On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook:
We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy of taking up arms against the police] and preparing for something more violent.
I was hesitant to make such a statement here. The experience of writing and publishing a post about Dallas, as the event was unfolding, which was read and criticized by many as an endorsement or call for violence—I’ll admit that made me somewhat gun-shy about saying anything in this volatile situation that could be misconstrued.
But now that we’ve witnessed a second killing of police officers—this time in Baton Rouge, where three policemen were shot dead by an African American veteran, who served in Iraq and showed some signs of mental illness—it may be time to face the fact that we are probably going to see more of this type of violence in the coming weeks and months. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote last week after Micah Johnson killed the police officers in Dallas:
There is no shortcut out. Sanctimonious cries of nonviolence will not help. “Retraining” can only do so much. Until we move to the broader question of policy, we can expect to see Walter Scotts and Freddie Grays with some regularity. And the extent to which we are tolerant of the possibility of more Walter Scotts and Freddie Grays is the extent to which we are tolerant of the possibility of more Micah Xavier Johnsons.
If Coates is right, it may be time to ask, what’s going on?
The success of non-violence during the civil rights movement is the lynchpin of contemporary American liberalism: its invocation has become a way of both condemning racism and reaffirming the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly of violence. But the thing about the tactic of non-violent resistance as developed from the 1920s through the 1960s was that its function was to intensify and thereby publicize the brutality of systems that often brutalized out of national view. Publicity would lead to policy change.
To the extent that the current civil right crisis has been triggered by widely-disseminated videos of the daily execution of African-Americans by police officers, it’s not at all clear what role non-violent tactics have to play in the resolution of the crisis. The tactical function of non-violent resistance has already been fulfilled — the brutality is intense and public. Yet policy has not changed accordingly. What else is non-violent resistance supposed to accomplish?
It’s not a rhetorical question. I may definitely be missing something, but am just troubled by the persistence of analogies to previous civil rights struggles that don’t seem to make sense in this context.
As I pointed out to Jeremy at the time, I think there are (and were) other functions of non-violence, one of them being to create a sense of chaos and ungovernability. But Jeremy’s point still stands, and has seemed especially salient these past few weeks.
Consider, for example, this news from May 2015:
The United States was slammed over its rights record Monday at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, with member nations criticizing the country for police violence and racial discrimination, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the continued use of the death penalty.
For 3 1/2 hours last year, delegates from 117 countries repeatedly criticized the US for its record of police brutality against people of color.
Did you know that? I certainly didn’t, and that’s the point. The news came and went with barely a notice or conversation in the US.
Once upon a time, US elites were terrified of this kind of international response to America’s domestic ills. The Civil Rights Movement shrewdly exploited that fear through its nonviolent tactics. Nonviolence, as Jeremy reminds us, derived part of its power from its ability to provoke racist state and non-state violence. Activists knew that violence would embarrass US elites on the international stage.
Martin Luther King certainly did; he deployed that international stage to great effect in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail:
The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.
But nowadays, American elites don’t fear that international response. Hence, the yawn of indifference in response to that news from last year. And that has divested nonviolence of one of its critical props. As Jeremy, again, reminds us.
It would be wrong to say that the violence we’ve seen these past few weeks is evidence of any widespread frustration with the failures of nonviolence. Black Lives Matter is an avowedly nonviolent movement, and as Coates recently claimed on the Brian Lehrer Show, it has been enormously successful in raising public consciousness around the issue of police violence. Action and changes in public policy have been slow in coming, of course, but no social movement has ever been able to execute a fundamental turnaround in state policy quickly. It’s simply too soon to issue any verdicts on the success or failure of Black Lives Matter and nonviolence more generally.
Still, Gavin Long, the man who killed the police in Baton Rouge, had this to say in a video:
One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors, have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It doesn’t — it has never worked and it never will. You got to fight back. That’s the only way that a bully knows to quit.
You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did. That’s what Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to sacrifice.
Revenge
But there may be another way to think about these murders of the police.
Over the last few days, I’ve been wondering how many of these killings are inspired by a desire for revenge.
Revenge isn’t something that figures much in social or political theory. To the extent that it does, it’s often depicted as a pre-political or psychological motivation, something that precedes the creation of a formal state apparatus of crime and punishment.
That’s certainly how it works in Aeschylus’s Oresteia: the characters wander around blindly, seeking retribution and revenge, until finally, at the end of the trilogy, we see the apotheosis of revenge, in the form of the Furies, and the creation of the rule of law, which is supposed to put an end to the never-ending cycle of revenge.
But what happens when the rule of law no longer serves the cause of justice, when murder goes unpunished, when revolutionary politics does not seem in the offing, when the “appeal to heaven” that Locke spoke of cannot be heard because it isn’t made? Do we see a reversion to revenge, the return of the repressed?
However we understand these killings, it’s clear that the combination of well-trained veterans and persistent racial injustice and brutality in our criminal justice system will continue to have toxic effects.
Empire
I don’t think we can overestimate the impact of America’s wars in this regard. Not merely because fighting can be a traumatic experience, leaving soldiers with all manner of mental illness. Not merely because soldiers learn fighting skills abroad that they can then deploy at home (Long’s shootings were described as a well-executed “ambush“). And not even because the weapons the police use in response, like the infamous “robot bomb” in Dallas, are often first tried out by the military abroad.
The Black Freedom struggles of the second half of the twentieth century—everything from the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement to organized and armed movements of self-defense—were all framed against the backdrop of the Second World War, the ultimate just war fought on behalf of an organized and organizing ideal of justice. It’s hard not to see the war’s inflections of justice in the various speeches and organized movements for Black Freedom after the war.
But now we are living in the shadow of the War on Terror. A war that was prompted by Osama bin Laden’s own call for revenge, and continued by the US’s answering cry of vengeance. And so we get the kinds of murders and murderers we’ve seen in these past weeks: driven perhaps by vengeance, and like the franchises of Al Qaida and now ISIL, freelance, entrepreneurial, and inflected by an unsteady combination of psychopathology, power politics, and disorganization.
If empire, as Hannah Arendt once noted, is “the only school of character in modern politics,” we may be seeing here the kind of education our veterans are getting, not only when they fight wars abroad, but when they come back to confront what is now being called—by today’s Sheriff Clark no less (you can’t make this up)—*an anarchic and episodic “civil war” at home, between the police and African Americans.
Update (July 19, 10:30 am)
I just found out, via this report from Christian Lorentzen on the RNC Convention, that Sheriff Clark, the author of the piece I linked to above, is African-American. My original comment (and the reference to the Sheriff Clark from the 1960s) now seems inappropriate; hence the strike-through.