison population that has risen by 600%. Over 25,000 Americans dwell in solitary confinement, one third of whom, because of this treatment, will become psychotic.
The U.S. is the only democracy to disenfranchise felons, 2,000,000 of whom are black. This has utterly determined the course of recent history. The more blacks a state contains, the more likely it is to ban felons from voting. The average state disenfranchises 2.4% of its adult population but 8.4% of blacks. In 14 states, the share of blacks stripped of the vote exceeds 10%, and in five states it exceeds 20%. In Florida, it is close to 25%.
While 75% of whites register to vote, only 60% of blacks can. Prior to 2008, at least seven Republican senators owed their election to these laws. Had felons been allowed to vote in the 2000 election, Al Gore’s popular vote margin would have doubled to a million. If Florida had allowed ex-felons to vote, he would have carried the state by 30,000 votes and with it the presidency. You can find far more in Michelle Alexanders’ The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The myth of American innocence identifies young black men as inherently and irredeemably violent, regardless of contrary evidence. When such men show they can rise above the soul-killing economic conditions imposed upon them, the state intervenes to prove its accusations. For example, Southern California youth gangs have repeatedly crafted truces over the years, only to have them deliberately sabotaged by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (which harbors violent gangs of its own).
America has punished many scapegoats, from the Natives to the Chinese to Latinos to Moslems. But why are we periodically compelled to lynch only one of them? Again, we look to the Puritan foundations of culture. American religious and popular thinking have always been polarized along racial lines: civilized vs. primitive, abstinence vs. promiscuity and sobriety vs. intoxication. These stereotypes express the fundamental opposition between composure and impulsivity (mythologically, between Apollo and Dionysus). The worst of all sins to the Puritan was lack of self-control.
Even while similar percentages of whites and blacks engage in sex, drugs (actually, white youth are more likely to abuse hard drugs than black youth) and violence, all regularly consume images of blacks as more susceptible to such “vices.” This allows whites, wrote Ralph Ellison, “…to be at home in the vast unknown world of America.”
The process of “othering” is not logical. As with archetypes, when one pole of a stereotype is activated, so is its opposite. While they perceive blacks as unable to control their desires, large majorities of whites also accuse them of the Puritan’s second worst sin – laziness. Two thirds believe that the problems suffered by blacks are due to their preference for welfare over work. This is a particularly ignorant claim, writes Tim Wise, “…seeing as how five out of six blacks don’t receive any.” Generations of cynical politicians have appropriated both sides: Blacks (and Latinos) are lazy welfare cheats – and – they will take your jobs away.
The next step in scapegoating is manipulating the fear that those who can’t control their desires will tempt us to follow them, that we might resist temptation. The black man (like communists in the 1950s) is America’s Dionysus. Like the enigmatic outsider of The Bacchae, he comes from beyond the gates to liberate the women, leading them to the mountains to dance, free of patriarchal control. Or, like the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, he leads the children away to punish the adults.
The projection of American Dionysus combines scapegoating with envy of those who appear to be comfortable in their bodies and unrestrained in their desires. In a culture that elevates the dry, masculine, Apollonian virtues of spirit over the wet, feminine and Dionysian, blacks proudly use the word soul to define their music and culture. White youth understand the term instinctively. Patterson observes that soon after the 1960s, the image of the internal Other expanded to include aspects of which white America is now admittedly, nervously envious. This ultimate Dionysian symbol crosses boundaries and dissolves them: “The Afro-American male body – as superathlete, as irresistible entertainer…as sexual outlaw, as gangster.”
African-American images have become a “Dionysian counterweight” unstably balanced with the discipline required of those who must tolerate the conditions of the modern workplace. Dionysus has free reign in the inner cities, where the police keep him safely contained, “…until the instinctual need for release from the Apollonian pressures…calls for its tethered, darkened presence”.
Blacks provide much of the cultural container that allows white youth (who purchase 70% of hip-hop music) to act out mild rebellion between their suburban school years and the corporate life that awaits them. This is no initiation, merely a controlled transition into consumer lifestyles. All learn to suppress their innate grandiosity of soul and project it onto celebrities. Instead of living creative lives as involved citizens, we consume the cultural products, including this denatured Dionysus, that the media feeds to us. More often, however, we watch the Dionysian experience, like Pentheus in his tree spying on the maenads.
