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.