Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Police Violence – The Class Argument
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zn.
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June 10, 2020 at 5:11 pm #116160
wvParticipantRace, Class, Gender, all jumbled up, and inter-sectionalized. Adolph focuses on the Class aspect as per usual. I tend to agree with him, but Race is certainly also a part of it. And its damn near impossible to separate race and class in a Corporotacracy. So, i think the best-leftists learn to talk about both, include both, educate about both…
w
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race/class:https://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violenceHow Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence
By Adolph Reed, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania)“….
…………Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions….
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….For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population…
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…..This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.
But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.
What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days. What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism. There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments. It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives matter…..see link
June 11, 2020 at 12:15 am #116192
znModeratorThere’s a lot to this. If I get a chance I’m going to try and add things to this thread.
June 11, 2020 at 1:20 am #116194
MackeyserModeratorI wanna go deeper as well, but this is the wrong thread to open at 1:20am when I’m trying to head to bed, so Imma nope out on this for now and come back later.
Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.
June 13, 2020 at 10:07 am #116469wvParticipantcounterpunch:https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/the-capitalist-limits-of-police-reform/
June 12, 2020
The Capitalist Limits of Police Reform
by Shamus Cooke“….Demanding reforms is critical to any social movement, and many police reforms can save lives and reduce harm, but they are often fleeting, as Alex Vitale explains in his book “The End of Policing”. The especially complicated dynamics of police reform have deep roots twisted together with the base of class society, where capitalist fueled austerity creates the social disruptions that police are called to “manage”.
Vitale’s book discusses the complex web of legal, social, and institutional barriers to reform that ebb and flow over the decades but ultimately remain in place, because the police are themselves the byproduct of historic economic relationships that have evolved over the years— police power grows as inequality grows, which widens as pro-market politicians shrink social services.
Banning specific weapons or tactics will be replaced by other forms of violence, because as Vitale explains, police are ‘violence workers’, experts in force that view all problems as nails to be hammered….
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…..Vitale notes that the nature of the police “since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status-quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.” And ultimately “as long as the basic mission of police remains unchanged, none of these reforms will be achievable”The “mission” of the police is tightly wound up with deeply-entrenched economic relationships…
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….The demands to “defund the police” are moving energy in the right direction since such demands will quickly expose the undemocratic nature of city budgeting. The budget is not transparent because its purpose, largely speaking, is to promote and protect the interests of those who run the government— the wealthy. Participatory budgeting has long been a demand of the Left, but the budget is so highly protected that little gains have been won.Divesting from police and investing in working people is the way forward, but there are gigantic class barriers that need to be recognized so that the power needed to overcome them can be amassed.
Defunding the police involves moving the money into public services, housing, etc. But this is a much more complicated demand than it appears because it directly challenges the direction that the wealthy are taking the economy. Similar ideas emerged after the nationwide riots that erupted after the Rodney King verdict in ’92. The outcome was more austerity and mass incarceration….see link…”
June 13, 2020 at 1:27 pm #116475
CalParticipantBefore I read that Reed article I tried having a conversation with my wife, who is kind of a mainstream Dem, about my frustration and reluctance to accept BLM as a meaningful and important reaction to America’s racial problems.
Reed comes pretty close to voicing my own frustration:
“And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.”
My conversation went no where and my wife and I probably din’t move beyond the basic idea that America has serious racial problems and at least the 8:46, George Floyd, BLM protests draw attention to this.
June 13, 2020 at 3:53 pm #116479wvParticipantBefore I read that Reed article I tried having a conversation with my wife, who is kind of a mainstream Dem, about my frustration and reluctance to accept BLM as a meaningful and important reaction to America’s racial problems.
Reed comes pretty close to voicing my own frustration:
“And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.”
My conversation went no where and my wife and I probably din’t move beyond the basic idea that America has serious racial problems and at least the 8:46, George Floyd, BLM protests draw attention to this.
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I just wish ole Adolph was a better…’communicator.’ Heck i agree with him, and i still get lost in the labyrinth of his paragraphs. I’ve never finished one of his articles in my life.
w
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June 13, 2020 at 5:24 pm #116480znModeratorantiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society,
That’s not its “sole argument.” Nor do I think it’s the “left wing of neoliberalism.” Actually I think saying that is the right wing of leftism purism.
Anti-racism appeals to deepset ideas of justice, human rights, and freedom from direct oppression. Is that enough? Of course not. Is saying it is not enough an important criticism? Yes. At the same time, to me “intersectionality” really means something.
