It's Always Been This Way: Racism, the Bill of Rights, and the Justification of Tyranny

I was about to post this diary when I discovered Leonard Nimoy had died, and posted a diary on him instead. I thought about not posting this one today, but, on second thought, Mr. Nimoy actually was a great fighter against racism and believed strongly in civil liberties, so I think it might be fitting to post it now.*

It's Always Been This Way: Racism, the Bill of Rights, and the Justification of Tyranny

It has become almost reflexive to respond to civil liberties advocates these days with implicit, or explicit, charges of racism and white privilege. When people object to the changes our country has seen in the expansion and increased brutality of police culture, military surveillance, and the security state, there is invariably someone in the blogosphere or on social media who responds caustically "What freedom? What liberty?" or "The Constitution--that slaveowners' document." It's always some version of "Nothing has changed. There's never been anything but tyranny here." If you think otherwise, the reasoning goes, you are a racist white elitist.

Police abuse of black people in this country goes back to the first shiploads of African slaves brought here, and it has always been outrageous, and should have always been a crime. But if someone tells me nothing has changed in the past 45 years, and that this level of police militarization and intimidation were always the norm in our society, they are wrong. Factually wrong. What's changed is that the methods and policies of the police in dealing with African Americans, which have always been horrible, are beginning to be applied to everyone in the population except the 1%. That is a change, and it's a change, I'd argue, that's been accomplished deliberately, with a great deal of help from the Patriot Act and post-9-11 Bush-era policies, including the invention of DHS, though some of it can be traced back to the Drug War. Drug offenses and counter-terrorism are the excuses which are now used to apply the same police brutality that used to be applied solely to African-Americans to everyone. This is not to say that the brutality is being applied equally as yet. It certainly is not. This is an expansion project. If we don’t recognize it as such, we will assuredly fail to stop it.

Where the conflict arises is that some people see this as a good thing, or at least believe that white people have no right to complain, since black people have been suffering this for centuries. The logic here is that now we're moving toward equality, because if things keep going this way, eventually the police will brutalize us equally. We haven't gotten there yet, but every mark on a Cecily McMillan's body, every shot in a Scott Olsen's head, every Kayvan Sabehgi who gets beaten until his spleen bursts, moves us toward the day when we will all get beaten and abused and dominated by the police equally, and white people will eventually, after enough decades of this, begin to know what it feels like to have been born black in this country.

This is not what equality was supposed to look like, but it's the only equality we're being offered: to be equally on the wrong end of the boot or gun of some guy working to protect some very rich white people who seem to vanish out of the historical picture. Apparently they don't count as white, and their privilege as rich white people is never discussed when the white privilege of civil liberties activists is criticized. Apparently, like the police themselves, the 1% are a force of nature, inevitable as a hurricane. Stopping the abuse or changing the way things are--that's held to be impossible; the important thing is making sure the abuse gets dealt out equally to everyone. We are far from there yet, but stories from NM and TX suggest that we're moving in the direction of equality steadily and incrementally. One day, no doubt, we will live in that colorblind society that regards all people without large amounts of money to be equally worthy of abuse by police and the large, wealthy, impersonal forces they serve.

It’s a hallmark of the Age of Obama, its zeitgeist, in fact, to excuse these large, wealthy, impersonal forces and implicitly justify their abuse, by putting such justifications into the mouths of black Democrats (especially, but not limited to black Democratic politicians) so that instead of opposing atrocities committed by rich white people, black leadership ends up by opposing white people who are rising against those atrocities. In effect, black leadership ends by helping the wealthy white abusers to shut down dissent within the white population, while believing, apparently, that they are actually furthering black civil rights. What this does is shut down the movement against abuse of power and transforms it into a fight between black people and white people who disagree with the way things are—a situation which serves Wall St, the military-industrial-security complex, and the Chamber of Commerce better than anything else I could imagine.

Without a movement of white people and black people who oppose these atrocities everywhere they occur, and see them all as part and parcel of a movement to subjugate humanity through *both* racism and classism, I believe we will end up working for humanity’s worst enemies. None of this need be done by erasing the reality of how rampant police abuse is fueled by racism, and serves racism, nor need it be said that white people suffer police abuse equally, which they don’t. What needs to be said, however, is that the abuser doesn’t stop with black people. He just starts with black people, and he never stops, until somebody stops him. As Ayn Rand once famously said, "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." The only real answer, both to the advance of tyranny and to those who are currently attacking civil libertarians as racist, is the framework provided by Pastor Niemoller: In America, first they came for the black people, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't black. Then they came for the Communists, the liberals, the working class, the middle class...

Let's not wait until there is no one left to stand up.

*Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting Mr. Nimoy would have agreed with my analysis.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

And what can I do to delete one of them?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

joe shikspack's picture

because they were designed that way. A relatively small group of wealthy and powerful individuals has always run this country and has manipulated the affairs of government to favor their enterprizes and maintain control of the populace.

You may find this quote from Woody Holton's "Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution," of interest:

In Federalist #60, which appeared on February 23, 1788, Alexander Hamilton predicted that critics of national legislation would rarely be able to form "a concert of views, in any partial scheme of elections." One reason Gouverneur Morris was willing to allow voters to choose the president directly was that, though even "little combinations" could dominate elections "within a narrow sphere," voters would not be able to coalesce in "so great an extent of country" as the United States.

The best-known champion of the large polity was of course, Madison. The "Father of the Constitution" told his convention colleagues that by uniting Americans under one political roof, the new national charter would "divide the community into so great a number of interests & parties that ... they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit" of any particular goal. The manner in which Madison expressed his thesis in Federalist #63 was strange but telling; he declared that the Constitution would protect citizens from "the danger of combining." His October 24, 1787, letter to Jeferson was even bolder. "Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny," Madison wrote, "is under certain qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles."

"Divide et impera" - an explosive phrase. Throughout the 1780s Americans who tried to organize campaigns in favor of relief legislation had discovered again and again just how hard it was to "act unaformly" over an extensive territory. Madison had made the same discovery, and it became one of his principal motives for shifting power for the state to the national level. Seldom would a majority of United States citizens share the same grievance. Even when they did, they would rarely be able "to discover their own strength," much less "act in unison with each other." It was the same strategy that Thomas Jefferson had urged Congress to employ against the United States's Indian neighbors - with the significant difference that Madison wanted to divide white Americans for their own good.

Would the new national government be equally impervious to every sort of grassroots pressure? Several Constitutional Convention delegates were sure that it would not, since some clusters of like-minded Americans would outdo others at achieving the unity that ensured influence. "The schemes of the Rich will be favored by the extent of the Country," Gouvernor Morris told his fellow delegates, Ordinary "people in such distant parts can not communicate & act in concert," placing them at a disadvantage compared with "those who have more Knowledge & intercourse" with each other.

"Divide et Impera" - divide and conquer is what has been happening here for hundreds of years and until Americans stop fighting each other as they dream of joining the ranks of the wealthy and powerful - and start fighting the powers-that-be - nothing will change.

Americans now have the means to communicate and "combine" over vast stretches of territory.

If we could just get over the bullshit divisions imposed on us by our oppressors, we could make things better for everybody.

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Big Al's picture

save the spotted owl, end the Fed, end the wars, abolish Citizen's United,
and justice for torture.

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Big Al's picture

It's like this article. Evidently some tea partiers are going to boycott Jeb Bush at an upcoming
CPAC conference where he's scheduled to speak. They say, "we don't need another Bush".

Hell, tea partiers might be even smarter than the Daily Kos partisans supporting Hillary.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/cpac-attendees-plan-walk...

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