One Book One Diocese Lenten Study
The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis is reading the same book together for Lent. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. We’re gathering in local communities to discuss the book or reading independently.
As part of my own discipline of reading the book and preparing for discussion, I’m summarizing each chapter in fewer than 300 words.
3. Manifest Destiny War
In the case against the killer of Trayvon Martin, one of the jurors believed the killer had the right to pursue.
Think about that.
Stand Your Ground didn’t only remove the duty to retreat, but granted a right to pursue.
While the killer could pursue Martin, Martin could not stand his ground,
“Why is retreat considered the right thing for the black body to do, but not the white body?”
Why?
As we explored in chapter 2, the Anglo-Saxon myth of superiority necessitated a natural and inherent inferiority of everyone else. It depended not only on the dehumanizing of black persons, but to identify them as chattel.
This fostered the Theo-ideology we know as Manifest Destiny, with a justification for the seizing of property from non-whites and the genocide of those who would not conform or convert to Anglo-Saxon cultural identity.
Foucault describes the nature of power as essentially being the capability of killing the other: to determine whether or not a whole population can exist. This is at the heart of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, which fueled both westward expansion and slaughter of its inhabitants, and also America’s military and nuclear dominance today.
The argument from within this exceptionalism is that “the other” always could have power (they are a threat to kill us) even when they do not. Assimilation is the mandate because resistance is perceived as threatening to order, and therefore a justification for extermination. It is by its nature a declaration of war.
American history of violence to black bodies from slavery to the drug war is perpetual aggression masquerading as
Further Thoughts—
Just some thoughts that came as I read this week.
Abolition
In the scope of race relations, the abolition movement was incrementalism.
The actual project of full equality of citizens, the bedrock of the liberal democratic ideal, is not some pinko leftist notion, but the central tenant at the heart of our pledged ideology.
While big events seem monumental, on the scale of true equality, they are just steps. And the perpetual excuses for maintaining systemic injustice are not speed bumps in the road but become obstructions as large as the revolutions themselves.
The Civil War, Jim Crow, and Mass Incarceration are not small retaliations by aggrieved persons: on the bigger scale they are titanic overreactions to small bits of progress.
John Quincy Adams and learning
Douglas takes a hard look at the work of John Quincy Adams before his time in the White House. He clearly seemed supportive of Manifest Destiny and expansionism. His time in the House of Representatives complicates things.
As one of the most powerful Speakers of the House in history, he didn’t just support abolition, he became among the only loud voices in Congress who dared support it directly and against the manipulations of his colleagues. His fierceness in opposition in spite of his colleagues’ threats, is important.
While not absolving him of the sins of his earlier political life, and at the risk of whitewashing racist beliefs he maintained, his opposition to slavery and expansion became bulwark at a time when movement was increasing ever greater toward the Manifest Destiny war footing Douglas describes.
Rather than celebrate all steps toward
So the point isn’t to lionize him or demonize him for these choices. I’d rather highlight how much he was willing to throw himself into a movement knowing the perils of doing so. And in light of the modern tendency to shrink away from the spotlight or speak only of how one’s team has “lost its way.”
The War on Drugs
The debate in 2010 around changing sentencing guidelines for cocaine reveals the true tenacity of the Manifest Destiny War.
The existing law punished crack cocaine 100 times more than powder cocaine. In the end, it was heralded as a compromise that the disparity was reduced to 13 times. How can we live with a punishment that is 13 times more severe and dare call it a compromise? As if that’s a both sides giving on something and finding some place in the middle.
The middle is equal sentencing. It isn’t extreme in any way to punish crack and powder cocaine the same. That’s the neutral middle.
The opposite would be to punish the wealthy white person for possessing the more expensive, purer powder cocaine at 100 times the punishment of crack.
And even that hypothetical extreme wouldn’t mitigate the myriad of ways cherished whiteness could be protected through commutation and prosecutorial discretion.
Criminalizing Association
Recent revelations of specific technology trends used by law enforcement show the fearsome power of unchecked criminalization.
CSOC, a technology intended to use analytics to predict crime and make law enforcement more effective has seen dramatic results in some communities. It has quietly reduced crime in several of our major cities without the public even knowing it is being used. Or how to find out if it is.
The basic idea is to predict the crime so officers are in place to catch the small number of criminals perpetrating the lion’s share of crime in the community.
But CSOC isn’t magic. And the secret sauce has a really tragic downside.
First, it outsources responsibility from a person to an algorithm. We can fire people when they are wrong. But we tend to trust a computer even when it is wrong. We invest greater authority in its supposed objectivity.
Secondly, that objectivity is given to it precisely because it isn’t human. It’s just crunching data.
Data which comes from human input.
So every bit of data it uses to analyze crime comes from officer input. And the more data the computer can crunch, the better!
But bringing in this data has a flattening effect on all the data. So every interaction with the community gets logged and becomes a datapoint. But it also becomes an incident.
This creates a negative spiral in the system because if you were to see something in your community and some police officers ask you about it, then you are more likely to be arrested in the future specifically because you now have a prior “incident”.
It only gets worse as the scale increases.
The predictive nature of these technologies is built on the prejudicial inputs by the officers who the system then sends out into specific communities. They go out, collect data, which gets put back into the system, making it all the more likely that the system will tell officers to patrol that very neighborhood tomorrow.
The challenge of this inherently imperfect system producing biased results is then doubled by the authority we give it as a neutral arbitrator. This makes these systems all the more dangerous and likely to heighten the Manifest Destiny war far more than it could ever produce a fair system of justice.
For more on CSOC, listen to these two episodes of Hi-Phi Nation, a brilliant podcast which explores philosophy and storytelling:
When Work Disappears
William Julius Wilson’s book When Work Disappears had a profound impact on me in college.
As a Sociology minor whose whole family came from the city of Detroit, this book detailing how white flight really started in another highly-segregated city explained so much about the moment and the panic and how things changed.
When I talked about the book with my parents, my Mom recalled how her elderly grandparents and great aunts and uncles received daily phone calls from realtors trying to get them to sell. This was 1967. Every day. Your home is worth less than last week. You need to get out while you can still sell it. Listen, we’re just trying to protect your investment.
In the second half of the book, we’ll explore the hope that comes from God. In chapter 4: the Freedom of God.