Assuming that blacks have a certain license to behave in ways the culture as a whole chooses to repress, whites project both fear and envy. While some blacks play along for profit, others, writes historian Gerald Early, resent “the entrapment of sensuality we are forced to wear as a mask for the white imagination.” Meanwhile, Hip-Hop subculture reflects the myth of the killing of the children. It displays self-confident anger in the lyrics, but depression in the clothing: baggy pants, drooping below the waste; everything pulled down; collapsed. Adolescents, especially minorities, are well aware of being forced to carry the weight of the world that their parents cannot.
From the perspective of those who bear the projection of American Dionysus, the subtext of most of our pressing domestic issues is race.
A million black children live in “extreme poverty” (defined in America’s cruel calculus as disposable annual income of less than $7,000 for a family of three). But typical welfare recipients are forced there by divorce or abandoned by unemployed fathers. The media-driven narrative of the black welfare cheat veils deindustrialization, tax policy, military waste and financial corruption.
Realistic estimates of poverty in America prior to the 2008 economic collapse and the resulting opioid epidemic ranged from forty to eighty million people, most of them white. But to admit the racial dimensions of the issue and the degree to which even poor whites have privilege is to call the foundations of our culture into question. Actually, the generosity of state welfare reform varies according to demography: those with overwhelmingly white populations have stronger safety nets and impose softer sanctions.
The reaction against the Civil Rights movement came to a (pre-Trumpus) head when Ronald Reagan inspired his followers with tales of black “welfare queens” in Cadillacs. Don’t these pictures evoke Dionysus, with his frenzied women and satyrs, parading through town, spreading their “values” like Mardi Gras beads? Aren’t they the essence of the sinful, fallen life to the puritanical, masculine mind – and aren’t they tantalizing? What if self-control didn’t guarantee redemption? What if “they” really are happier?
Curiously, whites project onto blacks and browns exactly what the heritage of discrimination ensures that they don’t have: power and influence. Lurid headlines in the early 1990s created a brief moral panic concerning “superpredators” who’d kill for basketball shoes. In fact, blacks commit only a quarter of all violent crimes, and whites are far more likely to be assaulted by other whitesthan by blacks. But racialized fear trumps common sense, and politicians continue to profit by promising, like Pentheus, to lock Dionysus up. The comparison is quite appropriate. Seven hundred years before Christ (another scapegoat), the Greeks were already telling stories of how the Titans, enemies of the Olympians, had dismembered Dionysus. Even then, the god of misrule and irrationality was too dangerous to be accepted into the city, or the mind.
The frenzy of prison construction continues even as national crime rates drop. Over 2,000 men are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were juveniles. Black youths receive life without parole sentences at a rate 10 times that of white youths.
Whites experience a unique ebb-and-flow of fear and denial, removing their children from local schools and moving away when neighborhoods become as little as 8% black. Although the streets are safer than a generation ago, whites often concede urban space to the Other, preferring to watch easy solutions in urban crime dramas or to bypass poor neighborhoods en route to suburban malls and sports arenas.
The economy, however, requires the presence of the Other, to perform service and agriculture work that whites refuse to do, as well as to justify its massive corrections industry and the perversely wasteful “War on Drugs.” And, as we saw in Ferguson, countless cash-strapped cities with large minority populations and white police forces have long been collecting up to 50% of their operating budgets through racially-profiled traffic stops. Othering is Big Business.
But What About Ferguson?
Part Four
What I really found unspeakable about the man (Ronald Reagan) was his contempt, his brutal contempt, for the poor. – James Baldwin
As Patterson suggested, we no longer lynch in public rituals supervised by clergymen. But this civilized approach creates two problems. One: modern capital cases take years, from crime to execution. Two: Since few people observe the killing, it creates no mass deterrence.
Human sacrifice must be a public spectacle, or it has no value. Whether at seventeenth-century Protestant witch hangings or at earlier Catholic auto-de-fe burnings at the stake, attendance by everyone in the community was required. All were to share in the sacrament, all shared in the guilt, and all were expiated by the murder.
