Brown, Garner, et. al. post #3: If it's all about power, why are we talking about race?

So we've established now that the arguments surrounding the logistics of the cases - the condemnations of Brown and, to a lesser extent, Garner, and the lack of impeachment of the police officers who killed them - are actually arguments about power.  But this does leave alone those arguments about race that get made, where the Right says race isn't a part of it, and the Left says it is, and people roll out statistics to back up their claims either way.  I certainly believe the statistics of the Left more than the Right, but we believe the statistics we want to believe, so let's ignore them for a moment...

We need to understand that the argument about power is deeper than simply the cause of fear via abuse.  Power is wielded constantly by the powerful to help maintain that power.

This is something inherently understood by most people.  We can all imagine a corporate CEO who wheels and deals with a board of directors to make sure s/he keeps his/her job when the company seems to be doing badly.  We can also imagine politicians who ignore threats from independent candidates to focus on candidates from their rival political parties, thereby showing the voting populace that only the two parties' candidates are legitimate.  We can imagine easily both parties being owned by financial interests, as Gore Vidal famously said:

I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.

It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican. - See more at: http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0806#sthash.ndT4BMLU.dpuf

Regardless of whether you vote Democrat or Republican, you're always voting in favor of big corporations.  The specific corporations these parties support are somewhat irrelevant.  People vote based on non-corporate decisions - such as fears over Ebola and terrorism, fears about climate change, fears about abortion and homosexuality (either for or against), but the first thing a party does when it comes into power is to change laws in favor of their big corporate donors.  Need proof?  Look at the tax bills that passed the senate and house, which rolled back the consumer protections of Dodd-Frank we put in place after the economic crash of 2008.  Banks didn't want those changes, so they funded people who would change them. 

By keeping the conversation merely two-sided, these parties set up a false dichotomy that causes conversations outside of the dichotomy to become irrelevant.  That is, they take what ideally should be a false premise - that a third party candidate cannot be elected - and then they throw money into arguments with each other and ignore outside arguments, which prevents the third party candidate from getting valid and free attention that the inside-party candidates get, and they force the premise to be true as a result.  And we, the voters, believe their premise and vote for the parties accordingly.  By naming ourselves as "Republican" or "Democrat," we identify more and more with their policies, and defend them when they do things we didn't want.

This is how power maintains itself - by focusing conversations in such a way is to invalidate the non-powerful.

Racism is nothing if not a tool of the powerful.  Racism is, in essence, a way of separating "self" and "other."  For white Americans like myself - and we are still the majority - racism means promoting our power over that of other races, and assuming that those races are trying to actively usurp or derail that power.  We see this in obscure ways...

In the case of Garner, we see a fight between corporate and individual power.  The corporation has a vested interest in maintaining sales, and so it packages cigarettes in bulk for sale.  Individuals who cannot afford a full pack, but who are nonetheless addicted, must either suffer through that addiction or save enough for a pack.  There is no way to casually smoke.  Corporate power, already made powerful by way of a huge mountain of cash, is codified into the law by making the selling of individual cigarettes illegal.  There is no essential crime behind the selling of loose cigs - that is, there is nothing different between the selling of an individual cigarette and a pack of cigarettes beyond three things - the surgeon general's warning, the age of the purchaser, and the protection of the corporation.  Since the law doesn't specify that loose cigs can be sold if the surgeon general's warning is provided, and if the age of the purchaser is verified, we can assume that the law is really about the third issue. In this way, the corporation has greater protection under the law than the individual.

And, since poverty is still largely racial - that is, it affects black people more than white people - and poverty is a large driver behind the need to purchase loose cigs, we can also see how the law protects the rich more than the poor and whites more than blacks.

We see this repeated throughout society across all laws, but especially drug laws.  For some statistics, I'll turn to an admittedly-biased source - but, since they're statistics, they should be fairly safe from bias (the takeaway from them might not be, but let's limit that at the moment):

African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense. (source)

So, our entire criminal justice system is slanted heavily against blacks. We already know this.

We also know that police systems are nothing if not power systems - that is, they are the enforcement arm, at the local level, of the state power structure.  Because power systems have a need to continue maintaining power, they also have a vested interest in protecting members of the power system who abuse that power (See parts 1 & 2 of this article for more info on that).  And, because power systems were established by mostly white people, they reflect white values of power, which largely inhibit black power by way of making illegal things that are available to black people and taking away systems that might change that balance of power (such as public schooling and public assistance for college, which have both been declining). 

