White Conservatives and Black Lives

I was about to post this article on the day that Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges in the killing of Philando Castille. That felt like the absolutely wrong moment to share a piece about how to talk across the ideological divide that separates Black Lives Matter from its detractors. It was a moment for the unrestrained expression of grief and rage. Since then, of course, we’ve seen the white supremacist alt-right assert itself more publicly and violently than it had in recent times, so I also want to emphasize that, when I refer to conservatives in this piece, I mean the traditional sort, not the alt-right, though I am under no illusions about the very real connections between the putrid ideology of the latter and the everyday ways white supremacy is implicit in both liberal and conservative politics.

With that said, here is the original piece:

Black Lives Matter is probably the most successful U.S. based civil and human rights movement in a generation. Its simple and elegant message has gone around the world and spawned many imitators. Yet one sector of the U.S. populace has remained largely unmoved by BLM’s message — white conservatives. Indeed, they have fulminated against it from the beginning. It is, of course, commonplace to attribute this communication breakdown to simple racism. And that’s certainly legit. But it’s ultimately not that useful.

I want to clarify at the outset that this should, in no way, be construed as a critique of Black Lives Matter, the movement by Black folks to assert their right to exist with freedom and dignity. I am not here to white-mansplain how they should improve their message. The movement’s success speaks for itself. However, there is no denying it has its limits, as any communication strategy does. The limitation I want to discuss concerns what often happens when white liberals try to talk to our conservative-leaning friends and family.

Moral Foundations Theory

For a good long while, I was genuinely bewildered by the reaction of conservatives to BLM. And it’s not just right-wingers, either. This includes many folks who might identify as independent but have a more traditional outlook on social matters. I was thoroughly perplexed, for example, by the rejoinder, “all lives matter.” How is it possible to not understand that “black lives matter” means black lives matter, too, not black lives matter more or only?

There had to be more going on than lack of comprehension. If that were all it was, a simple clarification would do the job. In reality, when white liberals try to convince conservatives there is often anger and digging in of heels. And the person trying to defend BLM ends up regarding their conservative counterpart as an uncaring, irredeemable racist. This experience is frustrating, of course, but it is also secretly satisfying to know with certainty that you’re on the right side of the issue.

I recently came across research on Moral Foundations Theory(MFT), that kind of blew my mind. The ideas, which are explained in the book, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt offer some powerful insight into the communication fail that happens between liberals and conservatives. Let me start with a brief primer on the theory. MFT was developed by a group of social and cultural psychologists trying to understand the confounding moral diversity found across various cultures. The theory proposes that the wide variety of moral systems governing human societies are based on a common set of moral foundations shared by all humans. This is not to say that nature rather than culture determines human morality. Rather, according to MFT, specific beliefs about right and wrong arise through the complex interaction between nature and culture. It might be helpful to think of these moral foundations as differently colored threads out of which a moral community weaves a unique moral tapestry.

MFT postulates six moral foundations:

• The first foundation is care/harm. It is the basis for admiring those in need and repudiating cruelty.
• The second is liberty/oppression. This foundation informs the conviction that it is wrong to impinge on an individual’s inherent right to freedom from unjust domination.
• The third foundation is fairness/cheating. It informs the principle that people should get what they deserve, but no more. People who work hard are entitled to recompense and people who commit misdeeds deserve appropriate punishment.
• The fourth foundation is sanctity/degradation, which concerns the importance of preserving the sacred. Religious strictures regarding the handling of holy objects and the performance of ceremonies rest on this foundation.
• The fifth foundation is loyalty/betrayal, which is about commitment to an ingroup. It may be expressed as team spirit or patriotism or even racial solidarity.
• The sixth foundation is authority/subversion. The moral duty to honor and respect one’s social superiors, such as parents, teachers, and other authority figures, stands on this foundation.

Countless intersecting historical, cultural, and contingent factors shape the way moral communities draw on these foundations to weave a functioning moral system. White liberals and white conservatives in the United States have constructed distinct moral communities with alternative moral systems (I’ll drop the modifiers “white” and “in the US”, but they are implied). Liberalism tends to emphasize the care/harm and liberty/oppression foundations, almost exclusively. For liberals, empathy for those who are suffering and the willingness to help them is the highest moral good. The actions seen as most immoral, meanwhile, are those that entail intentional harm or the domination of the weak by the strong.

Generally speaking, liberals see the notion of moral duties based on sanctity/degradation and loyalty/betrayal as backward (though environmentalists may see “nature” as sacred). The morality of loyalty is suspect for liberals because they tend to understand moral obligations as universal, meaning that ingroup and outgroup members are due the same moral consideration. Moreover, many liberals are contemptuous of the authority/subversion foundation and reject the notion that we have any moral obligation to obey or show deference to authority. On the contrary, liberals celebrate underdogs who defy the powerful (George Washington, Martin Luther King, etc.). A decent synopsis of the liberal morality might be: take care of the vulnerable and stand up for the oppressed.