So I am suggesting that America has tacitly given police (and now, ICE and Boder Patrol agents) the privilege to carry out these rituals – approximately five times a week, especially before videotaping witnesses – with practically no interference from the courts. And the executioners typically go free, often despite lengthy records of misconduct, because they are agents of the state:
Since 1967 (the height of Black rebellion), and especially since 2001 (the beginning of the War on Terror), the doctrine of Qualified Immunity has protected them from prosecution or lawsuits unless they are proven to have violated civil or constitutional rights, or acted “outside of their scope of authority”.
Despite public pressure, only four states have banned qualified immunity.
And what kind of people are cops? The question, of course, proposes an absurd generality. But we are talking about a society whose myths are collapsing, myths that have been dysfunctional for a long time. And this means that all our institutions – cultural, religious, educational, political, media, social welfare, foreign policy and the penal and l justice systems – have also been dysfunctional, or at least functioning in the perverted manner for which they were designed.
Policing is the worst example. A system which under ideal, indigenous or archetypal conditions could initiate men into the sacred archetype of the Warrior, a potential that could actually bring out the best in such men, has functioned under capitalism and white supremacy to bring out the very worst. Urban policing in America began in the Southern slave patrols, evolved to control the working classes and achieved its ultimate function to keep people of color segregated.
Not that good men don’t seek careers in law enforcement. The problem is that modern society offers few roll models or occupations – firefighting, emergency medicine and the Coast Guard – for those who are called to embody the archetype of one who would protect others and serve a transpersonal cause. As a result, the system is designed to take idealistic young people and spit out killers. Chief K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country, argues:
On any given day, in any police department, 15% of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70% could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons...And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, “I can’t believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!”
Police are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this...Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty...Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.
In some places, cops bend the tips of their badges as a sign of honor (or as an initiatory gang symbol) when they kill a civilian.
...no officer has ever come forward with evidence faulting another officer – and I have tried to find one. I’ve asked in depositions repeatedly: “Have you ever reported a fellow officer for misconduct?” The answer is uniformly “No,” even if the NYPD Patrol Guide – not to mention federal civil rights law – requires it.
Since even a single example of proven police brutality can threaten an entire system, Buffalo cop Cariol Horne was fired for stopping a white officer from choking a handcuffed Black man. The careers of Baltimore copsMichael Wood Jr. and Joe Crystal ended after they criticized brutality and corruption in their ranks. A group of 10 former recruits claims that the Austin, Texas PD trains police to view community members as the enemy and not as their fellow citizens. The prosecution of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd on camera was the rare exception that couldn’t be ignored..
The NYPD has conducted literally millions of stop-and-frisks, nearly 700,000 in 2011 alone, mostly of people of color, many leading to violent police misconduct. When a New York State Senator, himself a former cop, challenged Commissioner Ray Kelly on the practice, he was told that the racial targeting was intentional, because the goal was to “instill fear in them, every time they leave their home, that they could be stopped by the police”.
While punishment is rare, civil penalties are common, but taxpayers pay the settlements. In some places, we pay three times for abusive officers: once, for their salaries; next, for settlements; and third, through payments into police “defense” funds. These settlements remove substantial incentives against misconduct. And they can be costly. In one 15-year period the NYPD paid out over $1 billion in settlements. In Minneapolis, writes John Stoehr,
...the police department forces the city’s government to extract wealth from residents to pay for the crimes of individual police officers. In a very real sense, the militarized police demand residents pay ransom...Consider the pattern. Cop kills Black person. Black person’s family seeks justice...families usually settle for civil damages. Cities don’t have the money, so they sell municipal bonds. Bonds are bought by Wall Street bankers. Cities must raise revenues –taxes – not only to pay for civil damages but to pay the bankers...You might complain, but that might incur the wrath of police unions, who then threaten to stop enforcing the law if you don’t permit them free reign to do whatever they want.
Solutions to both financial and moral issues (short of complete de-funding) include:
1 – Removing qualified immunity.
2 – Taking settlements from police budgets or pension funds rather than from municipal funds and requiring malpractice insurance.
3 – Abolishing civil asset forfeiture(citizens lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined).
A systemic focus doesn’t let individual killers and abusers off the hook. But it does recognize how even those individuals are shaped and misshapen by the machinery of which they are a part.
Pundits praised Obama’s “post-racial” America. Indeed, I have argued here, here and here that corporate gatekeepers carefully vetted him for his reliability long before he sought the presidency. His specific mission was to revive the myth of innocence and restore faith in government while giving the police and the military freedom to act as they saw fit. Even as individual blacks prospered and crime decreased, those same pundits manipulated fear of terrorism, immigrants and people of color. Public police murders of unarmed black men – in many cases, documented with their hands raised – continued.
