Escalating Discord Between Police and Protesters Strains Baton Rouge (New York Times)
Police Scanner Audio Surfaces Proving Philando Castile Was Racially Profiled (BET.com)
After Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives following the 2010 “red tide” midterm elections, they were quick to show the extremes to which they would go in order to get their way. Just a couple of years after conservative talking heads were promoting the concept of then-President Bush having near-total power under the guise of “unitary executive” theory, they were now claiming that the fact that they’d gained control over one of the two halves of the legislative branch meant that they had a “mandate” to push through their far-right agenda regardless of what the Senate or President Obama wanted. Nowhere was this more evident than in the fight over the 2011 budget, where House Republicans held the debt ceiling hostage to try to force massive social spending cuts on a country that was very much (and still is, to this day) reeling from the effects of the 2008 market crash and subsequent major recession.
The last-minute compromise that prevented the United States from defaulting on its debt, and likely triggering another worldwide economic crisis in the process, included the automatic triggering of mandatory social and military budget cuts if Congress and the President couldn’t agree on future budgets on time, a process called sequestration. The “sequester cuts” were allegedly designed to be so odious to Republicans and Democrats alike that they would act as a force to encourage the compromise necessary to pass a budget that everyone could live with, and politicians talked about them as though they would never, ever actually happen since no one would like them.
Within two years, of course, they did happen, after President Obama won a convincing reelection and Republicans only maintained their majority in the House thanks to the massive gerrymandering of House districts they did on the state level after the 2010 elections. Despite this, though, they wasted no time in asserting their belief that House Republicans still had all the power in Washington, and this resulted in a round of sequester cuts in early 2013. As working-class Americans lost access to important programmes like Head Start, conservatives tried to raise money so rich kids (like the assholes I went to “school” with) could take field trips inside the White House. As that round of sequester cuts began to look inevitable, Republicans changed their tune on how bad they’d be, saying that the social services cuts would prove that those programmes weren’t as necessary as everyone else was making them out to be.
Those working-class Americans who got hit by the sequester’s cuts to social spending can tell you just how much they suffered; although I rarely like anything that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews says or does, his Hardball series “The Unkindest Cut” was arguably the most important political television of the year, going around America and documenting the extreme hardships caused by sequester cuts on those families who were already hurting too much. Unfortunately, like too much of the hardship experienced by working-class and middle-class Americans, it was forgotten about as soon as it was off of television, even though the problems caused by the sequester cuts are likely still affecting most, if not all, of the people profiled on Hardball. (Too many Americans are unaware of how large parts of New Orleans are still rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, more than a decade after those initial television reports captivated the nation’s attention. This is a failure not just of news media to remind us of these stories, but of ordinary Americans like us to not keep track of them like we should.)
If you were in the right-wing media bubble, of course, you didn’t hear anything at all about how the sequester was harming anyone but those rich kids who didn’t get to step inside the White House. By that point many conservative media outlets had basically devolved into all-Benghazi, all-the-time screaming, and it quickly became apparent that the Republicans who talked about the sequester proving the lack of “necessity” for social service programmes had planned on this all along. It’s not like right-wing media didn’t have a long history of ignoring stories that demolish their “everything the government funds besides the military is bad” narrative, but their coverage of the sequester and Benghazi proved the extent to which elected Republicans were now taking their marching orders from right-wing media.
One of the most famous examples of this came two summers ago, during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri that erupted after the killing of Michael Brown. As national news picked up on the circumstances of Brown’s death and local law enforcement’s tone-deaf militarized response to the protests that followed, right-wing media pooh-poohed the whole thing, treating it like an insignificant side story of some “uppity” African-Americans demanding special treatment, only good for a breather between anti-Obama and anti-Hillary stories. When some people burned down a neighbourhood CVS Pharmacy in Ferguson, though, suddenly that became the iconic image of right-wing media’s own breathless coverage of what was happening in the city, trying to brand not just all the local protesters, and not just all of Black Lives Matter, but pretty much every African-American (except the conservative ones) as violent thugs or gangbangers or whatever other synonym for the n-word they’re using these days, intent on burning all of America to the ground.
