Why People Wear Masks, Jamming, 04/12/2014

I find it strangely fitting that Phil Sandifer’s chapter on the legendary V for Vendetta in his Last War in Albion project on the British Invasion of the American comics industry dropped this Tuesday. V for Vendetta is a work that created the most notable imagery of protest in our era, the Guy Fawkes mask that conceals your identity so you can speak your mind freely. Phil’s country, the United States of America, is having yet another revolutionary moment of its own, not only through the continuing protests and public outrage against the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and the failure to indict the police officer who shot him to have even a public trial. 

Wednesday saw a New York grand jury decline to bring any charges against police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who personally choked a middle-aged black man named Eric Garner to death on a sidewalk where he and several other officers attempted to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Unlike the sketchy and mutually contradictory eyewitness accounts of Brown’s murder, a witness named Ramsey Orta, Garner’s friend, actually filmed the entire incident on his phone. It’s right here.

The civil unrest that has understandably followed the major events of the Brown case, and has already arisen over Garner’s murder, expresses the rage that many Americans rightfully feel against a system that is openly prejudiced against a significantly large and increasingly vocal minority. I’m glad that some resistance to the racial injustices in Western societies are getting some popular press through social media, thanks to campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter and #CrimingWhileWhite.

And the intellectual left in online circles rightly identifies that there are systemic causes that need to be changed. One of the bravest articles on the post-Ferguson landscape of thought about racial politics was a piece published in Jacobin Magazine a few days before the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted. Mariame Koba asked her readers to “indict the system.” 

Understanding the systemic causes of institutionalized racism and its material injustices is very difficult for humanity to do. Humans typically understand direct causation, when someone physically acts. And we typically understand indirect causation, when an action one person takes causes someone else to act in a particular way. 

Eric Garner seems to have been a very nice man.
Nonetheless, because he was killed by police officers,
many people speak very arrogantly on the internet as if
he was a criminal to deserved to be choked to death. Not
only is this callous and cruel, but it voices a terrifying
underlying presumption: that if a police officer kills you,
then it was right that you were killed.

But systemic causation is literally causation without agency, the causation of conditioning, tendencies, and likelihoods of what actions at the individual level will emerge from a complex set of relations. This is why it’s so difficult for so many people, like the Chief Justice of the United States' Supreme Court, to notice racism without racists. We can easily understand what it means for an individual to hold racist beliefs and treat people in discriminatorily violent ways. 

Yet it’s hard for us to assign moral blame and shame to, for example, an individual white police officer who has best friends who are Hispanic, friendly neighbours who are Arab-American, and an African-American wife, but who also stops and frisks any black or Latino male walking down the street who’s lost some weight lately and is wearing old pants that are slipping. Because he’s part of an institution that has trained him in certain modes of behaviour, he himself isn’t a racist, but still behaves in racist ways because of his institutional function and training. 

That's why indictments and criminal justice procedures centred on punishment aren't even really the correct means to fight the social problems we face today. Identifying the responsible party for a specific wrong act and punishing them works fine for incidents of direct and indirect causation. But the true triggerman in cases of racist police violence is the institutional system itself. Where causation is systematic, the instantiation at the individual scale is a matter of chance. Darren Wilson happened to see Michael Brown one day carrying a fistful of shoplifted cigarillos. That this was the act was bad luck. That there would be an act eventually was inevitable. 

The only way to repair wrongs that occur at the systemic level is to change the actual system. This isn't a matter of retribution and punishment, but of large-scale reform, repair, and social and institutional transformation. Systematic injustice requires not retributive, but reparative justice.

That this film and this novel should turn into Alan Moore's
most visible legacy in the human race speaks to its
incredible power and its core lesson. That even if we must
be anonymous to do it, we must not let our leaders and
institutions believe that they control society simply
because of their role in institutions. The police work for
us, and they ultimately must take our orders, not we theirs.