As I wrote earlier, when a community confronts a period of profound change, human sacrifice becomes its method. Certainly our current age – with women and gays continuing to question conventional masculinity; as men are rapidly losing financial security; as immigrants question our notions of who we are;as the political process becomes increasingly performative; as the American dream is revealed as a nightmare – qualifies. Hence the search for scapegoats.
The 1960s chant We Shall Overcome spoke to a future when segregation and discrimination would be eliminated. It was intended to shame America into living up to its promise. Indeed, the Civil Rights movement did procure its initial objectives. Legal discrimination was abolished and middle-class Blacks entered society’s mainstream.
But America missed the opportunity to address the systemic foundations of the myth of Innocence. Rather than lancing the canker of racism, it smoothed it over with superficial reforms. As Michael Ventura wrote, the centuries-old pressure on the white psyche remained: the alienation from the body, the condemnation of the feminine, the rape of the natural world, the worship of celebrities, religious fundamentalism, the dumbing-down of our innate intelligence and indigenous souls. All this remained, and the pressure naturally sought an outlet in our willingness to allow free reign to those would embody the darkest of our unacknowledged desires, the violent retribution against the Others of the world (both domestically and in Palestine). Naturally, racism resurfaced in Ronald Reagan’s “brutal contempt for the poor,” in Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform,” in George Bush’s neglect of Hurricane Katrina survivors and in Obama’s “Post-racial America.” Now, We Shall Overcome has been reduced to a parody, a photo-op for Congressional clowns.
Hands Up – Don’t shoot, on the other hand, spoke to the core of the issue.
Blacks and Browns have always known that police violence has nothing to do with preventing crime, that the police have often been little more than an occupation force intended to keep the Other inside the ghettos. As Noam Chomsky wrote, Blacks were “herded into concentration camps, which we…call ‘cities.’” Now, the Ferguson activists were teaching the nation that gratuitous cruelty, the murder of the unarmed – and non-threatening – victim, for all to see on You-Tube was precisely the point.
This is how America practices human sacrifice. We no longer have Aztec temples or lynching trees with hundreds of spectators, but now the high priests of sacrifice can perform their ceremonies before millions. The executioners don’t require our physical presence. But who can look away? Cornel West speaks of “Niggerization,” which
…is neither simply the dishonoring and devaluing of black people nor solely the economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement of them. It is also the wholesale attempt to impede democratization – to turn potential citizens into intimidated, fearful, and helpless subjects.
But Anusha Kedhar finds deeper meaning in the gesture:
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!” is not just voiced. It is also embodied. Contained within the phrase is both a plea not to shoot, as well as the bodily imperative to lift one’s hands up...The bodily act...takes those same bodies that are surveilled, disciplined, controlled, and killed and infuses them with power and a voice. It resurrects those dead bodies left lying in the street, and asks us, compels us to confront the alive-ness of the black body as a force of power and resistance.
PART FIVE: Conclusions
...police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality... - Alex Vitale
We ask incredulously, innocently, again: How often do police shoot unarmed black people? While the government keeps no statistics, the consensus is that the true number averages over a thousand/year (the UK average is three/year).
Remarkably, some still claim that the issue is crime, not race. But there are multiple examples of white men pointing guns at police and not being shot. Tim Wise writes:
Blacks suffer over five times as many non-fatal injuries per capita from the police as white people do. Black youth are six times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated for a first offense, even when their crimes are identical. Blacks are four times more likely than whites to be arrested for a marijuana possession offense, even though usage rates are identical. Police are almost twice as likely to stop and search black motorists as opposed to whites, even though whites are nearly 60% more likely to have illegal contraband on them. Wise continues:
...white law enforcement officers are still behaving as if the ruling in Dred Scott (1857) – that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect” – were still operative…When a white man can shoot a police officer and kill him because he thought the officer (who was executing a no-knock drug raid) might be a burglar, and not face charges, but a black man who does the very same thing in the very same state is charged with multiple felonies, what do we call it if not a sign of apartheid justice in America?
