Tim Wise's Blog, page 11

Far More Than Anecdote: Quantifying Racism and White Privilege in the Criminal Justice System

“Personal anecdotes don’t prove anything. The justice system isn’t racist. Black people are arrested more often because they commit more crime. Period. End of story.”

So read the message in my inbox this morning, sent by someone who had happened across my essay about Ferguson, the grand jury decision in the Darren Wilson case, and the history of police misconduct in black communities. To the writer of said missive, that history didn’t matter; even if true, in his mind it was no longer relevant—a trifle of an earlier less enlightened era when compared to the present. Yes, racism may once have plagued the nation’s legal apparatus and those charged with enforcing its rules, but today if black youth die at the hands of police or find themselves in jail or stopped and searched on the streets, it is either the result of their own wrongdoing, or the wrongdoing of others like them. To the extent crime rates are higher in black communities than white ones, according to this logic, any and all black people (especially males) will simply have to accept the possibility that regardless of their own criminality or lack thereof, they may be subjected to suspicion, profiling, search, harassment, even violence at the hands of the cops. Life as a walking contagion is simply the price that must be paid for wearing the epidermal uniform of the team with the higher rate of offending. Innocent until proven guilty, on this rendering, is but a theoretical contrivance with no applicability to those who are dark; a legal standard meant for show, and for no more serious reason than that. Because of the odds represented by the y-axis on some social science graph, the black people represented on the x-axis can be stripped of their humanity and reduced to walking actuarial tables.

This is America. Welcome to it.

I suppose that at some abstract level, such statistical discrimination—simply comparing crime rates to arrest rates and deciding there is no real unfairness operating—may make mathematical sense. And yet, there are still two significant problems with such an analysis, both of which demonstrate quite splendidly why we do not, as a general rule, leave matters of social morality to mathematicians. First, this kind of argument ignores the inherent injustice of using aggregate data to justify mistreatment of individuals who are not represented by that data. In short, even if black crime rates are disproportionate in certain categories, there will be millions of individual African Americans (indeed a majority of them) who are not criminals. To consign millions of innocent people to potential mistreatment because of the actions of a clear minority of one’s group—however statistically disproportionate that minority may still be—is intrinsically unfair. And second, such an analysis is highly selective. The data one chooses to examine (and to ignore) when making such a case as this is instructive.

So on the one hand it is true that the arrest rates for the most serious offenses—murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery—do closely mirror the offending rates as reported by victims to the Bureau of Justice Statistics each year in the annual crime victimization surveys. There is no disputing that rates of offending in these categories are racially imbalanced, with African Americans committing these crimes at higher rates than whites. Don’t misunderstand: this fact still doesn’t justify generalized suspicion of black folks; after all, the percentage of blacks committing these crimes each year is still a small minority of all black folks in a given community. But so far as this argument goes, the data doesn’t lie: rates of arrest and incarceration for crimes such as these are racially-imbalanced less for reasons of racial bias and more because African Americans commit these crimes at higher rates; not because they are black of course, but because these crimes are highly correlated with various socioeconomic conditions disproportionately experienced by black folks in America.

And yet, the higher black offending rate for these crimes hardly acquits the justice system of the charge of racial bias. First, because, as already noted, for individuals who are innocent of wrongdoing to be suspected of criminality because of the actions of entirely different black people is to experience racialized unfairness, no matter what the larger data says. And second, because unequal treatment can still enter into the system for other, lesser offenses. And indeed, it is there—especially regarding the so-called war on drugs—where disparities have been the most apparent.

As I noted in a second essay following the grand jury decision, there are millions of us—myself very much included—who have broken an assortment of laws, and in particular those related to drugs, without worrying about arrest, prosecution or incarceration. Indeed, for most whites our drug use is entirely risk-free. We are not the ones suspected of possessing or using narcotics (even though whites use drugs at rates that are equal to or even higher than for people of color), and so we can avoid detection and punishment, irrespective of our behaviors. This is among the largest categories of white privilege—a concept that most whites still reject, no matter the clear and convincing evidence of its existence.

But since the e-mail this morning insisted that “anecdotes don’t prove anything,” perhaps it would do us well to actually examine the data. And when it comes to the drug war, it is incredibly easy to ascertain the extent of racial injustice and white privilege. Well beyond mere anecdote, the numbers prove that racism in the justice system is so severe that it literally shapes everything about life in America: from who is and is not in jail or prison, to who is or is not employable, to whose families are financially stable, to the way media discusses matters of crime and deviance.

In order to determine the extent to which blacks, for instance, are over-arrested for drugs and whites under-arrested for the same, there are several things one needs to know. They are:

1) How many whites and how many blacks are arrested each year for drugs (and specifically for drug possession, since it is possession and use rather than drug dealing for which most drug arrestees of all races are busted)?

2) How many whites and how many blacks are current drug users, thus in violation of drug laws and potentially capable of being arrested for a drug offense?; and,

3) How much of a difference is there between those relative numbers, and thus, how many more whites and how many fewer blacks would be arrested each year if arrest rates comported with rates of drug use and/or possession violations?

The first number is easy enough to come by: According to the FBI, there were approximately 1.2 million arrests for drug violations in 2013. Roughly 815,000 of those arrested were white, while 366,000 were black. But these numbers are a bit deceptive. As it turns out—and this is common for most government data, unless noted otherwise—racial categories include persons deemed ethnically Hispanic, since Hispanics are not considered a race unto themselves. Approximately 88 percent of all Hispanics are classified racially as white in the data (thus they are included in white data tables), while a little less than five percent are classified as racially black, about three percent are classified as American Indian, a little more than one percent as Asian or Pacific Islander, and three percent as mixed race.* So to determine the number of “real whites” (those who are not socially seen as people of color) who were arrested for drugs in 2013, one must back out those among the 815,000 in the overall white totals who are Hispanic.

That too is a relatively quick and easy calculation. The FBI (in the table referenced above) provides data on the number of Hispanics arrested for drug violations, and in 2013 that number was about 119,000. However, this is an artificially low number, because the ethnicity data is only provided for those arrestees whose ethnicity is known, and as it turns out, that information was only available for 52 percent of all persons arrested for drug violations. Of those, Latinos represented nineteen percent of persons arrested. If we presume (and this seems reasonable) that Hispanics also represented nineteen percent of those whose ethnicity was not recorded, rather than Latinos representing 119,000 drug arrests in 2013, the actual number would have been more like 228,000. If 88 percent of these were “Hispanic whites,” this means that in 2013 there were 200,000 Hispanics arrested for drugs who appear in the data for white arrests, and would need to be backed out of the white arrest totals in order to ascertain the number of “real whites” arrested for drugs that year. Once this adjustment is made, rather than whites representing 815,000 drug arrests, the actual number is more like 615,000.

So reviewing now, this means that in 2013, when it comes to arrest for drugs there were 615,000 whites and 366,000 blacks arrested for drug violations.

Of these, the FBI notes that 82.3 percent were arrested for possession only as opposed to dealing. Assuming this percentage applies roughly equally to each racial group (and it very likely does), this would mean that there were roughly 500,000 whites and 300,000 blacks arrested for drug possession in 2013. If, as noted previously, there were 1.2 million drug arrests in all, and 82.3 percent were for simple possession, this would translate to about 990,000 possession arrests in all that year, with whites representing 51 percent of possession arrests and blacks constituting about thirty percent of possession arrests.

To determine whether these numbers suggest racial disparity and likely bias in law enforcement—and if so, how much bias—we now need to look at the data on drug usage. Here, we need information from two sources: Census data that will give us the total number of whites and blacks who are age twelve and older (thus, eligible for consideration in drug use and arrest data), and data on relative percentages of drug use by whites and blacks—data which is provided by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Once we have the first numbers we can multiply them by the percentages in the second set of numbers, to come up with overall numbers of white and black drug law violators.

According to Census data (from the interactive tables found in the American FactFinder section of the Census Bureau website), there were 173.1 million non-Hispanic whites and 34.1 million blacks age twelve and older in 2013. According to the SAMHSA data on drug use, there were 24.6 million drug users in the U.S. in 2013. Data on racial usage rates indicates that 9.5 percent of whites and a very similar 10.5 percent of blacks used drugs that year. Multiplying these usage rates by the population numbers produces a total of 16.5 million white users and 3.4 million black drug users in all. Whites are therefore two-thirds of all drug users in the country while blacks are fourteen percent of users. Latinos, it should be noted, though constituting about eighteen percent of the population, comprise only fifteen percent of drug users, and use drugs at a rate lower than whites—about 8.8 percent.

But remember, whites are only 51 percent of persons arrested for drug possession, while blacks are thirty percent of persons arrested for drugs. If arrest rates mirrored the rates at which persons in different racial groups actually violated drug laws, rather than 500,000 whites arrested for drug possession in 2013, there would have been more than 660,000 such arrests—in other words, more than 160,000 additional white people arrested for drugs that year. As for blacks, if arrest rates mirrored violation rates there would have been about 140,000 African Americans arrested for drug possession rather than 300,000—in other words, 160,000 fewer blacks arrested for drugs in 2013.

Imagine how different life would be in America if 160,000 more whites and 160,000 fewer blacks were being arrested each year for drugs: a shift of 320,000 persons in all in terms of who would be brought under the control of the justice system and who wouldn’t. Imagine what it would mean over the course of a decade: at least 1.5 million more whites with drug arrest records than the numbers of whites who actually have such records now; and likewise, 1.5 million fewer blacks with drug arrest records when compared to those who have such records now or will in the next ten years. First, had this happened, it would likely mean that the war on drugs would have ended long ago. It is hard to imagine white Americans and lawmakers sitting back and allowing 1.5 million more whites to be arrested each decade for drugs. So it is no exaggeration to say that but for white privilege in the enforcement of drug laws, the war on drugs and all of its destructive impacts on neighborhoods, families and the country as a whole would have been avoided.

Then imagine what a more equitable and representative enforcement of drug laws would mean (or would have meant over the years) for our jail and prison populations; what it would mean for the employability of whites compared to blacks (since people with arrest records have a harder time finding jobs); for the formation of stable families (since arrests can disrupt normal family life and the ability to provide financially for one’s children); and for the right to vote (since incarcerated persons generally are disallowed from voting and in some states, even after being freed from prison, one loses the right to vote). Imagine what such a shift in arrests would mean for the public perception of criminality and deviance—how it might effect policing, media portrayals of crime, and the stereotypes that are held by millions of people currently subjected to the lopsided arrest and prosecution of African Americans.

In short, imagine what the nation would look like in the absence of the obvious, blatant and massive racial disparity in just this one area of the justice system.

And then please, by all means, tell me the one again about how the system is fair, and racial bias a myth.

