I wanted to switch gears this week and talk about something other than navigating the disingenuousness of contemporary public discourse. Thought I’d maybe try my hand at something a little less depressing. But then along came all this rioting in Ferguson, MO, and I felt behooved to comment on it. As Social Matter’s resident Southern racist, it seemed like I’d be remiss not to.
You’re probably familiar with the gist of the story thus far. A young black guy named Michael Brown and a friend of his were stopped by the police on the way home from the convenience store or some such place. An altercation ensued. At some point, one of the guys allegedly grabbed for an officer’s gun. The officer maintained control of the firearm and used it shortly thereafter, killing Brown. The friend got away. As word of the shooting spread, the black community of Ferguson started rioting and looting, gutted a QT gas station and lit it on fire, shot at police, etc. etc.
I’m skimping on the details in part because they’re still kind of speculative at this stage. But primarily I’m skimping on the details because they’re almost entirely irrelevant to cause célèbres like this one. It won’t matter if it comes out that Brown really did grab the officer’s gun. Hell, it wouldn’t matter if it comes out that he was high out of his mind on coke and jumped on the hood of the patrol car and brandished a length of rebar and threatened the officer’s children. Wouldn’t matter at all.
(Just like it didn’t matter when it came out during trial—established by both forensic evidence and witness testimony—that Trayvon Martin was on top of George Zimmerman as Zimmerman fired the killing shot. That inconvenient little truth proved that, whatever else led up to the confrontation, the infamous and not-really-white “white Hispanic” killed Martin in justifiable self defense. But it did nothing to deter the jabbering heads of the MSM from characterizing Martin as an angelic and blameless victim. In fact, even now we’re hearing mentions of St. Martin in relation to Brown’s killing. As if a justifiable killing in Florida somehow makes a potentially justifiable killing in Missouri somehow more worthy of mass vandalism and theft. Layers upon layers of disingenuousness, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)
The narrative into which journalists, politicians, academics, and other professional liars will shoehorn this shooting doesn’t concern itself with pesky little considerations like what actually happened. It’s already established the plot:
Michael Brown was a gentle soul who was needlessly accosted by a racist police officer. In the ensuing fight, no doubt instigated by the racist hostility of the officer, Brown was mercilessly executed.
Such a shooting narrative is, of course, embedded within another, larger, even-more-facile narrative about the plight of black Americans:
The black community of America is no more violent or prone to crime than any other community (and if they are, it’s only because the legacy of slavery, segregation, white supremacy, etc. has forced them into intergenerational poverty and despair). Racist white police, nevertheless, profile blacks and subject them to completely unwarranted levels of surveillance, interference, and abuse.
That the first narrative has likely very little correspondence to reality and that the second narrative is an intentionally manipulative simplification thereof are beside the point. They serve the function they’re designed for. They establish the moral superiority of crime-infested, inner-city black ghettos over the white majority of the nation, no matter how comparatively law-abiding that majority may be. And they thus put the behavior of the black underclass beyond reproach in polite society. Michael Brown was an innocent killed for no reason. The community he was a part of is a collective of innocents persecuted for no reason. The driving force behind all of this is the irrational hatred and fear that white people have of people with black skin.
When you buy into that narrative, a bunch of thugs running around smashing windows and stealing sodas from the gas station aren’t engaging in rank, opportunistic, mob-mentality lawlessness. No. Their behavior is transmuted. They’re “grieving.” They’re “lashing out at injustice.” They’re performing a political protest of the noblest and most vital sort. Yes, that young man right there, stepping over the broken glass with two fistfuls of candy, the one with immaculately clean sneakers, Nike shorts hanging at about mid-thigh, and a T-shirt wrapped around his face. Behold a high practitioner of strategic civil disobedience! Behold your moral superior.
In the case of Brown and the Ferguson riots, just as in any other, the extent to which conservatives leave the progressive narrative unchallenged is the extent to which they’re beaten before they even start. The extent to which America was and is a diabolic juggernaut fueled by race hatred is the extent to which any of her actions, up to and including chastising rioters and looters, is morally suspect. Progressives start their inquiry into such events with the basic assumption of the sainthood of the victim group. When we leave those assumptions unchallenged, we lose all our rights to object to the actions of those victim groups, even if those actions include the pillaging of a major US city.
Before I sign off, though, allow me one disclaimer. I have no intention of giving modern law enforcement a pass. For all I know, Michael Brown was a tragic victim of a trigger-happy cop. Police are racking up such victims at in increasingly disturbing clip. And regardless it boils my blood to see police running around with assault rifles and camouflage uniforms, stepping out of APCs that a couple years ago were deployed in Iraq, looking for all the world like the face of martial law. I consider the ongoing militarization of American police to be a dangerous trend, more dangerous in fact than inner-city black criminality.
But even there the blacks-as-perennial-victims-of-white-racism narrative serves as nothing more than a hindrance, a red herring, and a distraction. It situates the antagonism between blacks and police as an effect of police militarization, rather than as one of many causes, which is where it ought to be situated. It encourages a misdiagnosis of police malfeasance. It obscures the facts.
What can I say? Layers upon layers. An internet columnist could sift through them week after week and never run out of distortions and untruths to unearth.