The dangerous part of Western institutional systems in this case is that we give a portion of our population the power of the legitimate use of violence against all other citizens and regular access to many kinds of weaponry. Too many of us trust these people instinctively, even though such trustworthiness should never be taken for granted. My old friend Sheena, a journalist with Sun Media, tweeted an article about the Pantaleo non-indictment which had a disturbing comment section, even by the standard of internet comment threads, that terribly unnerved her.

Those commenters illustrated what I think is a terrible tendency of thought. The most important common element that I saw among all the commenters was universal trust in the judgment of police officers. If a police officer was attacking you, then you did something wrong, because police officers only attack criminals. The default attitude of these commenters is to trust without criticism or a second thought the group of people who are institutionally empowered to do armed violence to the populace.

I found the same frustration reading Robert Nozick, if for an entirely different reason. He follows a tradition in Anglo-American political philosophy of reasoning through a society’s essential political relations in the abstract argument of a social contract thought experiment. And because the abstract terms of his argument define security through a monopoly on protective services as the only legitimate function of the state, the police and the military become the only legitimate state functionaries.

Because Nozick’s work lies at the foundation of modern libertarianism, these principled individualists who stand against government violence interfering with personal liberty see more violence in a state health insurance plan or environmental regulations than in battalions of armed civil servants with the power to kill and imprison citizens with regular impunity and, at best, personal inconvenience. Libertarians should be the natural enemies of state-sanctioned violence, but I’ve met too many who show the same blind trust in the police as the poor fools I linked above.

We’ve institutionalized both racist norms and a capacity for unchecked violence in the institutional authorities we invest with the power of violence. This is a recipe for disaster and I’m glad that, as a society, we’re coming to clear grips with that. Too bad it took generations of disasters.

A Stationary War Machine: When Men Become Weapons, Research Time, 19/08/2014

Race riots are so 1960s. The very concept almost feels like a dinosaur, an idea we thought had gone extinct. No one ever said this about the conflict on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. But that’s what it is. A race riot.

A young man is murdered and a neighbourhood
explodes. All too common in America today. Once is
too often.

Yet it is also more than a race riot. Ferguson is different from previous conflicts between a racialized group and wider society because the violence we’ve seen in that city was purposely stoked by police actions. Protests of Trayvon Martin’s killing at the hands of a Neighbourhood Watch member in Florida two years ago did not mutate into violent riots that destroyed communities and infrastructure. Protests of Mike Brown’s killing at the hands of a police officer did. 

It is obvious what the material difference is. When the St. Louis County police confronted the protesters, they were wearing camo gear, carrying military-grade assault rifles, and firing tear gas and rubber bullets. When the Missouri Highway Patrol accompanied the protesters, they were wearing ordinary blue and black police uniforms, and the largest gun they carried was their standard sidearm. Those protests were peaceful affairs that saw a more ethnically-integrated police force marching in tandem with an outraged people, many even sharing their pain and outrage. 

This moment of calm would not last. I doubt even the most optimistic residents of Ferguson suspected it would.* Very little trust seems to have existed between the people of Ferguson and their law enforcement officials. In a city where the revenue of police departments depend on their harassing residents for parking and driving tickets, it combines with tensions between a virtually all-white force (the number of non-white officers so low as to be statistically insignificant) to create a social environment of institutionalized predation. 

* However, I don’t exactly have the funds as an independent journalist barely managing to restart this section of his career to travel to Missouri to speak with the city’s residents. If anyone wants to offer me those funds, I would not waste them.

This is even without factoring the validity of mounting anecdotal evidence of profit-free police harassment of black residents and the shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old. This is even without the contemptible indignity of trying to criminalize Mike Brown with the claim that he was an armed robbery suspect at the time of his murder, a charge which even the owner of the store refutes, and which the officer who killed him didn’t know anyway. Last time I checked, petty theft wasn’t an offence warranting summary execution in Missouri.

Still, within days after peace was restored to the protests, looting and violence began again, and Missouri governor Jay Nixon has invoked emergency powers to assign a curfew to the entire city, essentially imprisoning its population as an act of collective punishment. The National Guard, the United States’ actual domestic armed forces, is now enforcing the curfew in the city. Violence continues. 