_______

* These percentage break downs were determined by looking at Census Bureau population tables under the American FactFinder section of census.gov for July 2013. The FactFinder tables provide data for Hispanics as members of each racial group. By comparing those numbers to the overall number of Hispanics in the population, one can quickly determine the share of the Hispanic population that is white, black, etc.

I Was No Angel Either: Crime, Deviance and White Privilege in America

He was no angel.

That’s the refrain, repeated for over two months on social media by defenders of Officer Darren Wilson, convinced that Michael Brown was little more than a violent and dangerous thug, worthy of death that August day in Ferguson.

From the beginning, Brown’s strong-arm theft of cigars from a local market was used by Wilson’s supporters as justification for whatever happened to him. “Thieves deserve their fate,” came the refrain from many a (mostly white) Facebook feed—this, from persons who have never openly advocated death for, say, Wall Street bankers who stole a lot more than Swisher Sweets. Nor have they likely ever contemplated what such a maxim might suggest about the merited destinies of their own white ancestors, for whom theft of land and the labor of others was central to the development of the very country those same commentators now call home.

“He had weed in his system,” cried others, suggesting that marijuana use either justifies being shot by a cop, or at the very least might explain his “aggressive behavior” towards Officer Wilson—the kind of thing that could only be said by someone who had never smoked much weed. Attacking police officers is, as a general rule, the last thing on your mind when you’re high.

I should know, as I spent quite a bit of my time when I was Michael Brown’s age in just such an altered state, never once concerned that such a condition might serve as a rationale for my demise at the hands of law enforcement. Indeed, I never even gave much thought to the likelihood that such behavior might land me in jail. All this, despite the fact that…

#IWasNoAngelEither.

I called for the initiation of this hashtag last night on Twitter to encourage those of us who are white to come out of the closet, as it were, with our admissions of just how non-angelic we have been, all while relatively secure in the knowledge that our misdeeds would likely go unpunished. To fully grasp the depths of racial disparity that plague our justice system, it is necessary not only to acknowledge the glaring evidence of aggressive policing towards (and racial profiling and over-incarceration of) black and brown folks, but also the flipside of that reality: the preferential treatment afforded those of us who are white, even when engaged in similar behaviors. So long as whites like me are receiving such preferential treatment—criminal justice affirmative action for white people, so to speak—we have no moral right to question claims of systemic racism made by people of color, who experience the downside of our institutional advantage every day. And we have no ethical leg to stand on when we complain about their anger in the face of yet again more evidence of that system, operating in its usual fashion.

So in the interest of full disclosure, and because Twitter hardly affords sufficient space for such a discussion as this, let me be clear: among the activities in which I had engaged, all before turning nineteen, and which—had I been black—would likely have ended quite differently for me, here are the ones I can remember, in order from least to most serious:

1. Underage drinking and public intoxication (hundreds of times);

2. Repeated use of fake identification for the purpose of obtaining alcohol (hundreds of times);

3. Manufacture of fake identification for myself and others for the underage purchase of alcohol (at least five dozen clients served);

4. Driving under the influence (can’t remember but plenty);

5. Leaving the scene of an accident after a fender bender with another person who was also drunk;

6. Criminal trespass;

7. Vandalism of government property;

8. Criminal mischief;

9. Fraudulent receipt of property;

10. Possession of illegal narcotics (weed, acid, ecstasy, cocaine);

11. Possession of illegal narcotics with intent to distribute;

12. Sale of illegal narcotics (only a few times, but still);

13. Theft of items worth more than $1500;

14. Illegal possession and re-sale of stolen items worth more than $1500

I have looked up the various statutes governing the crimes in the states where they were committed, and the combined potential period of incarceration for them exceeds thirty years—several of these potentially at hard labor. Indeed, just the most serious of these (the theft and drug crimes) carried potential sentences of ten to twenty years on their own.

I’ll highlight one of these in particular because it is so indicative of the way in which law enforcement, even when they come across white folks about whom they should have every suspicion, generally do not treat us as criminals.

It was early 1988, and several of us on the Tulane University debate team were returning from a tournament in San Antonio. In our rental car were four debaters—including myself and my partner—as well as our coach. A coach whom, I should point out, had just three months earlier taken us on a debate trip to California while carrying a briefcase filled with drugs: at least an ounce of weed, an 8-ball of cocaine, twenty tabs of ecstasy and about a dozen hits of acid. This was, needless to say, before 9/11 and security was lax. Even still, we had been astonished to see his stash upon arriving at the hotel in Los Angeles. We nicknamed him the “pharmaceutical gumbo” (a reference that seemed fitting given our school’s location in New Orleans), and then proceeded (or at least I did) to relieve him of some of that acid after the tournament was over and we went to Disneyland, which did indeed proceed to become (much as it is billed) the “happiest place on earth” that day.

Anyway, on the way back to New Orleans from the tournament in Texas, I was pulled over for going 73 in a 55 mile per hour zone. When the officer came to my window and asked for my license, I pulled out my wallet and began looking for it, but no matter how hard I searched, it appeared to be missing. I looked in every crook and crevice, every fold and pocket, but was having no luck. Because it was dark out, and the car’s dome light wasn’t working, the officer suggested I come back to his cruiser to look for it where the light was better. Nervous but figuring I had no choice, I complied. Upon sitting in the front seat of his squad car I began searching again, while the officer looked down at my wallet, no doubt curious as to why it was taking so long to procure a simple license. As I kept thumbing through pictures, my school ID, a Social Security card and assorted receipts, he appeared to notice something, right there, in the little “picture window” part of the wallet. Staring right at him was a document with my picture on it, and upon which the words “Maine Driver License” were clearly printed. Not because I was from Maine (indeed I wouldn’t set foot in the state until eight years later), but because that seemed like a good state from which to pass off a fake identification, and thus, was the state from which the maker of my particular phony ID (and whose talents far surpassed my own) claimed his clients hailed.

“Hey, isn’t that it,” he asked, pointing to the identification.

“Um, no,” I said, hastily. “That’s something else!” Great answer, a voice in the back of my head screamed.

“Are you sure?” He replied, clearly intrigued by this document, titled “Driver License,” but which I now insisted was absolutely not the thing it claimed to be.

I saw his hand moving towards my wallet as if to grab it and check for himself, but it was precisely then that I somehow managed to find my actual license, tucked away in a fold I had checked (or so I thought) a half-dozen times already.

“Here it is!” I exclaimed, hopeful that he would forget all about the fake he had seen and which he must have understood to be a fraudulent document by now.

I handed it to him as his eyes locked on mine, a glance exchanged that signified he knew full well the meaning of the other license, the one from Maine—and also that he was going to let it pass. He wrote down my information, called in the number, wrote me a ticket and sent me on my way. But what he didn’t know—could not have known because despite his obvious recognition that I was carrying a phony identification, itself a crime, he didn’t check—was that in the car at that very moment, once again in the briefcase of our debate coach, were at least an ounce of weed, another several dozen tabs of ecstasy and a few sheets of acid. Enough to send us away for several years, or at the very least to cost us our college scholarships as well as the federal financial aid that at least I was relying on, and to send our lives in very different directions.

But he did not search the car. Because despite my nervousness, barely concealed as I fumbled through my wallet—and despite the open-air evidence of a misdemeanor thanks to the fake license—he thought nothing more of my potential criminality. Had I been black, or Latino, driving along Interstate 10 to New Orleans, with a car full of other blacks and Latinos (as opposed to three whites, one South Asian and a very light skinned Creole), I cannot imagine things would have ended up with a $75 speeding ticket and a tip to drive carefully.

That, for those who have a hard time with the concept, is white privilege.

And please, I realize that professions of privilege and admissions of advantage may seem like cold comfort to people of color facing the heel of systemic oppression. It changes nothing, at least in the short run. Involved with such acknowledgements are no concrete policy proposals let alone the organized umph needed to make any potential policies likely. But that said, we should not dismiss the power of the narrative. After all, the narrative of black danger and criminality, of deviance and pathology wrapped in dark-skin did not emerge from data and statistical manipulation alone. It emerged from story-telling. The story-telling of those seeking to justify the imposition of Black Codes and segregation so as to “protect” whites from “black brutes.” The story-telling of the Nixon-era Southern strategy, or Reagan’s “welfare queens,” and the Willie Horton ad. Only by establishing counter-narratives that challenge those memes, that reveal the extent of our own illegal activity, and that call into question the operation of a justice system that winks and nods at ours—or simply never discovers it—while actively and aggressively prosecuting that of others (or simply shoots them without even asking questions), can we expect to move the ball forward in the fight for a more equitable system. We cannot continue to hide behind a veil of innocence or silence about our own misdeeds, thereby allowing the conventional wisdom about criminality to remain unsullied.

It is time to come out; time to admit the unjust privileges we receive every day in a system set up by people like us, for people like us.

And then time to demand that such a system be replaced by justice—now.

Repetitive Motion Disorder: Black Reality and White Denial in America

I suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson’s guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it—and more to the point, why?

Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases—not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond—inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder—a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one’s own response to it had anything to do with race.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending around those phony pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference between one black man and another.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending money to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one’s donation by saying what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of weed in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny that there is anything racial about one’s stunning ignorance as to the difference between those two things.

Reflex: To deny that there’s anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence—like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others—are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.

And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you’re black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they—the police—”drop their fucking guns;” not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a “revolution,” and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

We can remain ignorant to the ubiquity of police misconduct, thinking it the paranoid fever dream of irrational “race-card” playing peoples of color, just like we did after the O.J. Simpson verdict. When most of black America responded to that verdict with cathartic relief—not because they necessarily thought Simpson innocent but because they felt there were enough questions raised about police in the case to sow reasonable doubt—most white folks concluded that black America had lost its collective mind. How could they possibly believe that the LAPD would plant evidence in an attempt to frame or sweeten the case against a criminal defendant? A few years later, had we been paying attention (but of course, we were not), we would have had our answer. It was then that the scandal in the city’s Ramparts division broke, implicating dozens of police in over a hundred cases of misconduct, including, in one incident, shooting a gang member at point blank range and then planting a weapon on him to make the incident appear as self-defense. So putting aside the guilt or innocence of O.J,, clearly it was not irrational for black Angelenos (and Americans) to give one the likes of Mark Fuhrman side-eye after his own racism was revealed in that case.

I think this, more than anything, is the source of our trouble when it comes to racial division in this country. The inability of white people to hear black reality—to not even know that there is one and that it differs from our own—makes it nearly impossible to move forward. But how can we expect black folks to trust law enforcement or to view it in the same heroic and selfless terms that so many of us apparently do? The law has been a weapon used against black bodies, not a shield intended to defend them, and for a very long time.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an orgy of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early ’70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.