June 13, 2020 at 6:33 pm #116491wvParticipantantiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society,
That’s not its “sole argument.” Nor do I think it’s the “left wing of neoliberalism.” Actually I think saying that is the right wing of leftism purism.
Anti-racism appeals to deepset ideas of justice, human rights, and freedom from direct oppression. Is that enough? Of course not. Is saying it is not enough an important criticism? Yes. At the same time, to me “intersectionality” really means something.
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“Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things,
antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines…”
——Well, ‘I’ interpret that as Adolph just complaining about ‘Class’ getting minimized or jettisoned or ignored by a NON-intersectional kind of anti-racist program.
Basically, i think he’s just talking about Clinton-Obama-DNC type politics. Race, Gender, and No-Class. In other words, NeoLiberalism. In my words Corporotacracy.
Thats my interpretation of his thots, anyway.
w
vJune 13, 2020 at 6:35 pm #116493znModeratorBasically, i think he’s just talking about Clinton-Obama-DNC type politics. Race, Gender, and No-Class. In other words, NeoLiberalism. In my words Corporotacracy.
Thats my interpretation of his thots, anyway.
Okay. I hereby exempt him, then, from The Purge.
For now.
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June 13, 2020 at 7:01 pm #116494wvParticipantThe socialist adolph, is swimming upstream on this one.
At about the five minute mark (if anyone can make it that far) he talks about the race/neoliberalism thing.June 14, 2020 at 12:45 am #116506znModeratorBefore I read that Reed article I tried having a conversation with my wife, who is kind of a mainstream Dem, about my frustration and reluctance to accept BLM as a meaningful and important reaction to America’s racial problems.
Reed comes pretty close to voicing my own frustration:
“And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments.”
My conversation went no where and my wife and I probably din’t move beyond the basic idea that America has serious racial problems and at least the 8:46, George Floyd, BLM protests draw attention to this.
I understand that view but don’t entirely share it. To me the whole big picture is messy, and to oppose what has to be opposed requires lots of different allies and battles. Because of BLM as of right now the majority of the country believes that the police help uphold an underlying systemic racism that is everywhere. That has never happened before, that I know of, in USA history.
Yes it’s just one battle, I agree with that.
…
June 14, 2020 at 10:05 am #116522
InvaderRamModeratorummm… i wouldn’t be surprised to see trump win again.
specifically because of the race vs class issue. and that the class issue is by and large being ignored.
i would be worried.
June 14, 2020 at 11:28 am #116528
Billy_TParticipantTrump’s sadism and his bull-horn messages to white supremacists and other right-wing bigots seem to be escalating. Planning his MAGA rally, originally on Juneteenth, in Tulsa, where blacks were massacred nearly 100 years ago. Then announcing the end of health care coverage for trans people on the anniversary of the Pulse killings.
No way these things were “coincidences.”
Also, likely preaching to the choir here: But “neoliberalism” is such a tricky, ill-defined term. I think it often just confuses people.
My own take on the word is that it’s never been the exclusive domain of Dems, corporatist or otherwise. But it has always been right of center. I also think it helps to talk in terms of a hard version and a soft, which is how David Harvey deals with it. He sees the Republican version as hard, and the Dems’ as soft. I’m generalizing a rather complex thing here, of course. But that’s the gist of it.
Also, and I know you guys know this . . . it has nothing to do with “liberalism” as most people think of the word. It’s about “liberalizing” the markets, after the Keynesian era reined them in somewhat. Its main tenets, which are really far more compatible with Republican beliefs through the decades, are aggressive tax cuts for the rich and businesses, deregulation, especially Finance, and privatization of public goods, services and assets.
June 14, 2020 at 1:45 pm #116536wvParticipant… Because of BLM as of right now the majority of the country believes that the police help uphold an underlying systemic racism that is everywhere. That has never happened before, that I know of, in USA history.
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Well, I’ve seen those polls, and i wish i could believe them. But i don’t.
They remind me of the universal health care polls.
I think the country is much more evenly divided on this law-and-order stuff.w
vJune 14, 2020 at 4:42 pm #116539znModerator… Because of BLM as of right now the majority of the country believes that the police help uphold an underlying systemic racism that is everywhere. That has never happened before, that I know of, in USA history.
…
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Well, I’ve seen those polls, and i wish i could believe them. But i don’t.
They remind me of the universal health care polls.
