“In Ferguson And Beyond, Punishing Humanity”: Subordinated People Are Mistakenly Viewed As Brutes Or Even Nonhuman Animals
On Sept. 26, two peaceful protesters were arrested in Ferguson, Mo. Watch this video (warning: includes profanity) and you will see two white officers arresting a young black woman who is wearing a red hoodie. One tackles her in a chokehold and yanks her hands behind her back. She whimpers, and they force her face down on the pavement. They then carry her off with one officer holding her by an arm, and the other holding her by a leg. Her body has gone limp; they dangle her between them carelessly. Why were these two men handling her “like an animal?” asks the protester recording the scene with her cellphone. It is a good question. And its answer is not obvious.
One possibility is that people are treated brutally because those who mistreat them fail to grasp their common humanity — or, similarly, their personhood. The idea is that seeing another person as a fellow human being is not only a prerequisite for ethical relations with her, but also strongly disposes us to treat her as we ought to. In George Orwell’s experience, when you see another person as “visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, [then] you don’t feel like shooting at him.” (Or her — presumably.) Moreover, man’s inhumanity to man (and women, too) often stems from overlooking our shared human capacities, an appreciation of which would tend to give rise to empathy. Subordinated people are mistakenly viewed as brutes, subhuman, or even nonhuman animals.
This line of argument regarding the most virulent forms of racism has been developed in detail by David Livingstone Smith, among others. It is also accepted in some form by many different kinds of humanists in philosophy, variously inspired by Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein. And it has echoed loudly in the blogosphere in the two months following the Ferguson protests — which erupted when Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by a white police officer. It is not hard to see why. When, three days after the shooting, another white officer called the (primarily black) protesters “[expletive] animals,” it cemented many people’s fears that Brown had been slain in a similar spirit — the thought being that the officer responsible, Darren Wilson, saw Brown as an animal, or at least as less than human. Witnesses are on record saying that Brown had his hands up, that he was posing no threat to the officer, but that Wilson “just kept shooting” — even after Brown backed down, in a classic gesture of surrender. Wilson shot at Brown as if he felt powerless to stop him, almost as if he were faced with a bear or an ape or a zombie.
I used to be a humanist in this sense of the term. But I am fast losing my religion. Dehumanization increasingly seems to me to be merely a symptom of the problem. The problem being precisely that black people are being seen as people — and they are seen as being threatening, and taken down, because of it.
The humanist line on Ferguson is unduly optimistic, and rests on a psychologically dubious assumption. Namely, that when people who have historically enjoyed a dominant position in society (in this case white men) come to recognize historically subordinated people (racial minorities, women) as their moral and social equals, they will welcome the newcomers. But seeing others as similar to ourselves can lead to hostility and resentment under certain conditions. It’s true that Orwell’s vision of a person running across the battlefield holding up his trousers during the Spanish civil war transformed an enemy combatant into a vulnerable human being in his eyes — someone who must have been undressed or indisposed moments before the gunfire started. But this humanizing vision involved no loss of status for Orwell. He felt sorry for the man. He saw him as ridiculous.
The situation is different when it comes to white men’s perception of non-whites and women. Over time, as the fight for equality has allowed some advancement and social mobility for racial minorities, as well as for women, toward what we might call the inner circle of humanity, white men have experienced a relative loss of status. And they now have more rivals for desirable positions. Add to that the fact that they may find themselves surpassed by those they tacitly expected to be in social positions beneath them, and we have a recipe for resentment and the desire to regain dominance.
None of this is likely to be conscious, nor to manifest itself at all times; nor is it true of all white men, obviously. Rather, it is likely to come out in momentary flashes of aggression for some white men when they are feeling threatened. That “Bring it, you [expletive] animals, bring it!” that the Ferguson police officer spat at the protesters back in August should be heard in this vein as a slur and a battle cry. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, those accused of dehumanizing others often “acknowledge their victims’ humanity in the very act of humiliating, stigmatizing, reviling and torturing them.” The cop put these people down by likening them to animals — an insult that depends, for its humiliating quality, on its targets’ distinctively human desire to be recognized as human beings. The cop also declared his readiness to fight for his position in the existing social hierarchy. And the hierarchy assumes that we are all people — some of whom are more equal than others, naturally. This is the nature of domination and subordination relations, which have been theorized by Catharine MacKinnon and Sally Haslanger, among others. They require that there be people ranked above and/or beneath you. And it is important that we all know our place, if only tacitly.