These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history—and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks’ negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we perhaps, just this once, admit our collective blind spot? Admit that there are things going on, and that have been going on a very long time, about which we know nothing? Might we suspend our disbelief, just long enough to gain some much needed insights about the society we share? One wonders what it will take for us to not merely listen but actually to hear the voices of black parents, fearful that the next time their child walks out the door may be the last, and all because someone—an officer or a self-appointed vigilante—sees them as dangerous, as disrespectful, as reaching for their gun? Might we be able to hear that without deftly pivoting to the much more comfortable (for us) topic of black crime or single-parent homes? Without deflecting the real and understandable fear of police abuse with lectures about the danger of having a victim mentality—especially ironic given that such lectures come from a people who apparently see ourselves as the always imminent victims of big black men?

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people’s fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt—thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you’re wanting to be polite, but because you’d like to see your mother again)—is work; and it’s harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day and in a million ways before lunch how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. Because that’s what we’re telling black folks on the daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera—no doubt speaking for many more in the process—we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, even though in almost all cases they are found to have done nothing wrong, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation’s schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, and where they will be treated like inmates more than children hoping to learn, we tell them this. Every time Bill O’Reilly pontificates about “black culture” and every time Barack Obama tells black men—but only black men—to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things—that vast numbers of us can—and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation’s people.

But we can’t; and it is in these moments—moments like those provided by events in Ferguson—that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world—itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we’ve experienced it—seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body.

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*Robin D.G. Kelley, “Slangin’ Rocks…Palestinian Style,” in Police Brutality: An Anthology, Jill Nelson, ed., (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000), 21-59.

Poverty Denialism in a Culture of Cruelty: Bashing the Poor as Right-Wing Amusement

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future (San Francisco: City Lights, 2015) This section explores the way that many (especially on the right) downplay or dismiss the problem of poverty and the hardship faced by the poor and unemployed. In coming weeks I will post a few more excerpts from the book, which is in the editing process currently. Note, there may be slight changes to the final text when it is released in book form. 

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In 1981, Texas Senator Phil Gramm lamented: “We’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat.” It was, to Gramm, clear evidence of how exaggerated the problem of economic hardship in America was, and how horrible the nation’s welfare state had become. Apparently, poor people aren’t really suffering or deserving of much sympathy until their ribcages are showing and their eye-sockets have all but swallowed their eyes. If the poor are fat, it’s not because so many of the cheapest and most readily available foods in poor communities are high in empty calories, sugar and non-nutritional ingredients—or because, in general, the U.S. food supply is overly-processed and unhealthy—but rather, it must be because poor people have it too good and are able to do a lot of fancy eating at public expense.

America’s culture of cruelty has long been fed by this kind of thinking: namely, the belief that the poor and unemployed really aren’t suffering that badly. This “poverty denialism” rests on three claims: first, that America’s poor are fabulously wealthy by global standards and thus, should essentially stop complaining; second, that the poor buy expensive food with their SNAP benefits and have all manner of consumer goods in their homes, which means they aren’t poor in any sense that should cause concern; and third, that large numbers of welfare recipients commit fraud in order to get benefits, and then misuse the benefits they receive. In short, these are not the deserving poor—their pain is not real.

The Fallacy of Global Poverty Comparisons

As for the idea that the poor in America are not really poor, one can almost understand why this notion might seem persuasive even to those who are not particularly callous or cruel. Someone who has worked in the Peace Corps for instance, or the military, or has merely traveled widely and witnessed the kind of abject deprivation that is common in much of the world, where billions of people live on less than a dollar a day, might find this part of poverty denialism compelling. Most all of us have seen at least one if not several late-night infomercials seeking charitable contributions to bring running water and vaccinations to the globe’s poorest inhabitants. By comparison to the poverty highlighted by such efforts, one might not find the moral claims of America’s poor to be particularly pressing.

That said, to diminish the real hardship faced by the poor in the United States, solely because it is usually not as crushing as suffering elsewhere—and I say usually, because in some poor counties of America, conditions and life expectancy actually do rival those in some of the poorest nations on Earth—is neither a logical nor ethical response to that hardship. Even though in absolute terms it is true that America’s poor are not poor in the same way and to the same extremes as say, Sri Lanka’s poor, such a reassurance is likely not much comfort for America’s struggling masses. After all, Americans are not Sri Lankans, and they are trying to stay afloat and compete in a society against other Americans. This is why the international standard for evaluating poverty is not simply a set dollar equivalent amount, since poverty in a poor country is by definition different from poverty in a rich country, but is determined by looking at what percentage of a country’s citizens live at half or less of the nation’s median wage. To be at half or less of the median in any society, no matter what that median might be, is to be at a significant disadvantage relative to others in the job market, housing market, in terms of the quality of education your children will likely receive, and in terms of the health care you can access. If the median income is well above your own, you will be effectively priced out of the market for any number of opportunities; as such, even if you are objectively richer than someone in Bangladesh or Ghana, the life you will be able to carve out for yourself in the place you actually live will be far removed from the mainstream there.

This is why the reassurances of economics blogger Catherine Rampell at the New York Times, to the effect that “the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants,” or that “America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest,” are vapid to a point that would be laughable were the subject matter not so serious. Contrary to Rampell’s breathless excitement at the chart demonstrating these fun facts—which she found in a book by World Bank economist, Branko Milanovic and to which she refers as an “awesome chart” that “kinda blows your mind”—there is nothing awesome, mind-blowing, or even remotely relevant about the statistics in question. Nor are the protestations of Sean Hannity—who assures us that “poor in America is not poor like around the rest of the world”—helpful in understanding the real face of need in the United States.

If anything, to be poor in a rich country, where one’s worth is sadly too often presumed to be linked to one’s possessions (unlike in a poor country where people still know better) is to create a particularly debilitating kind of deprivation. To be poor in a place where success is synonymous with being rich is to find oneself marked as uniquely flawed. To live in a place where wealth is not only visible but flaunted, where the rich make no pretense to normalcy, and where one can regularly hear oneself being berated on the airwaves as losers and vermin and parasites precisely because you are poor or working at a minimum wage job, is to be the victim of a cruelty that poor folks in poor nations do not experience. The poor of Vietnam, for instance, do not have to listen to those who are doing better than they put them down on a daily basis. And why? Because those who are doing better than they, for the most part, are not the kind of people who would bash them for their poverty. The culture of cruelty is not as well developed there. It’s quite an American thing, which unlike most American things we haven’t yet exported to the world. So in a poor nation, the poor are still viewed as belonging to a common humanity, unlike in the United States, where the humanity of poor people, and certainly their right to full citizenship is increasingly under attack.

Ultimately, the politics of comparative suffering is always a losing and amoral proposition. It’s the kind of argumentation that would justify telling a Japanese American who was herded into an American internment camp during World War Two that they have nothing to complain about and should actually be grateful: after all, they could have been in Tokyo when we firebombed it, or in Hiroshima or Nagasaki when we dropped the atomic bombs. It’s the kind of position that would rationalize saying to someone who survived the Holocaust of European Jewry that they had no legitimate complaint against the Nazis, since had they lived in the Soviet Union they may well have perished in Stalin’s gulag (or for that matter, the reverse of this argument). To forward this kind of position is like telling an African American during Jim Crow segregation to get over it, since King Leopold killed roughly ten million Africans in the Congo under Belgian colonialism. In other words, this kind of comparison between the suffering one is currently experiencing and the much greater suffering one could theoretically experience elsewhere lacks all moral and practical relevance.

Not to mention, there is something ironic about this kind of argument coming from elites who regularly push for greater tax breaks so they can have more money with which to “do great things,” or just because they think they’ve earned it. After all, to whatever extent the poor in America are rich by global standards surely the wealthy in America are obscenely, disgustingly, perversely rich by the same; and yet they always seem to want more. They don’t seem satisfied with the kind of wealth that would allow them to literally buy entire countries outright, and which certainly dwarfs the wealth of the so-called rich in less wealthy nations, but yet they have the temerity to lecture poor people about gratitude?

Consider a recent commercial paid for by the Charles Koch Foundation that seeks to remind Americans how good they have it by noting that even if one earns only $34,000 a year, that’s enough to vault one into the top one percent of the world’s population in terms of income. Or consider the remarks of Bud Konheim, CEO and co-founder of fashion label Nicole Miller, who recently said those who are poor or working class in America should stop complaining since their incomes would make them wealthy in India or China. To whatever extent one finds this kind of thinking even remotely persuasive, shouldn’t the logic of such an argument run both ways? Shouldn’t the rich in the U.S. stop complaining about their taxes? The regulations they have to put up with? The minimum wage they have to pay employees? Talk about ingratitude! If they lived in any other industrialized nation the taxes they paid would be higher, regulations would be just as strict or more so, and their workers would have far greater protections and safety nets than in the United States. So when it comes to shutting one’s mouth and being grateful for what one has, perhaps the rich should lead by example.

How Dare You Have Air Conditioning! TVs, Cellphones and Right-Wing Resentment

One of the more prominent tendencies within the modern culture of cruelty is to chastise the poor for possessing any material items remotely connected to middle-class normalcy, as if somehow the possession of modern conveniences like refrigerators, microwaves or televisions demonstrates that the poor in America aren’t really suffering. In a segment from Bill O’Reilly’s FOX program in July 2011, he and fellow talking head Lou Dobbs joked about the “stuff” one can find in the homes of the poor. Citing a report by the Heritage Foundation, which has long forwarded this kind of argument so as to undermine support for safety net programs, O’Reilly noted, incredulously:

Eight-two percent have a microwave. This is 82 percent of American poor families. Seventy-eight percent have air conditioning. More than one television, 65 percent. Cable or satellite TV, 64 percent…Cell phones, 55 percent. Personal computer, 39 percent. So how can you be so poor and have all this stuff?

Aside from the bizarre implication that air conditioning is a luxury the poor should not enjoy, there are a few obvious holes in O’Reilly’s argument. First, it should be apparent to even the most casual thinker that most of the poor live in apartments pre-rigged with A/C whether or not they can afford to actually run it. Second, cable is necessary in most parts of the country in order for a television to get reception at all, so the mere fact that one has cable says very little about the quality of one’s television, let alone the extravagance of one’s entertainment habits. And finally, cell phones are no more extravagant than landlines, having more or less replaced the older systems for millions of Americans. To not have a phone would render the poor unable to remain connected to possible jobs, to family or to emergency services. Surely we do not expect the poor to be completely cut off from the world in order to deserve concern. Or perhaps for the Bill O’Reillys of the world, that is exactly what is required.

For Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, the poor aren’t really suffering because average per person expenditures for the poorest fifth of Americans today are equal to the expenditures of the middle-class in the early 1970s. In other words, if today’s poor are able to live like the middle class did thirty to forty years earlier, they have nothing to complain about. Of course, it is also probably the case that the poor in the 1960s had “stuff” comparable to what middle-class Americans had in 1939, but so what? The poor today also doubtless have certain luxuries unknown even to the elite in the 1790s, what with indoor plumbing and all, but one wonders what the point of such a comparison is? Does anyone really believe that today’s poor live better than Thomas Jefferson did, just because the latter had to crap in a chamber pot or an outhouse? Apparently Rector and the folks at Heritage think so, as they have also made the argument that the poor in America today “live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.” Though it should hardly need to be said, today’s poor do not live in the early 1970s, let alone the nineteenth century; they live in the present, where the ability to feel part of the mainstream (and to be part of the mainstream) requires one to be able to do things and have things that previous generations didn’t do or have. People didn’t “need” the Internet in the 1970s, for instance, because the Internet didn’t exist, but not having access to the web today can be seen as a pretty serious disadvantage. They didn’t need cars in 1837 either, but try finding steady employment today without one.

What Rector and others ignore is that the ability of the poor to purchase electronics—the prices of which have actually come down in recent years—says little about their ability to afford more important amenities. Televisions, microwaves or any other luxuries in the homes of the poor will tend to be pretty cheap. What you won’t as readily find is what really matters: namely, college degrees and high-quality preventative health care, the costs of which have far outpaced the rate of inflation. It is these things that the poor increasingly cannot afford, not because they have blown all their money on malt liquor and menthols but because they do not earn enough to purchase them, no matter the relatively cheap consumer goods with which they may entertain themselves, or at least cool the air in their apartments from time to time. The issue is not whether America’s poor are as poor today as the poor in Biafra, or as poor as the poor were at the time of the Nixon administration or the Gettysburg Address or the landing of the Mayflower. The issue is whether the poor are situated in such a way as to compete with others in this country at this time, and in such a way that might allow them to move up the ladder and out of relative deprivation. A dishwasher will neither suffice for those purposes nor by virtue of its expense get in the way of them, but the lack of health care or education most certainly will.

Notably, the common outrage over the possessions of the poor neglects to take heed of the obvious fact that for most, their consumer goods will likely represent items they were able to afford in better economic times before a layoff or medical emergency. Most poor people do not remain poor for long periods, but rather, slip into poverty after a layoff, medical emergency or temporary economic downturn. If a family finds itself transitionally poor and having to turn temporarily to SNAP (food stamps) after the layoff of a parent, it’s not as if the computer, the car or the Xbox they had before the layoff should be expected to disappear. Unless one wishes to suggest that upon a layoff one should pawn everything in one’s possession before turning to the very government benefits for which one’s taxes previously paid during periods of employment, expressing shock at the gadgetry of the poorest among us is absurd. And frankly, even if the poor did pawn every “luxury” item in their possession before relying on public assistance, the amount they would receive would hardly suffice to keep them from needing aid. Such items as video games or televisions might fetch them a few hundred dollars on Craigslist or at a pawn shop, but this wouldn’t be enough for even one month’s rent, let alone medical bills or groceries.

Crab Legs and Strip Clubs and Weed, Oh My! The Myth of Massive Welfare Fraud

Speaking of groceries, conservatives have long been preoccupied with what poor people eat, as with the by-now infamous stories that most of us have heard about persons buying expensive cuts of meat with food stamps or EBT cards. Tales of food stamp profligacy have been legion for generations and it is the rare person who hasn’t heard a story from someone who heard from someone else who heard from yet another person about the time they were standing in line and saw somebody pay for a choice cut of meat with food stamps, much as with Reagan’s campaign tale in 1976 about “strapping young bucks” buying T-Bone steaks with stamps.

Of course, the allure of the rather pedestrian T-bone has dimmed considerably over time, such that stories of culinary over-indulgence on the part of the poor now require a bit of an upgrade. Today, it’s no longer mid-range quality steak for SNAP fraudsters, but rather, King Crab legs, according to Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert. In a recent speech on the House floor, Gohmert relayed a story supposedly told to him by a constituent who was angered that while he could only afford ground meat for himself and his family, he watched the person in front of him pay for crab legs with food stamps. That the constituent said the individual paid with stamps is itself an indication that the story was likely a lie (since there are no more actual food stamps in use), but that didn’t stop Gohmert from repeating it and insisting that such a story proved why the nation should cut back on SNAP; this, despite the fact that the average monthly allotment for SNAP recipients is only $133 per person, and only $122 per month in Gohmert’s own state.

But contrary to claims that the poor eat like royalty on the public dime, the evidence shows that most SNAP recipient households are extremely thrifty with their food shopping. Far from blowing their benefits on crab legs or steak of any kind, they tend to shop inexpensively and responsibly to make the benefits last. According to a recent analysis of thousands of SNAP households, beneficiaries are bargain shoppers when they come onto the rolls and become even thriftier over time. Upon entering the program, nearly one in four households report purchasing food that is out of date or nearly expired, simply because those items are discounted; and this rate climbs to 30 percent for those same families after they have been on the program for six months. Likewise, eighty-five percent of new SNAP households buy food items on sale, and after six months of SNAP benefits about half of recipient households have learned to buy in bulk (so as to get discounts) and to clip coupons, neither of which practices afford one much lobster or very many premium cuts of steak.

Amazingly, Gohmert’s accusation about SNAP being used for crab legs is only the tip of an almost entirely unhinged right-wing iceberg. Lately, conservative criticisms of safety net programs have moved beyond culinary matters to even worse presumed wastes of taxpayer money. Recently, FOX hyped a report from a group called Colorado Watchdog, purporting to show that welfare benefits are being withdrawn at liquor stores, casinos and at least one strip club, and are even withdrawn in exotic vacation spots by Colorado’s poor. According to the report, Coloradans withdrew $3.8 million in cash welfare benefits from ATM machines in states other than Colorado over a two-year period. Although nearly $1 million of this amount was in bordering states, which could simply reflect that residents live near the border and work in a neighboring state or shop there, the rest was withdrawn farther away, including $70,000 withdrawn in Las Vegas, about $6500 in Hawaii, and $560 in the Virgin Islands. Although such anomalies make for plenty of right-wing outrage, they clearly are not representative of a substantial fraud problem. The entire amount withdrawn in states other than Colorado or its border states comes to only 1.7 percent of Colorado’s overall cash welfare budget under the TANF program (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which replaced AFDC in 1996). The amount withdrawn in Vegas, Hawaii and St. Thomas combined amounts to less than five hundredths of one percent (0.045) of all state benefits. To hype this handful of cases is less about truly rooting out a pattern of program abuse and more about enraging a public already encouraged to think the worst of the poor and those on assistance.

As for withdrawals made in liquor stores, these too amount to less than one percent of TANF benefits withdrawn and involve less than one percent of households receiving benefits. As for casino withdrawals, which amount to about $75,000 per year, these could indicate that persons are gambling with their benefits, but could also represent low-wage casino employees who make withdrawals at their place of employment because there isn’t a closer or more convenient ATM around. When it comes to strip club withdrawals, there appears to have been a whopping $1,500 withdrawn at one Denver area club over the course of two years: disturbing but hardly evidence of a common practice. In all, making a public spectacle of these rare potential abuses of taxpayer monies ends up stigmatizing the ninety-nine percent or more of all recipients who play by the rules and don’t misuse benefits. While it might be worthwhile to figure out ways to sanction those handful who take unfair advantage, is it really so important to catch and punish these few that the broad base of TANF families should be stigmatized? Apparently in a culture of cruelty, the answer is yes: stopping a handful of abusers is so important on principle, that even if entire programs have to be stigmatized, chopped or ended altogether, the cost is worth it.

Likewise, commentators on the right have accused Colorado TANF recipients of using benefits to buy marijuana at the state’s newly-legalized weed stores; yet there have been only sixty-four cases of persons in the state using benefit cards to withdraw cash from ATMs located inside marijuana shops. This represents one-and-a-half-tenths of one percent (0.15) of all TANF-related withdrawals in Colorado during the month in which the usage was discovered; and the combined value of the withdrawals came to only $5,475, which is 4.4 thousandths of one percent (0.0044) of the state’s annual TANF block grant. Not to mention, the stores in which these ATMs were located dispense marijuana for patients who use the drug for medicinal purposes, so to ban them from using TANF benefits this way would be to deny them a valid and legal form of pain relief.

For many on the right, however, evidence is a luxury hardly worth indulging. It is virtually axiomatic for some that the poor are poor because of drug use. Bill O’Reilly, in one particularly disingenuous segment on his FOX program, suggested that because roughly thirteen percent of the population was poor and roughly thirteen percent of Americans currently use drugs, “maybe poverty is not exclusively an economic problem.” The implication was that the thirteen percent in poverty and the thirteen percent who use drugs were the same people. But of course they are not. Despite being nearly three times as likely as whites to be poor, African Americans use drugs at rates that are essentially identical to the rates at which whites use them. Latinos, despite being 2.5 times as likely as whites to be poor are less likely to use drugs than whites. And when it comes to drug abuse and dependence as opposed to mere recreational use, whites are more likely to abuse narcotics than people of color, despite being one-third as likely to be poor. If there were a correlation between poverty and drug use, suffice it so say that these data would look very different.

Sadly, some simply cannot relinquish their commitment to the notion that the poor and those on public assistance are irresponsible and dishonest, scamming the system and taking advantage of hard-working taxpayers. When the Department of Agriculture recently released a report noting that 2012 had seen the lowest rate of SNAP payment errors in history, conservative commentators went ballistic. FOX Business anchor Stuart Varney chastised the Department of Agriculture report, asking “since when has (a 3.42 percent error rate) been good?” In fact, such a rate is extremely good and is the lowest in the history of the food stamp/SNAP program. In fact, even that error rate includes underpayments (i.e., payments that were lower than they should have been, or payments that were not made at all to persons who applied and should have received them but were unfairly rejected). When underpayments are subtracted from overpayments, the net amount of overpayment in SNAP falls to only around two percent of program dollars: one-eighth the amount of projected fraud in the area of tax collection.

As for fraud by TANF recipients, there is no doubt that technical fraud occurs, meaning that recipients in some cases work for cash under the table by taking care of a neighbor’s kids or cleaning their house—income that would result in a suspension or reduction or benefits were it reported. But considering that the average monthly benefit from TANF is only $162 per person, and $387 per family—less than half the poverty line in every state and less than one-third of the poverty line in most of them—is such fraud really surprising? If benefits are set so low that even when SNAP is added to them the typical family on both kinds of assistance still remains below the poverty line, how is one supposed to survive without such side work? If anything, that kind of fraud speaks to the work ethic of the poor and their desire to earn income and take responsibility for themselves and their children. It suggests that the stereotype of lazy welfare recipients sitting around doing nothing is a complete contrivance.