In my liberal, minority-led city of Oakland, of 45 “officer-involved shootings” between 2004 and 2008, 37 of those shot were black.None were white. One-third died. Although weapons were not found in 40% of cases, no officers were charged. Nationwide, in 2012, over 400 such deaths were ruled as “justified homicides.” What police do accomplish is meeting arrest and ticketing quotas:
It is not 1965 anymore. In large swaths of the nation, at least among older whites – those most susceptible to fear-mongering – it is no longer possible to shame them into living up to America’s ideals. Conservatives have once again convinced millions to identify as “white” rather than as workers who have common cause with people of color. A half century of shock-jocks, Fox News, Rambo superheroes, economic depression, Democratic collusion, racist televangelists and media caricatures of dark-skinned criminals have given them permission to flaunt their worst impulses.
It wasn’t long before anti-racist activists gave up on the “Hands up, don’t shoot” theme because it had, quite simply, failed to generate a moral response from the police, the media or the broader society. The more objective and provocative “Black Lives Matter” movement was born, and I needn’t remind you of the ignorant responses it generated. As I wrote this essay yet another video surfaced of six NYPD officers beating an unarmed Latino man.
Can we speak of “guilty pleasures?” Is it possible that, as Americans did in 1890 when they flocked to public lynchings, we now enjoy watching videos of cops shooting and beating people of color?
This returns us to the question of white privilege. Half of all whites believe that blacks enjoy economic parity with them, 61% say blacks have equal or better access to health care than the average white, and 85% say that blacks have just as good a chance as whites to get any housing they can afford – and all this despite the contrary views held by the vast majority of blacks. This means that whites are privileged to say to blacks, in effect, “I know your reality better than you do.”
This, in our demythologized world, is the primary definition and function of myth: stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to remind us – to reassure us and convince us despite our mounting doubt – of who we are.
The militarization of the police and ICE is clearly related to the bogus wars on drugs and “terror”. In 1980 tactical police units (SWAT teams) were deployed 3,000 times. Now this happens 50,000 times per year, or 150 times per day. Nearly 90% of American cities with populations above 50,000 have them, but so do 90% of forces in small-to-medium size cities. Most SWAT teams are deployed to serve routine drug-related warrants on private homes, using military equipment, often with disastrous consequences.
This is more than the result of mass paranoia; it’s old-fashioned, pork-barrel corruption. The National Database of Critical Terrorist Targets, established after 9/11, grew to over 300,000 localities, and Indiana grabbed more (over 9,000!) than California and New York combined. The department’s database of “vulnerable critical infrastructure and key resources” includes amusement parks, ice cream parlors, a petting zoo, a popcorn factory and a kangaroo conservation center.
The logic is simple: arms merchants spend lavishly on politicians, who terrorize the public about The Other (both domestic and foreign) and then vote for bloated miliary budgets. The military gives away outdated but still quite lethal equipment to local cops and foreign authoritarians and then demands newer stuff, to be justified by newer threats.
...nearly every major police agency has traveled to Israel for lessons in occupation enforcement...Israeli forces and U.S. police departments are so entrenched that the NYPD has opened a branch in Tel Aviv.
While some of us are horrified to hear of the latest outrage, others are unified in their denial. To deny something is to declare it taboo, which means “too sacred to mention.” The sacred is a secret, and this is the secret: Americans are unified in their fear of the evil Other, and we regularly declare our allegiance to a culture whose primary religious ritual is human sacrifice. The Other is sacred because he – briefly – takes our sins away. So far, for white people, the sacrifice – which, ironically, made Michael Brown sacred – has been successful.
Do Black lives really matter? They matter to the extent that Black people still participate in the economy of production and consumption. They matter to the penal-industrial-security-weapons complex. They matter to politicians who can always play the race card. They matter in terms of the distraction that Black entertainers and athletes offer to millions of couch potatoes. But mostly, Black lives matter as the Other whom America is now proudly, publicly offering up as a sacrifice so that it may continue avoiding the ultimate confrontation with itself. The great irony, of course, is that such an event, painful as it will be, can be the sweetest and most liberating of healings for everyone. Back in 1963, Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed unless it is faced”.
We Shall Overcome, sang Martin Luther King that same year, adding that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” May it be so. May it happen nonviolently. May it still be possible to shame America into living up to its ideals. But it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better.
As Black militant Ramona Johnson Africa says, Down with this rotten-ass system!