Consider, too, what the people involved were doing in two of the above cases. They were engaged in that uniquely human activity of protesting. They were behaving as no animal besides us ever behaves. They were being “political animals,” to use Aristotle’s term for human beings. Many philosophers say that it is our capacity for rationality that distinguishes us as human. But at least as distinctive, one might think, is our capacity to be political.
The humanist line on Ferguson hence fails to explain what seems to provoke the aggression — namely, acts of political and personal defiance, which only people can demonstrate. Moreover, it is hardly surprising that historically subordinated people should be perceived in this way when they try to assert themselves around, or over, dominant group members. They are liable to be perceived as belligerent, “uppity,” insubordinate or out of order.
This is a plausible hypothesis about what happened in Michael Brown’s case as well. The exact events remain in some dispute, but most agree on the same basic sequence. What seemed to set Wilson off was that Brown challenged his authority. The incident began when Brown ignored Wilson’s orders to get out of the center of the street, where he and his friend had been walking. Wilson drove off, apparently cowed. He then seems to have changed his mind, decided to stand his ground, have a do-over. He slammed his car into reverse; by some accounts, he was taunted by Brown, following a physical altercation. In the end, Wilson shot Brown at least six times, including twice in the head, and reportedly kept shooting after Brown surrendered. But at that point, it seems, it was too late for deference.
The humanist line on Ferguson also fails to explain the quality of the aggression, which has a resentful, vindictive tenor. After he was killed, Brown’s body was left uncovered on the street for some four hours afterwards, to add deep social insult to fatal physical injury. And when another young black man, Kajieme Powell, was shot and killed a mere 10 days later in St. Louis, the police officers who shot him did something extraordinary. After they had killed him, they handcuffed his dead body. Powell had been staggering around with a small knife, apparently trying to commit so-called suicide by cop. The man clearly needed some help to raise him up again. Instead, the police shot him down, and arrested him post mortem.
These actions, as well as being shameful, reveal a resentful and punitive mentality behind the aggression, which are classic examples of what the English philosopher P. F. Strawson famously called the interpersonal “reactive attitudes.” These attitudes are held to be both distinctive and central to our dealings with other human beings — that is, with people who we recognize as such, or as fully paid-up members in this club we call humanity. When it comes to animals and children and people we regard as (temporarily or permanently) not in control of their actions, we may try to correct, manage, deter or restrain their behavior. But, ordinarily and ideally, we do not resent it. They are not moral agents. We can’t really blame them.
And resentment and blame, along with punitive behavior and the associated social practices, are precisely what black people in this country are being systematically subjected to at present, at every level of the criminal justice system. Black people are proportionately far more likely to be stopped, frisked, searched, arrested, tased, charged, tried, convicted, incarcerated and executed (by means that are often grossly unconstitutional). Black bodies are routinely being policed and punished without mercy. And we don’t police animals in this way. Nor do we punish them in this spirit.
Unfortunately, seeing people’s humanity is only the moral beginning. Sometimes people will be punished for the crime of being people.
By: Kate Manne, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University; Opinionator, The Stone, The New York Times, October 12, 2014
“A Problem That Doesn’t Exist”: Walker Struggles To Defend Wisconsin Voting Restrictions
Wisconsin’s voter-ID law is such a fiasco, it’s hard not to wonder sometimes how anyone could defend it. In a debate on Friday night, Gov. Scott Walker (R), who fought to impose voting restrictions before his re-election bid, made his best case.
Walker said that the voter ID law, which the U.S. Supreme Court just blocked from being enforced, is worthwhile if it stops one person from fraudulently casting a ballot.