I think the country is much more evenly divided on this law-and-order stuff.w
vThere’s no reason to disbelieve the polls. The issue is translation into action. A majority does support universal health insurance, when asked. But in that case it did not translate into a fair and open fight between Dem primary candidates.
So it remains to be seen what actions come out of the new mindset where, unlike previously, a majority of whites see and “get” systemic racism in policing.
….
June 14, 2020 at 5:11 pm #116541wvParticipant… Because of BLM as of right now the majority of the country believes that the police help uphold an underlying systemic racism that is everywhere. That has never happened before, that I know of, in USA history.
…
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Well, I’ve seen those polls, and i wish i could believe them. But i don’t.
They remind me of the universal health care polls.
I think the country is much more evenly divided on this law-and-order stuff.w
vThere’s no reason to disbelieve the polls. The issue is translation into action. A majority does support universal health insurance, when asked. But in that case it did not translate into a fair and open fight between Dem primary candidates.
So it remains to be seen what actions come out of the new mindset where, unlike previously, a majority of whites see and “get” systemic racism in policing.
….
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Well, i dunno. I do question the poll numbers. Part of the reason i question them, is because i think we live in a corporotacracy-idiocracy. I dont think half the people in this country even know what ‘systemic racism’ IS. I think people answer black-and-white questions on poll questions in ways that dont necessarily reflect what they really think. Heck oftentimes idiot-propagandized-humans believe things that are completely at odds with one another.No, i dont trust ‘any’ of the numbers on these complex issues. But, i dunno.
w
vTaibbi:”…As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.
Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.
(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context…”
June 14, 2020 at 5:18 pm #116543znModerator… Because of BLM as of right now the majority of the country believes that the police help uphold an underlying systemic racism that is everywhere. That has never happened before, that I know of, in USA history.
…
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Well, I’ve seen those polls, and i wish i could believe them. But i don’t.
They remind me of the universal health care polls.
I think the country is much more evenly divided on this law-and-order stuff.w
vThere’s no reason to disbelieve the polls. The issue is translation into action. A majority does support universal health insurance, when asked. But in that case it did not translate into a fair and open fight between Dem primary candidates.
So it remains to be seen what actions come out of the new mindset where, unlike previously, a majority of whites see and “get” systemic racism in policing.
….
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Well, i dunno. I do question the poll numbers. Part of the reason i question them, is because i think we live in a corporotacracy-idiocracy. I dont think half the people in this country even know what ‘systemic racism’ IS. I think people answer black-and-white questions on poll questions in ways that dont necessarily reflect what they really think. Heck oftentimes idiot-propagandized-humans believe things that are completely at odds with one another.No, i dont trust ‘any’ of the numbers on these complex issues. But, i dunno.
w
vTaibbi:”…As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of the country. A Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.” That survey included 40% of self-described “liberals” and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as the national paper of record.
Incidentally, that same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as “very important,” while an additional 16% considered it “somewhat important.” This means the Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – “Buildings matter, too” – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population, including 64% of African-Americans.
(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context…”
THe polls did not ask “do you believe in systemic racism.” The polls asked if the Floyd murder was an isolated incident or represented a deeper pattern of racial injustice.
I do see a shift in consciousness on these things. That is probably because we are all deeply influenced to believe in human rights and equality before the law, and now more people are open to seeing police injustices, which automatically touches the “human rights” nerve. So perceptions like that have an ideological garden bed to grow in.
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June 15, 2020 at 1:32 am #116561znModeratorA Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.”
You get different answers about that one, depending on the poll. For example there’s this:
Americans 49% to 34% reject use of military for crowd control amid George Floyd protests, poll finds
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/americans-49-34-reject-use-military-crowd-control-wake-floyd-protests-pollJune 15, 2020 at 10:25 am #116562wvParticipantA Morning Consult poll showed 58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of “calling in the U.S. military to supplement city police forces.”
You get different answers about that one, depending on the poll. For example there’s this:
Americans 49% to 34% reject use of military for crowd control amid George Floyd protests, poll finds
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/americans-49-34-reject-use-military-crowd-control-wake-floyd-protests-poll==================
Well, i think you’d get different numbers on all the other ones too, if you change a word here or there, or offer another option, etc. Like i say, i dont trust these kinds of polls. I wish i could.
w
vJune 15, 2020 at 10:44 am #116572znModeratorWell, i think you’d get different numbers on all the other ones too, if you change a word here or there, or offer another option, etc. Like i say, i dont trust these kinds of polls. I wish i could.
w
vThere ARE several polls on the other ones and it holds up. The numbers vary but it is always a majority.
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