That morality of care and liberation may seem like common sense if you’re a liberal, but then that’s precisely what makes you a liberal. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to give all six moral foundations roughly equal weight. Thus, while they value care and compassion, they value respect for authority and ingroup loyalty just as much. And protecting the sacred from debasement is at least as important as opposing oppression, especially if the oppressed are members of an outgroup. If the conservative moral matrix could be summed up in a single injunction, it would be: uphold the social institutions and sacred traditions responsible for preserving the social order. The heroes of this morality tend to be law enforcement officers and military veterans.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Back to Black Lives Matter

From the conservative perspective, society has an unwritten compact whereby the police protect us from crime and social breakdown, and, in exchange, we agree to grant them our trust and even a certain amount of reverence. Yet BLM activists are saying that police abuse their authority by brutalizing and killing innocent people, and that the institution itself is basically corrupt. Since, for conservatives, the compact with the police is sacred and indispensable to an orderly society, this message must be false, and to suggest otherwise is dangerously subversive. After all, the police routinely risk their lives in maintaining the thin blue line between social order and chaos.

In addition to considering it wrong to criticize the police because of their vital social role, conservatives also tend to feel a sense of ingroup loyalty toward law enforcement personnel. Outgroups, of course, may include the liberal elite, the mainstream media, and “social justice warriors.” The ultimate outgroup member, however, not only for many conservatives but for a vast swath of white America, is the young Black male from an inner-city neighborhood with sagging pants and a (presumed) gang affiliation. This figure is seen (implicitly, if not explicitly) as a grave threat to the social order, which is precisely why he is so often abused or killed by police, sometimes for the “crime” of talking back or running away. This stereotype is where the racism of the All Lives Matter crowd is most manifest. It is precisely because of this ingroup/outgroup mentality that many white folks are unable to hear the implicit but obvious “too.”

I should emphasize, parenthetically, that these racist stereotypes are by no means limited to conservatives. It is true, for the reasons I mentioned, that conservatives are more likely to believe that someone shot by police probably had it coming. But liberals, despite their professed care for victims of violence, tend to obsess over the victim’s guiltlessness, often losing interest when a victim turns out to have a criminal record or a gang affiliation.

It should be obvious that the standard liberal strategy of appealing to sympathy for victims of police violence is never going to be effective with those who feel strong loyalty to the police and a reflexive suspicion of their victims.

The Example of Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest, in which he sat refused to stand during the national anthem

(Photo: Kelley L Cox, USA TODAY Sports)

before his NFL football games, represents a near perfect example of this clash of moral foundations. While his protest was extremely powerful on a symbolic level, many saw it as a denigration of our society’s sacred symbols. From their perspective, he was being disloyal, not only to the police, but to the military, and to all those who have sacrificed to make our country what it is.

In addition, conservatives (as well as many liberals) are wedded to a racial progress narrative. This story assures us that our racist past is passed, and nowadays anyone in America can be successful. The wealth and celebrity status of athletes such as Kaepernick is seen as proof that the American dream is fully accessible to Black people. By publicly rejecting that narrative, Kaepernick was exhibiting not only disloyalty and disrespect, but ingratitude. Not surprisingly the backlash was swift and intense, and continues to negatively impact Kaepernick’s athletic career.

Allow me to re-emphasize that it is not the responsibility of Black folks to deal with the anger and resentment engendered by their requests for dignity and human rights. Kaepernick’s actions were an authentic and, in many ways, highly effective expression of his valid disappointment that his country is not living up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. He doesn’t need to change anything. It is on us white folks, those of us who are moved by the movement and want to take the message further, to consider why the message has failed to move our conservative friends and family. And we can begin by understanding how their moral worldview is organized. Simply assuming that our moral concerns are self-evidently right and calling anyone who doesn’t share them “hateful” may offer us a sense of moral superiority, but it isn’t going to reduce police violence.

Some Thoughts on Strategy

The situation may sound hopeless, but I don’t think it is. We may have to be willing to reign in our smug moral certainty, but there are possibilities for finding common ground on the goal of reducing police violence. Inroads are already appearing. For example, an article on The Federalist website argues that police accountability and transparency are essential to protect the integrity of policing. And this post on The American Conservative rejects the oft-heard rhetoric about a few bad apples being responsible for police brutality, and argues that the problem is systemic.

We may be entirely right that “the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality.” It may also be true that out of control hooligans with badges routinely get away with murdering people of color because police culture protects them, and the larger society doesn’t care enough to ensure the system holds them accountable. But our righteousness about these things is unhelpful when we’re talking to people who do not share our moral foundations.

