Melian Dialogues

I don’t have anything terribly original to say on the topic of the current events in Baltimore. Anyone with two eyes, a few neurons to rub together, and a sense of history can understand for themselves that, whatever you think of riots as a political or moral phenomenon, it is impossible to detach those events from their manifestation as the reaction of a brutalized populace. Take a few minutes to read Ta-Nehisi Coates on this topic, then come back if you feel like it.

So now, a few words about the rhetoric of (non-)violence. Hardly anything in American political life is so reliable as the Grave Concerns of Very Serious People whenever more than three black people show up in the same spatiotemporal vicinity to express some degree of dissatisfaction with their treatment by the American police state; the ritual bemoaning of violence is metronomic in its regularity. Curiously, those same Very Serious People are somehow very quiet when it comes to the violence perpetrated upon those very same black people. Instead, we are subjected to the standard casual racism disguised as responsibility politics: that guy shouldn’t have run, this woman shouldn’t have spoken up, this other guy should have complied. Ad nauseam ad inifinitum.

There just isn’t any way of reconciling this double-standard that’s actually fair to the facts at hand, which is why any conversation on this topic turns into a prime example of goalpost-moving and evasion. “But destruction of property is still wrong!” “But you should still comply with police orders!” “But what about black-on-black crime?” Anything to avoid the unpleasant fact that police are enabled by the state to take lives with virtually no repercussions whatsoever, and that the lives taken are disproportionately black ones. It’s Thucydides meets Weber: the the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must, coupled with the state’s monopoly on violence and discretion in its distribution. No one familiar with the history of race in America ought to be surprised when this lethal mixture distributes that violence disproportionately onto African-Americans.

The Grave Concerns present an insurmountable double-bind. On the one hand, no one will speak for you if the police decide they like you better dead; on the other hand, no public expressions of outrage are allowed, lest you be labeled “violent.” Usually at this stage the Very Serious People suggest that the way to reform is through the voting booth, which only serves to remind everyone that none of these Very Serious People have ever lived as members of a politically disempowered community. The VSP’s tend to have a romantic notion of that decidedly un-romantic Weberian formulation, “the strong and slow boring of hard boards,” mostly because it allows an escape into cliche rather than obligating someone to actually do something, the way a real moral outrage would. After all, it’s not them who will have to do the actual boring, it’s other people, and for other people, especially other black people, justice can wait. Forever, if need be. Never mind that not being subjected to the arbitrary lethal power of the state manifested in its police force is one of those pretty basic things that one would think wouldn’t require “reform” to make happen.

This vicious circle will continue until it becomes an accepted fact in American politics that black lives are worth as much as white ones, and that a system of racial terror imposed on black communities is morally untenable. As long as that system persists, we’ll see more Baltimores for the simple reason that public protests are the only visible way that black communities have to protest against this. All the pearl-clutching over destroyed property and violence inappropriately issuing from rather than being directed at black people are just ways of avoiding that basic realization.