“It doesn’t matter if there’s one, 100 or 1,000,” Walker said. “Amongst us who would be that one person who would like to have our vote canceled out by a vote that was cast illegally?”
This isn’t a good argument, but it’s important to evaluate in the context of the Republican “war on voting” in general.
Walker realizes that there are no documented incidents in modern Wisconsin history of a voter committing voter fraud, at least not in a way that could be prevented by a voter-ID law. The Republican governor also realizes that independent estimates suggest more than 300,000 legal, eligible Wisconsin voters could be disenfranchised by this voter-ID law, which addresses a problem that doesn’t exist.
But note the calculus Walker makes: disenfranchising 300,000 legal voters is a price he’s willing to pay to ensure that one – not one percent, just one literal individual – fraudulent-but-hypothetical vote isn’t cast. Wisconsin’s governor is prepared to create the worst election-related chaos in the nation, on purpose, regardless of the costs or consequences, if it means one individual who might cast a fraudulent vote is prevented from doing so.
If this is the best argument Walker can come up with, voter-suppression proponents really need to come up with new talking points.
Of course, I should mention that the governor’s defense is, at least for now, a moot point. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked implementation of Wisconsin’s ridiculous law last week.
That said, Walker’s administration, and Wisconsin’s Republican state attorney general, are still looking for ways to impose this and related voting restrictions in this year’s election.
This is no small matter for the governor’s personal prospects – polls show him in a very tight race against challenger Mary Burke (D), and if Walker can disenfranchise 300,000 voters, his odds of winning improve. In other words, the Republican incumbent has a strong incentive to prevent many of his constituents from voting, and he continues to look for new ways to make that happen.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, october 13, 2014
“U.S. Citizens Have A Right To Protest, Even In Ferguson”: Rights Not Respected In The Moment Are Not Rights At All
Last week, a federal judge told us what we already knew.
Namely, that police in Ferguson, Missouri, violated the rights of protesters demonstrating against the shooting death of Michael Brown. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry struck down an ad hoc rule under which cops had said people could not stand still while peacefully protesting. Some were told they couldn’t stop walking for more than five seconds; others that they had to walk faster.
Again: These were not rioters. These were citizens seeking “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment gives them the right to do. So Perry’s ruling is welcome, but not particularly surprising. The no-stop dictate was so flagrantly wrong as to make any other decision unthinkable.
Still, one’s sense of righteous vindication is tempered by the fact that police felt free to try this absurd stratagem in the first place — and by the fact that this was hardly the only recent example of police using the Constitution for Kleenex.
Ferguson, let us not forget, is also the town where reporters were tear gassed and jailed and photographers ordered to stop taking pictures, which seems a pretty straightforward abridgment of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press. Meanwhile, a new ACLU report makes Boston Police the latest — but hardly the only — department empirically shown to engage in racially biased policing, which would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws.” And a recent Washington Post series illustrated how civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to search your vehicle, seize any cash they find and keep it, without even charging you with a crime, until or unless you prove to their satisfaction that you came by the money legally. Goodbye, Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Farewell, Fourteenth Amendment stricture against seizure of property “without due process of law.”
It seems our constitutional rights are being nibbled out from under us, compromise by compromise, expediency by expediency, while we watch with dull complacence. In our unthinking mania for laws to “get tough on crime,” we actually made it tougher on ourselves, altering the balance of power between people and police to the point where a cop can now take your legally earned money off your sovereign person and there’s little you can do about it.
“I know my rights,” an aggrieved citizen would yell once upon a time. Turns out that doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore.
Indeed, at the height of the Ferguson protests, an L.A. cop named Sunil Dutta published in the Washington Post an op-ed advising that, “if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.” Don’t argue, he said, even if you “believe (or know)” your rights are being violated. Deal with it later.
Certainly, he’s correct that there’s nothing to be gained by making an a– of yourself or making an angry cop angrier. Nothing will be settled on a street corner.