In her 2011 book, Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty, University of Connecticut law professor Kaaryn Gustafson notes that although technical fraud is common, other types—like someone filling out multiple claim forms so as to get excess benefits from the system—are exceedingly rare. In California, she notes, officials only identify about three such cases per month, only one of which has sufficient evidence of intentional fraud as to justify being referred for further investigation or prosecution. According to Gustafson, efforts to detect criminal fraud through mechanisms like fingerprinting of recipients, intended to spot persons with criminal records who are legally barred from most program benefits, have proven superfluous. Not only do such efforts not result in much weeding out of criminals but they also are anything but cost-effective. In Texas, fingerprinting efforts ended up costing taxpayers $1.7 million in the first seven months of operation, and nearly $16 million by the end of 2000. But in four years, there were only nine criminal fraud charges filed by state prosecutors. Indeed, serious fraud is so rare and expensive to detect and prosecute that anti-fraud initiatives typically exceed whatever amount of money is being lost from fraud in the first place.

Lying With Numbers: How the Right Slanders the Unemployed

For some however, presuming the worst about the poor and unemployed is so reflexive an act, they will quite purposely deceive the public about the slothful ways of the struggling with no concern for truth. Recently, right-wing talking heads from Limbaugh to FOX News personalities Bill Hemmer, Lou Dobbs, Shannon Bream and Charles Payne, all publicized what they considered “stunning new evidence” about the irresponsibility of the unemployed. Relying for their information on a popular right-wing website that naturally provided no links to its source, they trumpeted supposedly convincing data from the Labor Department to the effect that the unemployed spend more time shopping than looking for a job. In fact, the original article breathlessly exhorted its readers that the unemployed not only shop too much but also spend twice as much time during an average day in “socializing, relaxing or leisure” activities as they do searching for a job. They also seemed shocked and appalled that almost all of the unemployed manage to sleep in a given day, noting to close out the piece, as if this were indicative of how lazy the jobless are: “Nearly all of the unemployed—99.9 percent—reported sleeping on an average day. On average, they dedicated 9.24 hours to that activity.” Horrors.

But naturally, the article’s author and the right wing media figures who repeated that author’s claims got it wrong. Despite Payne’s suggestion that the data proves how welfare programs “do make people lazy. They make people comfortable. They make you want to take a chill pill,” the actual statistics say nothing of the sort. The data source in question nowhere used the term “unemployed” to describe individuals being examined, nor was it specifying anything about those persons; rather it refers to persons “not employed,” which is an entirely different thing despite how similar it may sound. According to the report used to make this claim (the Labor Department’s American Time Use Survey), those who are not employed include persons “not in the labor force,” and that concept includes not only people who have simply quit looking for a job and might be on public assistance, but also those who are retired, disabled, full-time students, and those who are stay-at-home moms or dads with partners who earn enough to support them on their own. According to Census data, of all persons who are not working, two in five are retired, one in five are students, fifteen percent more are chronically ill or disabled, and another thirteen percent are caring for children or other family members (this would include many middle class stay-at-home mothers). In other words, eighty-five out of a hundred people who are classified as not working or not employed fall into these categories. So the fact that only nineteen percent of those classified as “not employed” engage in job searches or interviews on an average day, while 22.5 percent of those “not employed” shop for items other than groceries on an average day, means nothing. Those doing all that shopping and luxuriating are mostly not the people the right would have us envision: rather, they are people who are not in the labor force because they haven’t the need to be due to a partner’s earnings, or else they have already retired or they’re going to school.

The stay-at-home mom who spends her days shopping and getting her nails done and whose husband makes millions on Wall Street may be lazy and self-absorbed, and the seventy-five year old Florida snowbird who sits on the beach all day may have been a horrible human being during his work years, but they are surely not the individuals being chastised by the right with this data, even though they are the ones who are likely to be showing up in it. This is just one more prime example of how conservatives routinely distort data to further a narrative of cruelty towards America’s most vulnerable.

Your Bumper Sticker is Not a Philosophy: Reflections on Voting and the Limits of Radical Purity

You hear it often when you reside on the left of the political spectrum in America, especially around election time.

Sometimes it’s discussed and debated in whispers, other times in rather bombastic tones. It’s a debate about whether truly progressive folks, let alone radicals, should be willing to vote for clearly compromised Democrats, despite how far from our own views they obviously are. Some say yes, while others insist no, and just as strenuously as the first.

I know all the arguments on both sides. I know them because at some point in my life, I have probably made them all, depending on the situation.

When it comes to the arguments for not compromising, for not giving our votes to candidates whose policies seem so similar to those of the right, even now there are times when I still find myself attracted to them, at least partly.

But this is not one of those times.

For those of us on the left, there is something almost sacramental it seems about refusing to vote, while insisting with all the wisdom of a bumper sticker: “If voting changed anything it would be illegal,” or that “The lesser of two evils is still evil.” It’s almost a rite of passage for progressives to counsel abstention from exercising the franchise, or to advocate voting for a third party candidate—not because they have any chance of winning, or because by voting for them we will actually be helping to build that third party into a viable political force, but simply so that our conscience can be clear. We can vote for that radical alternative, and then drive back to our homes from the polling station in our fuel-burning vehicles, take off our shoes manufactured in a sweatshop somewhere, and then send out a blog post or social media message on our overpriced, virtual-slave-labor-produced technology, telling everyone how awesome it feels not to have contributed to evil today.

There’s something cathartic (in a juvenile, angst-driven, anarchy-tatted kinda way) about preening as a moral superior because you didn’t give in to the two-party “duopoly,” or whatever the hell Ralph Nader calls it. Maintaining one’s ascetic sense of unsullied ideological purity feels good. So does heroin, of course, but I’m not sure the indulgence of either is one’s best bet for safety in the long run. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that voting is the key to real political change; it self-evidently is not. But to think that it means nothing, or so little as to not recommend the activity is to engage in a dangerous moral conceit. Dangerous because there appear to be others, every bit as committed to their worldview as we are to ours, who feel no qualms about pulling that lever, or pushing that button on the touch-screen—even though I figure they also know it isn’t the sum total of political engagement.

See, some things are pretty easy to understand, and this is one of them. If voting doesn’t matter, dear precious revolutionaries, then riddle me this:

Why are some people trying so damned hard to keep certain other people from doing it?

If the game is so unalterably rigged that the elite will get their way no matter who is in office, then why would right-wing billionaires spend so much of their coveted loot on electing certain people rather than others? Why bother? Are they stupid? Have they nothing better to do with their lucre? Or do they know something that we might not? I’m guessing the latter. I doubt quite seriously that folks with that much money and power are stupid. Venal, cruel and worthy of contempt? Oh quite possibly those, but not stupid; and above all else, highly self-interested. They put their money and their votes where they think it will do the most good for them. Not for the country, or the world, and not for the rest of us, but for them. And right now, there is no question who those folks are backing.

Yes, yes, I know (yawn): Wall Street threw a lot of money at Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008; and if Hillary Clinton is the nominee in 2016 they likely will again, given how much the Clintons love ‘em some bankers. But right now, this year, this week, their money is decidedly being spent in different directions; and not, I beg you to recall, for shits and giggles.

More to the point, the right is trying in over two dozen states to dramatically limit access to the ballot box for millions of voters, and not simply because they are bored and have nothing better to do with their time. They have placed limits on early voting because the folks most likely to vote early are the folks with the least flexibility on election day: lower-and moderate wage workers, and especially people of color. They are demanding photo ID for the same reason: not because there is any evidence of a voter fraud problem — in fifteen years there have been 31 cases of in-person fraud that could even theoretically have been stopped by these new laws — but because the folks less likely to have photo ID are poor and working class and folks of color. They are disallowing college students from using their school identifications though, even if they include a photo; and why? Because they know the way younger voters have trended lately, and it isn’t to the right. It is entirely transparent and purposeful. To the folks who comprise the most reactionary tendencies in this nation, they know that voting matters—at least at the margins.

Let’s be clear: They didn’t lose those 40,000 registrations in Georgia (overwhelmingly black folks and young people) just to be dicks. They lost them because they don’t want those 40,000 people to vote; because those 40,000 people could be the difference in a close Senate race and they know it. They are trying to weaken the protections of the Voting Rights Act — and went to court to accomplish these ends — for a reason. They try and intimidate black voters for a reason.

They do these things because they expect them to pay off. They apparently aren’t satisfied with the degree to which Barack Obama is solicitous of the wealthy, or the extent to which he bombs people around the world, or the extent to which his health care bill was a giveaway to the insurance industry. They apparently aren’t satisfied with his moderate and cautious stances on immigration, or his court nominees, however far from radical they quite obviously have been. They want more. And if you think it can’t be any worse, you might want to put down the pipe.

So yes, the Affordable Care Act is inadequate. But it really matters that so many state legislatures are in the hands of right-wing extremists who are refusing to expand Medicaid, thereby denying care to at least 5 million people. And if you don’t think that matters, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts you aren’t one of those 5 million, and likely don’t know anyone who is.

And of course, the Democrats are overwhelmingly in bed with the same companies as the Republicans, and yes, they are far too enamored of the empire and throwing the empire’s weight around, at the cost of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives lost. But if you think the right wouldn’t seek to empower those companies and that empire even more if given the chance—that they wouldn’t bomb more countries, cut more taxes for the rich, and roll back what minimal labor protections still exist for working people—then once again, ask yourself: why is that same right-wing spending so much money and trying so hard to win this election?

The real work of democracy, obviously, is in the streets and always has been; it’s in places like Ferguson, where mostly young folks of color have been leading an inspiring uprising against not only the killing of Mike Brown but the larger plague of police violence against, and mistreatment of, the black and brown in this country. But it is not only there where work is to be done. And though it should be apparent, the work of protest movements really is made easier or harder, depending on who is in office at a given time. The Voting Rights Act really would have had a much harder time passing, as with the Fair Housing Act, had Barry Goldwater been president, rather than Lyndon Johnson. And if John McCain and Sarah Palin had been running things, the courts really would be worse, and there would have been no health care reform at all, against which we on the left could spend our time railing.

And yes, I know: some of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Republicans in the past turned out to be more progressive than some of the justices appointed by Democrats. But have you not noticed the difference between the Dwight Eisenhowers and Richard Nixons of the world, on the one hand, and the Ted Cruzs and Rick Sanotorums of the world, on the other? The Republicans of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s are gone now. They have been replaced by people who make St. Ronnie of Dementia appear moderate by comparison. They are beholden to media personalities who insist with a straight face that the president wants Americans to die from Ebola as payback for slavery and colonialism; replaced by people who are so intimidated by (or in agreement with) the philosophically deranged, that they’re afraid to even call Donald Trump and the birther brigade assholes, despite how snugly the label fits.