If we want to find common ground with conservatives, we (white folks) need to set aside our righteousness and focus on what will move them. We might, for example, emphasize the need to keep bad police from sullying the otherwise honorable profession. We could talk about the cost to taxpayers of settling lawsuits due to police misconduct. I know this one is deeply problematic, but perhaps we should be making a more of a commotion when white people are killed by the police, rather than when they are treated with kid gloves.

These approaches may feel unsatisfying because they don’t address the deepest roots of the problem. That’s to be expected. But the point is not to satisfy our moral intuitions or score moral points; it is to convince conservatives to join us in demanding greater scrutiny of the police. While it is vital that we stay connected to our own moral values, it is equally vital that we recognize the moral values of those we wish to persuade.

Whiteness and the Violence of Victim Blaming

“Black on black” violence is not a thing. Not. A. Thing. It is a racist trope, a story deployed by the chief spokespersons for white supremacy (I see you, Fox News) as part of a rhetorical strategy to avoid responsibility for the grievous historical crimes committed on its behalf and, most recently, to derail criticisms of the police.

Yes, it is a fact that 93% of black homicide victims are killed by black perpetrators. But we should all know by now that statistical facts are only meaningful given a particular context or theory. And of course, if the fact supports an existing cultural narrative, it may be seen as basic common sense, making it that much more challenging to question. The 93% statistic is part of the “common sense” of black on black violence which in turn springs from a deep and well-practiced story of black criminality that goes back to Reconstruction.

The story of black criminality began to take hold soon after the end of legalized chattel slavery in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. In the absence of slavery, white U.S. Americans had to contend with the fact that four million people had gone, practically overnight, from bondage to freedom. And these were people that generations of Americans had been taught were naturally childlike and servile based on the color of their skin. This created a national crisis of sorts. White America had invested an enormous amount of psychological and moral capital in its construction of itself as a chosen race, destined to spread across the land, manifesting its Empire of Liberty. 

White America solved its conundrum with the story of black criminality. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad argues in The Condemnation of Blackness, beginning with the 1870 census, white academics and politicians began to deploy crime statistics to

demonstrate the inherently inferiority of black people. The statistics were already meaningless in relation to what they purported to show. After all, this was at a time when the black codes were being used to round up black men in the South to supply labor for the convict leasing system. Regardless, this new narrative became quite popular, and justified ever more intense policing of black communities in the South and North, resulting in more statistical ammunition for the narrative.

Another landmark event in the construction of this story occurred in the 1930s when the U.S Department of Justice developed its Uniform Crime Report, which tracks all crimes in the U.S. and reports them according to the racial identities of victim and perpetrator. From the beginning, the reports agglomerated various European immigrant groups into the category “white,” rendering their ethnicity-specific criminal behavior essentially invisible at a time when crime and violence were rampant within working class ethnic enclaves in Northern cities. The statistical assimilation of European immigrants was of course part of the more general 20^th century expansion of whiteness to include ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe. Meanwhile, as Gibran Muhammad explains, with respect to European immigrant communities, “struggling neighborhoods were considered a cause of crime and a reason to intervene [e.g. building libraries and community centers]. Among blacks, they were considered a sign of pathology and a reason for neglect.” (p. 76)

The story of black criminality is directly responsible for the dominant culture that easily accepts stop and frisk, the school to prison pipeline, and mass incarceration while shouting “tyranny” about universal health care. The story was decisive in providing justifications, explicit and implicit, for practices such as redlining, loan discrimination, urban renewal, and interstate highway construction, which created the economically and socially isolated black neighborhoods that are now subject to educational neglect and over-zealous policing.

This extreme residential segregation along with the failure of Civil Rights era reforms to improve the situation, led to a number of civil uprisings in the late 1960s. These events exacerbated white fears, which were then mobilized by “law and order” politicians, to launch the war on drugs, which has, from the start, been a war on black communities.  As Heather Anne Thompson explains, the drug war is directly responsible for the epidemic of violence experienced by these communities in recent decades.

The violence in inner-city black communities has, thankfully, been in decline, but this has not led to a corresponding reduction in police violence. The U.S. is now experiencing a new uprising of black people who are fed up with the violence perpetrated on their communities, not only by police, but by an entire system that some believe is bent on their eradication. The murder of Mike Brown in August 2014 was the latest (but not for long) in a tragic series of police and vigilante killings of unarmed black men stretching back to Reconstruction. The rallying cry #BlackLivesMatter is reverberating across social media, letting the world know that the treatment of black people as inherently threatening and/or ultimately disposable must stop.