Yet, there is something unsettling about the idea that you are only allowed to assert your rights at a later date in a different forum. The bullying behavior and contempt for the Constitution that characterized police in Ferguson ought to leave us less than sanguine with that notion, ought to encourage us to resist — at the ballot box, in the council meeting and, yes, by lawful protest — this drift toward unlimited police authority.
It’s all well and good that now, several weeks after the fact, a court affirms the rights Ferguson police denied. But that’s a poor consolation prize. An argument can be made that rights which aren’t respected in the moment they are asserted are not really rights at all.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, October 12, 2014
“The Right’s Scary Ebola Lesson”: How Anti-Government Mania Is Harming America
If not for serial budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine and we would certainly have better treatment, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins tells the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. This comes on the heels of reporting that the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by half since 2006, and new revelations about how botched protocols at the Dallas hospital that turned away Thomas Eric Duncan and then failed to treat him effectively also led to the infection of one of Duncan’s caregivers.
Yet most of the media coverage of the politics of Ebola to date has centered on whether President Obama has adequately and/or honestly dealt with the disease. “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. Cruz is probably the wrong guy to talk about seriousness: his government shutdown forced the NIH to delay clinical trials and made the CDC cut back on disease outbreak detection programs this time last year.
I find myself wondering: When, if ever, will the political debate over Ebola center on the way the right-wing libertarian approach to government has made us less safe?
My fans at Newsbusters and other right-wing sites were outraged last week when I raised questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry shared some responsibility for the nation’s Ebola crisis with President Obama, since the outbreak occurred in his state on his watch. Now that a second person has been infected there, I think the question is even more relevant.
The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”
“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.
But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.
That agenda, however, has been disowned by the modern GOP. Sarah Kliff got lots of attention for her Vox piece starkly depicting how the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by more than half since 2006. The chart she used actually came from a piece in Scientific American last week, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s must-reading: it dispassionately explained the way we’ve underfunded and degraded our public health infrastructure. And again, it made me think about the Republican policies that have hampered our ability to fight this crisis.
Isn’t there a fair way to say that cutting 45,700 public health workers at the state and local level, largely under GOP governors, was irresponsible? As was slashing the CDC’s prevention budget by half since 2006, or cutting the Affordable Care Act’s prevention budget by a billion? Sen. John McCain wants an “Ebola czar,” but the Senate is blocking confirmation of the Surgeon General. Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?
It seems relevant to me that Texas is 33rd in public health funding. It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”
When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.
As the great science writer David Dobbs concluded last week: “So the richest country on earth has no team to contain the first appearance of one of the most deadly viruses we’ve ever known.”
I’ve found myself wondering if Ebola is unquestionably a plus for Republicans three weeks before the midterm, as everyone (including me) has assumed. Certainly Republicans think it is; that’s why vulnerable Senate candidates, from Thom Tillis in North Carolina to Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are fear-mongering about it.
But if Democrats are the party of government, and thus seen as culpable by voters when government does wrong, aren’t government-hating, budget-slashing Republicans politically vulnerable when we need government to do something right, and the cuts they’ve pushed have compromised its ability to do so? Or does IOKIYAR mean the media just shrugs when the GOP fear-mongers, but would punish any Democrat respond in kind?
Blogger Kevin Drum likes to complain about a Democratic “Hack Gap” – the fact that liberal pundits are too willing to criticize Democratic leaders, while GOP pundits more often line up behind theirs. I don’t agree with Drum – in the end, Chris Matthews and I didn’t cost the president his re-election in 2012 – but it’s an interesting debate. Personally I think Democrats have a “Brilliant and Ruthless Campaign Operative Gap,” when it comes to shamelessly exploiting the other side’s political weakness.
The GOP’s anti-government crusade has hampered our ability to face the Ebola challenge. In an election year, there’s nothing wrong with Democrats saying that clearly. Campaigns should be cutting ads right now spotlighting the way Republican budget cuts have devastated the public health infrastructure we need to fight diseases like Ebola. Here’s one such ad from the Agenda Project.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 13, 2014
“Secret Deficit Lovers”: The GOP Deficit Scolds Are Having A Hard Time Letting Go
What if they balanced the budget and nobody knew or cared?
