nonsite | In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s
2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new
introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” that considers the essay in view of the contemporary situation.
Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its
proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of
egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class
politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial
class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a
political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations.
Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but
empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things,
antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that
its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the
distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes
the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable
along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague
Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the
burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair
if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the
dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever
LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice,
articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical
economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward
individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious
distinctions.
We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this
argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have
consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through
mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1
For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on
reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of
racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response
to the deep sources of the phenomenon.
Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl)
indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that
in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by
police that is nearly double their share of the general American
population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly
equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are
killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the
first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of
the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven
percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed
through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or
unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear:
among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice
their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than
theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding
exercise2
called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger
of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a
fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States
since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright,
prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure
dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793
Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered
to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the
pursuit of public revenue.”3
This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual
declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that
“racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however
modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice
manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or
paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the
glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those
killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial
disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other
possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that
ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with
median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family
income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data,
the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of
population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages
6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota
4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible
that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated
among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%;
South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.
However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29
people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in
several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police
were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were
among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New
Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in
2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of
police killing.
What is clear in those states, however, is that the great
disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native
Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to
find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has
nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless
collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual
overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial
strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days.
0 comments:
Post a Comment