• • •

But the phenomenon of Ferguson is more complex than high-grade enormous weapons simply “going to someone’s head” in the words of America’s new national conscience Jon Oliver. A person’s self-conception is rarely dominated by an image that he would recognize as fully human. We are processes more than static bodies, and our understandings shift as readily as our states of being. Ta’Nehisi Coates discusses in The Atlantic the power that American police forces have typically held over black people’s bodies in the country’s history. 

Mapping is an act of definition,
labelling, ranking.

But the militarization of the police doesn’t just affect black bodies. It transforms men into weapons. Police officers do not simply become enforcers of the law when they don the uniform. They also become agents of the state, and this is a decision with profound dangers. The state is an institution that striates society, organizing it into clearly mapped coordinates. These coordinates are not simple locations, but can carry complex identifying marks. These are the marks of hierarchy, the marks by which one knows one’s place in the state order.

Perhaps Coates would call them the marks on black bodies over the centuries: the scars of whips, the burns of plantation brands, rope burns along the neck, even the haphazard scars of a billy club assault, or the pink and red craters of a rubber bullet entering the thigh or the abdomen. Rank order can be instituted through the honesty of direct violence, but more often it is done through the personality-free institution of bureaucratic rules. The state, in the name of the people, provides services for human welfare, and possibly even flourishing. But to claim them, one must become a number in the complex system of dispersing those goods. 

Your social lifelines through your state are given or revoked not by the bureaucrat himself; that poor man is only a functionary, and often is sincerely sorry for the hardship he must bestow. The bureaucratic rules themselves define what the institution does. Will the taxpayers subsidize the police? Or will it be the hunt for parking and speeding violators? Which burden is more vulnerable to corruption by old prejudices? I think that much is clear. Driving While Black is the offence so common that it became a joke.

If the policeman becomes the tool of striation, part of a machine that organizes society by enforcing rank, then the militarization of the modern American police department introduces a strange new element to this dynamic. The last 20 years have seen the American military adapt its arsenal to desert warfare. The desert is a smooth space where a destructive force can move like lightning.** Massive metal bodies can shoot across these spaces, moving almost like pure destructive energy.

** The analogy can be coincidental if you’re me, or intentional if you prefer to think in echoes of devils.

We saw it in America’s two invasions of Iraq. We can see it today in the explosion of the Islamic State through the countryside of eastern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan. Only in the cities and the mountains can these armies genuinely encounter resistance. Even then, the resistance must be dedicated to the prospect of extreme casualties, willing to scorch its own earth to drive the invaders away.

These forces were unleashed upon Ferguson, without even the modicum of self-consciousness lying in the discipline of the military infantryman never to point his rifle as a default stance. Even in a war machine as powerful as lightning, these checks of small mercies exist. Not so for the undertrained war machine let loose in Ferguson. The application of machines whose purpose is to destroy countries on a city full of barely armed protesters destroys inescapably. The war machines typically set loose in the desert abandon their targets as quickly as they attack, always moving on to the next. Unlike the desert, the city of Ferguson experiences wave after wave, because the material components of warfare in smooth spaces have been given to the apparatus of the state, and so focussed intently on a single place.

For more detail on these concepts of striated
space and the war machine, read 1000 Plateaus,
chapters 14, 12, and 13.

One of the sick advantages of bureaucracy as a means of oppression is that it encourages docility. The pain is so slow to inflict that its daily dose is never more than an annoyance. The power of a weaponized people – the St. Louis County police and the Missouri National Guard – provokes explosions in reaction. Old-fashioned moral categories of blameworthiness cannot really be applied here. The population of Ferguson have become victims of rapid violence. Self-consciousness and self-control shattered, rage at these latest blatant injustices fuel action. 

Police, too, have become little more than machines channelling the violence of their armour and vehicles, and the destructive racism of their anger. When given permission to explode, the explosion occurs across all dimensions of their existence. A blaze fuels its own rampage on air alone, and this last week of violence has turned people into fires.