On the one hand, I couldn’t condone the burning of that CVS Pharmacy because of my commitment to non-violence, and there’s a lot to be said for the argument that the loss of that CVS Pharmacy only did more harm to the Ferguson community after the killing of Michael Brown. At the same time, though, the way that conservatives and right-wing media fixated on the destruction of a building while everyone else was mourning the loss of a human life did a lot to show the inhumanity and misanthropy of the modern conservative movement, as right-wingers ignored Michael Brown’s death or even tried to justify it. As Michael Brown’s name was soon joined by those of Eric Garner, and John Crawford III, and Tamir Rice, and far too many others, the right-wing response remained the same, and as committed as I remain to non-violence, I know it’s far easier for me to say that as I sit here in the suburbs, as a white person, than it is for the people in the communities being shattered over and over again by these killings.
Tensions were already high going into this past week, as many of the police officers indicted in the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore were being acquitted, adding more fuel to the narrative of lack of accountability in modern policing. The killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile would have been horrible enough individually, especially with the videos of each death that quickly became all but impossible to ignore (unless you were in the right-wing media bubble, of course, in which case it was still pretty much a near-constant drone of stories about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails). Having the two of them occur back-to-back, when the atmosphere in America was already charged with racial tension due to recent world events and the open Islamophobia of one major party’s presumptive presidential candidate, was too much for many of us to handle.
None of this excuses the deaths of five police officers in Dallas, of course, because nothing can excuse that. Never mind that Dallas has been making good strides towards increasing accountability in their police force, never mind that those police officers had not only helped with that night’s protest march but had even posed for photographs with some of the protesters. Those police officers did not deserve to die, period, end of story. Regardless of how many police officers may be racist, or use force too quickly, or kill unarmed or legally-armed African-Americans, that is no reason to go around killing police officers. There will never be a reason for that.
Again, though, it’s easy for me to say that as a white person in the suburbs. I don’t live in the kind of community that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile lived in, and even though I deal with harmful prejudices and stereotypes on a daily basis, I will never know what it’s like to be an African-American growing up and living in the United States. As many stories as I hear about the horrors of the modern African-American experience, that will never be a substitute for living that experience firsthand.
What I do know is that right-wing media is up to their old tricks again. Not only have they focused on the Dallas shooting to the near-total exclusion of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. They’ve seized on images of the shooter wearing a dashiki and raising a fist, once again trying to paint every liberal African-American as a potential lethal threat to society. Some are even going so far as to call Black Lives Matter a domestic terrorist organization. One is even stoking the otherness of President Obama again, fixating on pictures of him in appropriate dress while he was attending a Muslim wedding in order to play off the heightened racial tensions of recent months, all while we’re bearing witness to the most overtly racist major party presidential campaign of my life.
Two summers ago, as African-Americans were reeling from the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and John Crawford III, they were told by friend and foe alike to allow the American justice system to take care of the police officers responsible for these killings. None of them were even indicted, let alone convicted, and very few of the police officers who’ve killed unarmed African-Americans since then have faced any legal repercussions for their actions. Right-wingers have, at the very least, used these tragedies to push their “the police are always right so they should have maximum power and zero accountability for it” narrative, and some have been positively gleeful about these killings.
In the wake of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, can you look any African-American in the face and tell them that they, or their family, or their friends, won’t be the next African-American shot to death by police? I sure can’t. I want to tell them that violence is never the answer, but it’s easy for me to say that when it’s not my family being killed. I want to shout out against the social and societal forces that have led to these killings, but I don’t want to drown out African-American voices because they aren’t getting heard enough. I feel compelled to do something to try to help them, but I can’t figure out what to do. I don’t believe violence is ever the answer, but inaction is also unacceptable, so we need to figure out how to stop these killings before the body count gets any higher.