After four centuries of dehumanization under de facto and de jure white supremacy, during which every one of the above-mentioned policies and practices were rationalized by conservative voices citing statistics and anecdotes absent any meaningful historical context, the pseudo-post-racial compassion of calls to focus on black on black violence ring hollow.  Before we even bother to quarrel the with these moralistic invocations, however, we must recognize their essential racist intent. Once you accept the notion that black on black crime is a thing, you have already bought into a 150 year old story, the purpose of which has always been to justify institutionalized and culturally sanctioned violence on black bodies.

Reflections on Whiteness, Fear, and the Culture of Separation

                               Photo: Twitter         

"One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. That’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem; your history is. And as long as you pretend you don’t know your history, you’re gonna be the prisoner of it. And there’s no question of your liberating me, ‘cause you can’t liberate yourselves. We are in this together. " 
- James Baldwin

I have been seeing pictures on social media of protesters holding up mirrors to the police so the officers can see what they look clad in full riot gear. While this is a powerful tactic, I want to suggest that the reflections in those mirrors, the helmets and body armor, and the police state they symbolize, are actually a direct expression of the collective fears and anxieties of our society, especially white society. As white people, it is not only dark skinned people we fear. We also fear our own repressed history. And we fear looking at our ongoing complicity in the violence that afflicts communities of color, even as we displace our seemingly limitless capacity for violence onto them, thereby magnifying our fears and justifying the police state we've created to allay them.  

And then Ferguson happened. We have had more than enough of our young brothers and sisters of color being killed by police, vigilantes, and other panic-stricken white people. If you've been paying attention, it's obvious that this has been building for some time. Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, and on and on. It may be a surprise to some, but there is nothing new about black people in this country being killed with impunity. Most black folks have noticed the low value this society places on black lives. What is new is that white people have finally begun to notice the pattern and to look at it through the lens of white privilege.

There have been a good deal of discussion on social media about the very real differences in the way we, as white people, are treated, especially by law enforcement. One particular meme consists of white folks holding signs citing outrageous behaviors that did not get them shot by police. There is an excellent blog post on XOjane in which a white mother lays out all the ways she knows her white sons will be able to roll through their young lives without fear of being bothered, much less killed, by police.

As important as recognizing our white privilege is, however, this is not enough. Admitting that, as a white man, I am treated with respect and deference by institutional power (and don't ever worry that any mistreatment I may receive is due to my race) is a crucial first step. However, observing that the system is unjust in my favor does not, by itself, remedy the situation. This awareness must be coupled with collective political action. Having recognized that, as white people, we have special access to institutional power, we must use that access to demand genuine accountability and begin to co-create a truly equitable society. This is what being an ally means.  

It isn't always easy to hold institutions accountable, of course. In the case of law enforcement, according to Mother Jones, "no agency appears to track the number of police shootings or killings of unarmed victims in a systematic, comprehensive way." This, in itself, is a profound indicator of the depth of the problem. To fill this void, following in the footsteps of Ida B Wells' anti-lynching campaign, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has issued a report documenting 275 unjustified killings of black people by police, private security, and vigilantes in 2012. As the report shows, very few of these killings resulted in the shooter(s) even being charged, let alone convicted, a fact that attests to the deep and tangled roots of white supremacy in the U.S.  

The virtual police occupation of communities of color in the U.S., along with the school to prison pipeline, and the racist mass incarceration system, is not a product of individual-level racism. It is a product of us as white people acting collectively and consistently based on a distorted idea of our racial self-interest. We may not explicitly support law enforcement tactics that result in human rights violations, but our failure to oppose policies that promise to "keep our streets safe," by being "tough on crime," constitutes our tacit support.

That probably sounds a bit harsh, but I really don't mean it as an accusation. The race discourse is rife with accusation already, whether it's white conservatives and their black allies blaming black culture, white liberals blaming other white people, or activists calling out their fellows. This all helps to create and sustain the culture of separation, which is one of the centerpieces of white culture. What is most needed is healing and reconnection, and where we need to look first (and deeply) is to white socialization. White socialization teaches us not only to see ourselves as separate individuals, but to fear each other. And it teaches us to value separateness, not only from each other, but also from the parts of ourselves that are not acceptable to the false standards of whiteness (innocence, independence, reason, culturelessness).

As white people, we need to build a new consciousness and a new sense of who we are as members of the larger human family, which begins with unlearning some of our white socialization. This is certainly challenging and deeply personal work, but it is not work we can do on our own. There is no individual credential to earn or penance to pay. There is no competition to win. There is simply the opportunity and responsibility to reawaken long dormant capacities for being together in community. Thus it is work that can only be done collectively. Indeed, the real revolution begins the moment we come together with our vulnerability, our uncertainties, our fear, and our longing.