That all explains why blacks are the victims of power itself more, but is that true of police power?

Well, take a look back at an article I wrote in August.  There, I talk about the perception of "thuggery" and link to an article that reveals that blacks are killed by police at an alarming rate.  That perception of thuggery, I think, is the key to why this might be the case. 

We have a cultural perception that blacks are more likely to be criminals than other races.  It's actually true, sadly.  Violent crime is where that distinction is most marked, as the number of black people who commit murder each year is 6 times higher, per capita, than whites (source).  But this is a problem of perception - while blacks do commit more murders than whites, the rate is still "only" 20 per every 100,000 people - meaning that 99.9998% of all blacks in America are not murderers.

This cultural perception is a two-part problem: first, it started with perceptions way back in slavery times that whites used to reinforce their feelings of superiority over their slaves, a kind of self-created authority allowing them to keep slaves without violating their morals; second, it got reflected in the media.  See, something "we all know" is that the media is a fear-mongering propaganda machine, overemphasizing dangers we face ostensibly as a way of informing us of how to protect ourselves, while at the same time using that fear to make obscene profits.  The logic of the news media is now circular - it will only report on stories people want to watch, but people only want to watch stories that agree with the things they already believe, and they already believe those things because they have seen them on the news.  In such a way, it consistently reinforces its own beliefs of racial power, including ideas of black violence and criminality. 


So, with the perception of criminality in place, police naturally and subconsciously react to it.  It's impossible not to.  It's the natural result of power.

Power is always racist.

Conceid

Imagine, if you will, that you're a straight man.  It's easy for me to imagine, of course, and there's a reasonably good chance (somewhere around 43%) that it'll be somewhat natural for you to imagine as well. 

As a straight man, you know one very important thing about sexuality: women are hot.  Not all women, necessarily, but many.  There are aspects that you might use to identify a woman that you would also identify as being attractive to you: breasts, slender legs, diminutive features when compared to an adult man, long hair, large eyes, high cheekbones, red lips or cheeks, and so on.  Your specific definition might be unique to you (perhaps you like women with mohawks, or women who've had amputations; I don't know), but you'll likely identify with several "standard" ideas of what's attractive in a woman.  We agree so well on these that scientists have produced ideal ratios of attractiveness (If you measure the distance from the top of a woman's head to the bottom, the distance between her eyes and lips should be 36% of that first distance for optimal attractiveness; similarly the distance between eyes is 46% of total width - Link).

It's easy, as a straight man, to see what other straight men see in a beautiful woman.  It is also easy to understand what a gay woman might see in another woman.  It is quite easy for us to understand homosexuality in women, even if we might dislike it for fear of its extracting women from the pool of eligible mates (yes, that's how I actually thought back in my older, dumber days).

But homosexuality in males is another matter.  It's difficult for a straight man to see another man as sexually attractive, even if the other man is physically attractive - that is, I can readily admit to the physical attractiveness of your Brad Pitts and George Clooneys of the world, but difficult if not impossible to translate that understanding into an understanding of someone's sexual desire for them. 

As a result, we deny their physical sexuality by virtue of their attractiveness, and ascribe sexuality to other factors - fame, money, prestige, strength, masculinity, and so on.  We assume that a woman who is interested in them must be interested in them for one of those reasons (aka, "gold diggers") rather than physical attractiveness. 

We take this even further when trying to understand homosexual men's attraction to another man, and assume either femininity on the part of the attractee - that is, the more masculine male in the relationship is attracted to the more feminine male because of his femininity; the more feminine male is projecting his own femininity by searching for a more masculine partner.  (This is the assumption behind the "pitcher and catcher" cliche.)  When seeing a gay man alone, who does not possess any obvious (read: stereotypical) gay traits, we may search for other causes, such as a missing father figure (the need for non-sexual male bonding being mistaken for sexual male bonding). 

Regardless, the reason can never be simple physical attraction.

And, as you can hopefully see, these are exactly the points we all generally agree with - that is, unless we know we have things incorrect and have investigated them to draw them out, we take these points at face value, and they drive a lot of our conversations about each other.

Which is a backwards way of saying that everything we think about sexuality and what is attractive and what assigned roles people are filling within this complex story are all directly derived from that initial premise: that the actor and subject creating these definitions is a straight male.