Voting is just a tactic: nothing more and nothing less. Is it the be-all-end-all? Of course not. No self-respecting member of the nation’s elite would be satisfied to just vote every few years and leave the rest up to chance, and neither should we. But those elites damned sure don’t sit out the elections either, smug in their conceit that either way, everything will work out alright. They take no chances; they play every hand; they never fold—not even once. They work overtime to block low-income folks from the franchise, knowing that photo ID requirements will present a more onerous burden for the poor and working class than anyone else—between $75 and $175 dollars, once you factor in paperwork requirements, travel time to get the ID made and time lost from work—and that this burden can be the deciding factor for millions. Mission accomplished.

It’s why some don’t stop even there: some on the right are so insistent on keeping the vote out of the hands of certain people that they are openly advocating barring the poor from voting, or requiring people to own property in order to vote, or making them pass a civics test first, or barring anyone receiving any kind of government benefit from voting. They are openly advocating a return to the days of Jim Crow elections, all under a color-blind rationale that allows them to appear (to themselves at least) as something other than the racists they really are. But make no mistake: The people those sheriffs and election registrars wanted to keep from voting in Mississippi in 1964 are the same people conservatives wish to keep from voting today; folks of color first, and then any of the rest of us committed to racial and economic equity. To stay at home or discourage others from voting, as some act of left-wing puritanical contrarianism, is to give them exactly what they want. It is to do their work for them.

And please, before someone does it—and I’ve heard it before, so that’s why I bring it up—no frivolous and reflexive quoting of Audre Lorde here, about how the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The misuse of such a genius as she for purposes other than those to which she dedicated her life is all-too-common but nonetheless enraging for its ubiquity. First off, Lorde was not talking about voting when she issued this famous phrase, and you can’t just take a quote, the sound of which you like, and deploy it for any damned purpose you happen to desire. To do so signifies a maddening lack of originality, and indicates how quick some are to rely on slogans and aphorisms, however insightful, rather than strategic and tactical thought. And second, for the love of God: voting was never one of the master’s tools. The master, the manor-born, or the King didn’t want people to vote; and especially not the slaves, the peasants, or the commoners. The master would always prefer dictatorship and no elections at all. To miss this point is to spit in the face of Fannie Lou Hamer and suggest that she was naive, just playing foolishly with the master’s tools when she was fighting for the right to vote; so too it is to disrespect John Lewis, and martyrs like Jonathan Daniels, James Reeb, Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, and so many others—all of whom fought and occasionally died for, among other things, the right to vote. But here we are, nearly fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, and we’re still dealing with the occasional self-proclaimed radical who thinks they’re imbued with more profound political insight than any of those just named; even as not one of them has done half of what they did, sacrificed nearly as much, or paid a fraction of the price as these others, for the sake of their convictions. Frankly, it’s grotesque.

What it comes down to is this: Voting is harm reduction; just like giving clean needles to addicts. Voting doesn’t solve our problems, just like clean needles won’t solve the problems posed by intravenous drug use. But harm reduction matters.

I make no pretense to having the answers; but that said, I’m fairly confident that whatever the answers are, and whatever the best strategies for moving this country to a place of justice might be, none of them involve greasing the skids for reactionary Christian supremacists, rabid nativists, implicit (if not explicit) white nationalists, and puerile homophobes. I’m quite certain that anything that makes Ted Nugent happy or Michelle Bachmann joyous is bad for the world, and anything that helps Sean Hannity sleep well at night is something terrifying and to be resisted at all costs.

For those of us on the left then, wondering whether or not it’s worth voting for yet another compromised Democrat, may I suggest a relatively easy way to answer that question, so that we then might move forward with conviction, do what we have to do, and get on with the more important business of organizing for change? It’s not that hard: On election day, just ask yourself, “What would Ann Coulter want me to do?”

And then do the opposite.

James Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show, 1968

A great and brief clip of Baldwin on Dick Cavett, explaining racism to folks who clearly don’t get it. Here, Baldwin explains the irrelevance of whether or not whites are prejudiced against blacks, noting that the real issue is how white institutions treat folks of color, regardless of intent, bigotry or hatred. A lesson worth remembering today…

Hard on Systems, Soft on People: Fighting for Social Change as If People Matter

“Be hard on systems, but soft on people.”

I’m sure this nugget of wisdom has been around for more than a while, but it was only about a year or so ago that I heard it: spoken into the room where several were gathered — parents and faculty at our daughters’ school — to discuss matters of identity and oppression: things like racism, sexism, heterosexism and the like.

The facilitator for the session, who offered up many other insights throughout the course of the dialogue, repeated this one several times, and with good reason. First, he explained, we need to be soft on people because people make mistakes, we hurt each other, we are all works in progress, and each of us is capable of saying or doing the wrong thing at any time — indeed we all have, many times — and so we should essentially extend to others the patience and compassion we would want for ourselves, as growing, changing, and hopefully maturing people. But also, and more importantly, when it comes to the issues we were discussing, be soft on people and hard on systems because it is the systems (racism and white supremacy, sexism and patriarchy, classism and capitalism, heterosexism and straight/cisgendered supremacy) that have distorted us, taught us the biases with which we all walk around to one degree or another, and in some ways damaged our ability to see each other as fully and equally human sometimes.

In other words, to go too hard on other people, as people, is to often miss the structural and institutional roots of their (and our) own bad behaviors. No one acts or speaks or writes, or anything, in a vacuum. We operate within the context of everything from our upbringing to our education to the media we consume to the peers with whom we associate to whatever happened to us an hour before the dialogue session, which put us in a pissy mood. And because no one knows another person’s damage completely, nor its source — and yet we know, intuitively, that we all have plenty of it — we should probably err on the side of system-based critiques and offer kindness to people whenever possible, knowing that who we all are today owes an awful lot to where we were yesterday, and the day and the month and the year and the decade before that. This is not to say that we let people off the hook for injurious behaviors or statements; it is merely to say that we acknowledge that there is, indeed, a hook; and it has a source that did not originate with the person we are placing there.

This maxim, to be soft on people but hard on systems is perhaps, at least in my experience, the most important guidepost any of us can follow when trying to challenge monumental social problems like racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, religious bigotry, ableism, or any other form of identity-based mistreatment. Among the reasons it’s so important is precisely the fact that it’s so incredibly hard to do, and this I say from personal experience, not just as some abstract observation.

When people say or do things that are in some way racist, sexist, or in any way injurious to others (or ourselves), the natural instinct (for those who consider ourselves anti-oppressive and committed to equity at least) is to fire back. It is not to give deep consideration to the social dynamics that created whatever we just witnessed or heard or saw. It is not to ponder the strategic wisdom of the various ways in which we might approach the individual who just said or did whatever it is we heard or saw. It is to blast away. And on the one hand, this is not only understandable, there’s something truly positive about it. It demonstrates a real commitment to not keeping quiet, and surely we need more people willing to call out oppressive and hurtful behavior wherever and whenever it manifests.

But on the other hand, it can also be incredibly destructive: of dialogue itself, of the compassion needed to maintain dialogue over time, and of the trust needed to move dialogue into action and real movement building for social change. This is because blasting away forecloses any real hope of finding common ground, or even teaching someone upon whom you’re unloading whatever it is you wish for them to know, about their actions, their words, and how they impacted you, or could impact others.

Sadly, to even say this — to suggest there may be strategic concerns worth pondering when it comes to how we challenge each other when dealing with these issues — will be criticized by some, I suspect, as “tone policing.” Because some folks — and I have been one of them before, will probably be one again, but am trying not to be — apparently think that the speaking part is more important than the hearing part when it comes to producing social change. So one person’s need to tell another person their truth outweighs our collective need for the second person to actually hear it, in this rendering. As such, niceties like which style of criticism might work best for that purpose — condemnation replete with challenges to one’s integrity, or perhaps a gentler reproach — are dismissed as deflective, or simple strategies for silencing anger or hurt.

I have violated the “hard on systems, soft on people” rule so many times I’ve lost count, and even after hearing it spoken into the universe have done so. That’s on me, and I am writing this as much to remind myself of what I know in my heart (and head) to be true, as to convince anyone else of it. But I do hope others can give it some thought and take it in as well. Because I think it can make us all better, and more effective, and even make us healthier if we do so. This is not to say that we should suffer fools gladly, or calmly; nor is it to suggest that there aren’t times when folks just need to be put on blast in some way, shape or form. But it is to say that we probably need to evaluate our toolkits and determine if maybe there are multiple tools in there, some of which are better suited to certain situations, and others of which might work best in very different ones.

So, for instance, take the case of someone who we know from years of experience says racist or sexist or otherwise harmful and bigoted things, pretty much as a matter of routine. This is someone in our own family, or class at school, or at work, who we’ve long known to be that guy, perhaps; or maybe it’s someone with a high profile, like a Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or someone like that, whose entire persona is wrapped up in making demeaning comments about others. In those kinds of cases, although it might still be constructive to try and remember that they too are human beings, horribly distorted by systems of racial and gender and class and religious conditioning, I would agree: there isn’t much to be gained from approaching them tenderly or otherwise, and trying to help them work through whatever damage they’re carrying around. Not because they aren’t capable of change — we all have the capacity for transformation — but because that change isn’t likely to come just because of something you say or do to challenge them. A letter or article or speech or book or pithy Facebook post or tweet isn’t likely to be the source of their moral and ethical metamorphosis. And even if it were, the time and energy you’d have to likely pour into the effort would probably exhaust and destroy you before it changed them, so there are some self-preservation concerns here as well.

Rather than trying to fix their damage, or even really understand it, being soft on people in this kind of instance might mean (in the case of family) just walking away from their toxicity, and ending your relationship with them, since attacking them probably won’t help. In the case of someone like Limbaugh, whose high profile poison can wreak far more havoc, it may mean trying to convince his sponsors to pull support for his show, even while trying to refrain from going personally after him on our Facebook feeds with caustic attacks. As gratifying as it can be (and boy don’t I know it), to call someone like that an idiot, or blowhard, or asshat (my personal favorite), it really is pretty hard to imagine that any of that moves us even one step closer to a better, more decent and equitable society.  It makes me feel good for a second or two, it lets the people who see the attack on social media pile on — so it rallies our “team” together for a brief moment of imagined camaraderie — and perhaps gets under the skin of the folks who are on our friends’ list or who follow our feeds, and whom we’re frankly trying to piss off (oh, yes, and don’t act like you’ve never done that). But beyond that, not much. Going hard on the system that spews the poison and makes it profitable would be far more meaningful than any personal vitriol we might be able to throw in the direction of the person we detest, even if at some cosmic level they may deserve it.