O.K., the federal budget hasn’t actually been balanced. But the Congressional Budget Office has tallied up the totals for fiscal 2014, which ran through the end of September, and reports that the deficit plunge of the past several years continues. You still hear politicians ranting about “trillion dollar deficits,” but last year’s deficit was less than half-a-trillion dollars — or, a more meaningful number, just 2.8 percent of G.D.P. — and it’s still falling.
So where are the ticker-tape parades? For that matter, where are the front-page news reports? After all, talk about the evils of deficits and the grave fiscal danger facing America dominated Washington for years. Shouldn’t we be making a big deal of the fact that the alleged crisis is over?
Well, we aren’t, and once you understand why, you also understand what fiscal hysteria was really about.
First, ordinary Americans aren’t celebrating the deficit’s decline because they don’t know about it.
That’s not mere speculation on my part. Earlier this year, YouGov polled Americans on fiscal issues, asking among other things whether the deficit had increased or declined since President Obama took office. (In case you’re wondering, the pollsters carefully explained the difference between annual deficits and the level of accumulated debt.) More than half of those polled said it had gone up, while only 19 percent correctly said that it had gone down.
Why doesn’t the public know better? Probably because of the way much of the news media report this and other issues, with bad news played up and good news downplayed if it’s reported at all.
This has been glaringly obvious in the case of health reform, where every problem with the Affordable Care Act has been the subject of headlines, while in right-wing media — and to some extent in mainstream news sources — favorable developments go unremarked. As a result, many people — even, in my experience, liberals — have the impression that the rollout of Obamacare has been a disaster, and have no idea that enrollment is above expectations, costs are lower than expected, and the number of Americans without insurance has dropped sharply. Surely something similar has happened on the budget deficit.
But what about people who pay a lot of attention to the budget, the self-proclaimed deficit hawks? (Some of us prefer to call them deficit scolds.) They’ve spent the past few years telling us that budget shortfalls are the most important issue facing the nation, that terrible things will happen unless we act to stem the flow of red ink. Are they expressing satisfaction over the fading of that threat?
Not a chance. Far from celebrating the deficit’s decline, the usual suspects — fiscal-scold think tanks, inside-the-Beltway pundits — seem annoyed by the news. It’s a “false victory,” they declare. “Trillion dollar deficits are coming back,” they warn. And they’re furious with President Obama for saying that it’s time to get past “mindless austerity” and “manufactured crises.” He’s declaring mission accomplished, they say, when he should be making another push for entitlement reform.
All of which demonstrates a truth that has been apparent for a while, if you have been paying close attention: Deficit scolds actually love big budget deficits, and hate it when those deficits get smaller. Why? Because fears of a fiscal crisis — fears that they feed assiduously — are their best hope of getting what they really want: big cuts in social programs. A few years ago they almost managed to bully the nation into cutting Social Security and/or raising the Medicare eligibility age; they even had hopes of turning Medicare into an underfinanced voucher program. Now that window of opportunity is closing fast.
But isn’t the falling deficit just a short-term blip, with the long-run outlook as dire as ever? Actually, no. Falling deficits right now have a lot to do with a strengthening economy plus some of that “mindless austerity” the president condemned. But there has also been a dramatic slowdown in the growth of health spending — and if that continues, the long-run fiscal outlook is much better than anyone thought possible not long ago. Yes, current projections still show a rising ratio of debt to G.D.P. starting some years from now, and uncomfortable levels of debt a generation from now. But given all the clear and present dangers we face, it’s hard to see why dealing with that distant and uncertain prospect should be any kind of policy priority.
So let’s say goodbye to fiscal hysteria. I know that the deficit scolds are having a hard time letting go; they’re still trying to bring back the days when Bowles and Simpson bestrode the Beltway like colossi. But those days aren’t coming back, and we should be glad.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2014
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