But what about other cases? Not the obvious jerk, the blatant bigot, the apparently sociopathic practitioner of rhetorical poison, but rather, the person who shows up in our Facebook feed or on Twitter, with whom we went to school 10 or 20 years ago, and who we really haven’t seen much since, but whose friend request we approved, or who we agreed to follow, because, ya’ know, they always seemed nice enough back in the day? And then all of the sudden they’re putting up some infuriating shit, and they’re saying things that strike us as implicitly racist or sexist about someone, or some issue we care about? Now what? Well, I suspect that for most, here too the instinct might be to blast away. And not only might that be the instinct, but it’s an instinct that is nurtured and all-too-easily rewarded by the mechanics of social media, mechanics that seem tailor-made for a “shoot first, think later (or not at all)” approach. Once again, been there, done that. But is any of this helpful?

Well, I can’t speak for others, but I know that I cannot remember a time that blasting on someone like that actually made me feel better. Oh sure, it’s cathartic in the moment, and then the doubt creeps in: Jeez, is that really what I wanted to say? Did that really help matters any? Man, I hope he doesn’t think I’m an asshole. Maybe I should go back and be a little clearer about what I was trying to convey (too late!) In these instances, it seems like perhaps a benefit of the doubt is in order. This person said or did something that was messed up. I’d like to bring that to their attention and actually find out where they’re coming from, since after all, I don’t really know them very well if at all. So maybe I need to approach this (at least at first) as a fact-finding mission more than anything. Ask some questions to try and gauge why the person said what they said, wrote what they wrote, did what they did, or whatever. Based on that person’s reply, I can then determine the next step I need to take in the process, whether it’s walking away, challenging them respectfully or perhaps (in certain cases) going ahead and publicly seeking to expose them for their actions.

And then there’s one final case: a situation where someone you know does something wrong, someone for whom you generally have respect and whom you know to be a person of good and positive intentionality, but who nonetheless says or does something that could be injurious on the basis of race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc. Now what? It seems to me that neither of the above two approaches are sufficient in this kind of case. Because although intent — as we who do anti-oppression work are quick to note — doesn’t matter in terms of assessing whether a harm has occurred (i.e., something can be racist or sexist in terms of its impact, even if you didn’t mean to hurt anyone), it most certainly should matter in one sense: namely, how we approach the person to whom we are seeking to offer a criticism. If I know you, and believe you to be a person whose intentionality around these issues is positive, and then you say or do something wrong, and then I go after you the same way I would a stranger whose intentionality I do not know, or the same way I would Ted Nugent, whose intent I actually know to be hurtful, then I’m the one who’s sorta being the asshole. To not approach you with kindness in that situation, is to not only ignore strategic considerations but basic notions of how people in relationship (as friends, colleagues or whatever) are supposed to treat one another.

So it means, when someone I know says something that could easily have the effect of perpetuating a racist or sexist stereotype, or, let’s say, a stereotype about those with disabilities, or poor folks, rather than publicly announcing “this is what racism looks like,” or, “this is what ableism looks like,” or attempting to skewer them in some public fashion as someone who was racist, or ableist, or whatever, I would hope that I would reach out to them personally first, or maybe even on social media (if that was the location of the violation) and say something like,”Hey, I’m sure you didn’t mean it this way, but this thing you said struck me as possibly reinforcing certain stereotypes or discriminatory viewpoints, so I just thought I would mention it and see what you thought, and perhaps we could have a dialogue about it?”

When I have done that with others (and I have),  and when others have done that with me (and they have), it has never failed to produce positive discussion, acknowledgment of the mistake, and common ground moving forward.  This is because such a statement both conveys a serious concern and makes note of what that concern entails, but also signals clear recognition of the basic core decency of the person being challenged. Perhaps some would think this level of  gentleness unnecessary, and that to encourage it is to simply cater to thin-skinned people who take everything too personally. I suppose it could be in certain cases. But at the same time, it is pretty basic to human psychology that when we are criticized for oppressive behavior, unless we are literal sociopaths, we recoil. While I might not much care how someone who is trying to be oppressive feels about my critique of them, it would be pretty shitty of me not to care what a friend felt about one, or how someone I knew was trying to get it right felt about one. And if I blasted them, all the while secretly hoping they would fire back at me, just so I could further discredit them or show others how horrible they can be, then I am being not only vicious, but cynically and manipulatively so. And I have done this, and I have had it done to me, and in neither case was their anything about it that was remotely productive.

In the end, most folks are good people trying to do the best we can with limited tools and understanding. At some level, we all know that too; we know it about ourselves, and I think most of us know it about others. But we make use of these platforms, from Facebook to Twitter — hell, even e-mails sometimes — that are constructed in such a way as to make that basic truism irrelevant in the moment. There is a keyboard, and a send button, and a desire to be the very first person to call out someone else for something they just did, because it’s important to be first, to show others how smart we are, rather than to work with others to facilitate growth. And then maybe, if we’re lucky, our criticism of someone else will go viral, with hashtags even, because hooray! And then we can say we did that, and feel important for a week or so, which in a world as fractured as this one, I suppose can occasionally be a pretty nice substitute for actually being seen and heard as an actual person.

So although I cannot control how others choose to speak to me or about me, to critique me or challenge me, I will absolutely say this much. I am going to try very strenuously, for my own health and for the health of the world I would like to help create, to go “hard on systems but soft on people.” Because I am interested in working against the former and with the latter. And I apologize to all whom I have at any point angered, injured or harmed in any way by not staying true to this principle. I will try and do better. I hope you will too.

Resurrecting Apartheid: White Police and Politicians are Waging War on Black America

It seems like no exaggeration to suggest that at this moment, a half-century after the greatest victories of the civil rights movement, America is drifting backwards towards apartheid. It’s not a word I use lightly, nor one we are accustomed to using when describing our current condition. Indeed, its not even a word that most are willing to utter when referencing our past. It’s a word we like to reserve for others, for the formerly white-dominated South Africa, but not for ourselves, and certainly not now, what with a black president and all.

But beyond the presence of brown faces in high places, can anyone really claim without gagging on the sheer dimensions of the lie, that we are even within intercontinental-ballistic-missile-striking-distance of that state of post-raciality so many naive white folks assured us had arrived upon the election of Barack Obama? People like Rudy Giuliani and William Bennett and John Bolton and Ann Coulter, all of whom proclaimed racism essentially over as soon as the election had been called?

Is it really a stretch to call it apartheid, even as one after another after another after another black male (roughly one every 28 hours) — and more than a few black women and girls — are gunned down by police or vigilantes in city after city and town after town, unarmed, or armed only with an air rifle in a Wal-Mart? And this, even as white men can point their guns at federal officials or parade around the streets, or in Target or churches or Chipotle, or bars (because guns around booze is always a great idea) or anywhere they damned well please with weapons — real ones, with bullets — and be left to see another day? Or in some cases even lauded as heroes and the new “freedom riders,” standing up for their constitutional rights?

Honestly, when a white man in a place like New Orleans can literally point his weapon directly at not one, not two, but three members of the New Orleans Police Department, and when told to drop his weapon, answer back, “No, you drop your fucking gun,” and remain a breathing, carbon-based life form — as was the case this past April for Derrick Daniel Thomas — then you know you’re dealing with a two-tiered law enforcement regime hardly different from the ones that existed under Jim Crow. Google the NOPD and check out their history if you harbor any doubts about how such an act as Thomas’s would have gone down had he been black.

Hell, when I lived in the city, one of my roommates was punched and bloodied by the NOPD just for giving side-eye after they accused him of robbing a white woman several blocks away. Even after she told them he wasn’t the guy — oh yeah, they shoved him in the car and took him over to her for an entirely improper sidewalk lineup — they still threw him back in the car and headed downtown to book him for resisting arrest. Because apparently denying culpability for a crime you didn’t commit is resisting arrest in apartheid America. It was only when Darryl informed the police that his uncle had been the city’s first black Lieutenant (and having named him, sufficiently scared the white grunt cops) that they resigned to letting him go.

Why should we refrain from the charge of apartheid when police departments like those in Ferguson, Missouri — scene of the latest sacrifice to the gods of white supremacy, and with a recent history of overtly racist leadership and racist brutality against folks of color — continue to patrol the streets of their town as if they were an occupying force in a foreign country? As they include among their ranks the kind of retread bigots who openly berate the people for whom they work as “animals?” This is Sharpeville, 1960 or Soweto, 1976, only with lower body counts (so far). This is Birmingham, 1963, Selma, 1965, only with a midwestern accent, rather than the southern type we’d long been told to expect. Fifty years later and white law enforcement officers are still behaving as if the ruling in Dred Scott — that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect” — were still operative. Because sadly, and no matter what the Constitution may say, it appears that it is, so much so that it may well become the new motto for police around the country, soon to replace the “protect and serve” emblems on their patrol cars.

Can we really dispute the creeping, perhaps galloping return of apartheid, in a nation where black children are 3 times more likely than white children to be suspended or expelled from school, even though the rates of serious school rule infractions are roughly the same between whites and children of color? When black children are being suspended from pre-school as young as 3 years of age, while white children in their very same classes, whose behavior is far worse, are not? When African American youth are six times more likely than similar white youth to be incarcerated for a first offense, even when their crimes are identical? When black youth are twice as likely as whites to be in classrooms taught by the most inexperienced teachers?

Can we afford to split hairs about how it’s not really apartheid because after all, there are no formal laws mandating discrimination, when black folks continue to be 4 times more likely than whites to be arrested for a marijuana possession offense, even though rates of weed usage are virtually identical across racial lines? Apartheid 2.0 may be a slight upgrade to the nation’s racial software, but it’s running on the same basic platform.

Is apartheid truly too strong a noun to deploy in a nation where white women with substance abuse problems are regularly steered towards life and sobriety coaches or other forms of treatment, while black and brown women are steered towards prison cells? Is it mere hyperbole to use such a word in a place where department stores are so guilty of racially profiling black shoppers that they have to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to those they unfairly victimized, while a wealthy white woman who actually did shoplift can go free for an actual crime?

Can we really refuse to call it apartheid when police in a town like Ferguson are almost twice as likely to stop and search black motorists as opposed to white ones, even though whites are nearly 60 percent more likely to have illegal contraband on them when searched? When cops are, according to recent research, likely to view black youth as young as 10 as older and more dangerous than they are, and even to dehumanize them, viewing them as akin to apes?

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 on his home) 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?

What other than apartheid can we call it when city officials in Detroit can shut off water to thousands of mostly black residents for owing a few hundred dollars on their bills, while refusing to cut off white-led corporations that collectively owe millions?

Apartheid is indeed making a comeback, and not only on the streets of our cities and towns but at the polling booth, where officials in North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Virginia and dozens of other states are trying to make it harder for people of color to vote, by requiring photo ID (which people of color are less likely to possess), and by shortening early voting (which people of color are more likely to use), or eliminating minority-majority polling centers altogether. Even though there is literally no evidence of a voter fraud problem, only 31 cases in 15 years involving in-person fraud that could even theoretically have been stopped by a photo ID requirement, and no rational reason for shortening early voting at all, except that black people and lower income folks are more likely to make use of it, because they aren’t as likely to have flexibility on the regular election day.

Occasionally, right wingers even admit that the changes are intended to suppress black Democratic turnout and swing elections to Republicans. Indeed, in Texas, officials even used a version of that argument — the one about the desire to sway elections from one party to another — as a defense of the legal changes they were advocating. The only bias being introduced, they insisted, was partisan, not racial per se, and so the changes weren’t therefore unconstitutional, despite the obvious racial disparity the changes would elicit, and the fact that in states like Texas race and party affiliation are increasingly linked.

And so fifty years after the Selma to Montgomery march — organized specifically to rally support for full voting rights for African Americans, and during which march white police viciously attacked peaceful demonstrators — police are once again attacking peaceful demonstrators, arresting journalists, and firing tear gas at residents just because they can, while political elites, right wing commentators and reactionary Supreme Court justices attack the Voting Rights Act, and seek to roll back access to the franchise by way of less obvious, but no less effective methods than poll taxes and literacy tests, or, say, property requirements (which several on the white right have openly said they would like to reinstate).

Unfortunately, almost no one in the nation’s leadership class is willing to see the beast we are facing for what it is. Few, and certainly not the president, seem prepared to call out the racism that is so endemic to almost every case of police brutality and violence, or the machinations of right-wingers seeking to disenfranchise voters of color. And when it comes to the latest horror in Missouri, the desire of the president to lecture black people about their anger and small-scale property destruction rather than lecturing white people about their racism, their fear and contempt and hatred of black bodies — and prior even to the obligatory condemnation of police violence there — reeks of a moral putrescence both dispiriting and revolting to behold. When a guy like Rand Paul, who thinks companies should have the right to discriminate against black people — in other words, someone who does not even believe in the Civil Rights Act — can actually issue a more meaningful and forceful condemnation of police racism than Barack Obama, something is clearly amiss in this country. And our failure to call it what it is, to name it, to confront the truth of who we are once again becoming, will not make it go away.

Only a commitment to utterly overhauling policing, demilitarizing the cops, purging all racists from the ranks of law enforcement, requiring them to wear cameras at all times, requiring them to live in the communities they police, and a host of other reforms, can possibly stem the tide of brutality and bigotry that currently courses through the veins of the nation’s warrior cops. The temporary replacement of Ferguson’s police by the state highway patrol, led by a conscientious black officer — though it is an excellent start for defusing the current crisis — is only a first step. And only a commitment to a full restoration and extension of the Voting Rights Act can end the drift back to blatant white supremacy in the political system. It is time for laws that will prevent any policy, practice or electoral procedure that disproportionately erects barriers to black and brown voting, and it is time to apply those laws to every state, not just the places covered by the original Act. Apartheid, after all, isn’t just for the South anymore. Hell, it never was.

Tears of a Clown: Robin Williams, Suicide and Some Reflections on Sadness

It’s hard to know how to begin this time. Mostly it’s because my head is spinning, but also it’s because this isn’t my normal literary wheelhouse, so there is no store of pithy anecdotes to which I can turn in search of just the right words. It is as simple as this, I suppose: Robin Williams is dead. And not just dead, but dead apparently by his own hand. One of about 40,000 Americans who will commit suicide this year, one-fourth of them in the manner Williams did, by way of suffocation or asphyxiation.

I have often felt the sting of celebrity deaths, as have many others I suspect, for no other reason than the fact that at some remove, we tend to think we know them; they have entertained us, made us laugh, or cry (or both), and so we feel entitled to grieve their passing as if they were family. But this one is different for me. Not because it was Robin Williams, an individual who was so integral to the laugh track of my life, but because who he was and what he did to bring joy to the world, and the way in which he took himself from us hits close — far too close — to home.

I was 16 when my father, a stand-up comic and an actor (whose personality has always been eerily similar to that of Williams) attempted to take his own life: a few dozen pills and a fifth of Vodka being thought sufficient to do the trick. Seeking to end the pain, whatever pain it was, that he felt he could no longer endure. A pain that was apparently greater in that moment than whatever love he felt for his wife, my mother; or for me, his son. And for nearly 30 years I have lived with it, and by “it” I mean the gnawing sense that all of us in this club — those who have either lost someone to suicide or nearly so —  share. Is there something we could have said? Something we could have done? Even when we know, intellectually, that it wasn’t our fault, there is this deep and abiding thing that we never quite shake: namely, the sense that maybe, just maybe, things could have turned out differently if we had just said this, done that, been different, loved more, prayed harder, whatever. Our loved ones would still be alive, or would never have tried to kill themselves at all.

I thought I was over that. Seriously. I had written about my father’s suicide attempt in my memoir and spoken of it in dozens of speeches over the years, and had never really broken down, had never really found the story hard to tell. I chalked up my stoicism to personal fortitude, having healed from the pain, or perhaps just to the necessity of moving on at some point. My father, after all, is still alive, and though we have no relationship to speak of, I can at least say that since that horrible day in May, 1985, I’ve grown and thrived and managed to build a family and to love and be loved; and I can also say that my dad has started his life over, and begun a new family, and that he too has learned to love and be loved. So there’s that, and in both cases those are not minor considerations.

Yet upon hearing the news of Williams’s death it struck me: I am not over it. I will never be over it. There is no getting over it because there is no way to reconcile the person one loves or loved (who so often put on a happy and brave face for the world) with the person who would say, in effect, to hell with that and proceed to check out, or at least try to. There is no getting over that pain because that pain can never make sense, at least not to those who have never suffered the kind of smothering depression, the crushing sadness, the debilitating melancholy of those who decide, even in the face of a family (and in the case of Robin Williams a world) that loved him, that such a love as that is not enough.

Think about that. In a world of 7 billion people, most of whom will be born, live and die in relative obscurity, their names known only to themselves, their immediate family, and a statistical handful of others, one such as Robin Williams — who brought so much to so many and had earned the love of hundreds of millions — was still brought low by sadness. Fame, fortune, and a family that loved him were not enough to keep him here. Though my father never attained the same success, he too lived to make people laugh and to make them happy, and in many ways he succeeded in doing this. He was, for most of his adult life,  a working comic; someone who managed to eke out a living, however marginal, doing what he loved. Yet he was never happy, never secure in his own skin, in the presence of others, or with his own thoughts.

I apologize at this point because I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say. I just know that I have to say it, have needed to say it for nearly three decades, and cannot keep it to myself in the solitude of my hotel room, alone in Buffalo so far from my home. And what I need to say is this: We must learn to hold each other far more tightly than we’ve done up to now. I am as guilty as any, having allowed myself on too many occasions (even tonight before the news came of Williams’s death), to engage in acrimonious banter on social media, so let me be the first to take a pledge here and now…no more. There isn’t time. We aren’t promised tomorrow, and even if we aren’t personally at risk for suicide, do we really have the luxury of treating death like a far-off visitor? Really? How distant? 10 years, 20, 30, 50? No matter, in the scheme of things it’s nothing, a blip on the screen of human existence, and it’s coming, for all of us, far sooner than we’d like.

We have to be there for one another, to stop fearing sadness and mental or emotional illness. It isn’t contagious. But running from it, afraid to touch it, to struggle with it, to admit of its presence in our own lives is deadly. You can’t outrun sadness. You can’t wish away depression. Sadness is part of the human condition, as integral to our experience as joy. If one cannot feel sadness then I suspect one can never really be truly joyful, for it is only in the presence of sadness that one can come to appreciate how full and amazing life can be. Our problem is that too often we try to sever that part of the human experience, or deny it, and make it go away without really healing the underlying cause of our distress.

When we ask people how they’re doing, let’s just be honest, are we really looking for an answer? Or was it just a pleasantry? If you asked someone that question and they answered back with something more complicated than “good, you?” would you listen? If they told you, “Hey, ya know, I’m not really doing too well right now,” would you stop and find out more? Perhaps many of us would. I’d like to think I would. But the unfortunate reality is that few who were in pain would even offer up the chance because we’ve all learned to keep our pain inside, to not burden others with it. We’ve been conditioned to believe that sadness, depression, emotional distress or mental illness is a sign of our weakness, not our humanity; evidence of our unique inadequacy, rather than our universal typicality. And so we soldier on, pretending of a strength we only wish we possessed, and we let the sadness consume us. For most of us, we are able to come back from whatever depths to which we descend, but not for all of us. And the point is, and as Robin Williams so aptly demonstrates, you never can tell.

A week or so ago I was reading about someone who said he had gone an entire month (I think it was) without complaining about anything. He said he kept a positive attitude and simply refused to complain, to speak negativity into the world. And while I think it’s a great idea to strive for positivity — and surely we could all complain a lot less I suppose, especially about little things — the simple truth is, when people are hurting, a smily face grin and a pledge to look on the bright side won’t do. When we complain, when we lash out, when we hurt one another with our words, we are all seeking a place to put the pain, whatever it is and from wherever it comes. It’s what we do when we can’t sit with it any longer, can’t stuff it down. It’s what we do when we fear that keeping it bottled up is too dangerous. And so rather than pledging a state of permanent contentment — after all there is much to be discontent about in this world — let us instead pledge something different: a pledge of mutual support, of genuine listening, of compassion, for one another and ourselves.

And most of all, let us pledge to stop hiding our sadness or pain in the shadows. It is real. It is part of us. And because it is, it is beautiful and horrifying and amazing and scary. But if we ever really want to know someone, or be known by them, we have to present it as readily as we would the easier parts, the happier parts, the safer parts. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and to allow others to be vulnerable with us. It’s the only way we grow, or heal. So the next time someone makes us angry, or hurts us with their words, or pushes our buttons on social media or at work, let’s all try and step back for a minute, breathe, and remember that whoever the villain might have been in that moment, they have a story, and drama, and shit going on with them about which we know nothing. And so do we. Perhaps if we could learn to admit our frailties, to acknowledge our fears, to be upfront about our own damage, others would do the same, and we could learn from one another how to get through this brief moment we’ve been given on this planet, and to get through it together.

 

 

“You Don’t Really Know Us…” 5th Graders in Chicago Brilliantly Confront Media Imagery

Amazing and powerful discussion on NPR with two 5th graders from Chicago (South Shore), whose essay (along with their class), entitled “You Don’t Really Know Us,” was published in the Chicago Tribune. Powerful testament to the ability of even 10 or 11 year olds to see through the phony, hostile and prejudicial media narratives that too often cloud our vision. A must listen…