On occasion, the unconscionable mates with the ridiculous and gives birth to the absurd.
As reported by the Daily Mail, there is at least one (of likely many) such occurrence in Ferguson, Missouri.
Because of the Department of Justice's scathing report on endemic, institutional, habitual, cultural, and routine white supremacy among his department and brethren, a Ferguson police officer's feelings have been hurt--he has been made to cry.
An angel has now earned its wings:
A serving Ferguson police officer revealed that he broke down in tears after he read the Department of Justice report which condemned his force and said: ‘I just close my eyes and wish it wasn’t like that’.
The officer said that his colleagues were ‘good cops’ and that they were ‘hurting’ just like the rest of the community.
In an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Online he said they were all standing behind embattled Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson but were fearful they would lose their jobs if the department was shut down.
He said: ‘People who don’t know me see me and then they hate me. That’s not fair....I’m not going to hate people because they are venting.
‘It’s tough but I still have to get to work.
‘I have to take it because they are venting and we have to let them vent, but I will protect this city, I will protect Ferguson’...
The officer said: ‘There are guys who write a lot of tickets, yeah, but I don’t think it was any different from other departments.
The officer said that in the wake of the report the mood on the street had been hostile.
He said: ‘When we get to some of these calls people are yelling profanities...they are filming us and that didn’t happen before.
He added: ‘The biggest thing that hurts is how the community feels, what are they feeling. That’s very important to me..
‘Sometimes I just sit there and cry...
The Daily Mail continues:
...The Ferguson police officer said the report misrepresented not just the force, but the city.
'The report is hard to read, but that’s not me,' he said
‘I am good with the people, the community. We have good officers. Do they write more tickets than some people? Maybe. But they are good officers.
‘This hurts, it really does. When you read it, you read it as a city as a whole. You read it like everybody is like that, but not everybody is like that.’
The oral traditions of black and brown people contain wisdom about the power of white women's tears to make our lives a living hell (see the lynching tree in the United States). It would seem that white men have now learned the same lessons.
The deflection and denial by Ferguson's officials about the racist practices of their government, the predictable and on script screeds by the likes of Patrick Buchanan in defense of their hero Titan negro hunter Darren Wilson, and now the supposed pain of the Ferguson police in response to being called to marginal account for their bigotry, are (again) examples of white privilege and white supremacy as both quotidian behavior and political ideology.
A white cop's tears in response to the Department of Justice report on institutional white racism--white supremacy--in Ferguson presents another opportunity (there are after all a near endless supply of such moments in the Age of Obama) to sketch out the contours of Whiteness in the post civil rights era.
Whiteness is a social, political, and cultural system that involves maintaining the inter-group privilege, power, and superiority of those people who are arbitrarily grouped into and known as "white" in the United States and the West.
Whiteness functions as a type of privilege, psychic and material wage, and grants its "owners" the label and title of being "normal"--or in the United States the unmarked, not hyphenated, and assumed to be the "real" and essential "American".
Whiteness is also invisible to its owners as a day-to-day matter; Whiteness is hyper-visible to those others who live along and on the other side of the colorline.
The concept and term "Whiteness" refers to the macro level social construct that works through and is manifested as hegemonic power. Akin to the relationship between individual "men" and "masculinity", Whiteness works through, can be channeled by, and profoundly impacts the identity formation of individual people who are marked as "white" in the West.
There, many if not most white folks do not reflect on what it means to be "white"--unless said identity is threatened and/or the taken for granted benefits and unearned advantages are perceived as being denied.
All white people are beneficiaries of Whiteness to varying degrees--even if all white people are not active signatories to the social contract of Whiteness and White Supremacy.
The lower case "white" refers to individuals who happen to be members of that socially constructed racial group. The upper case "White" signals to Whiteness and questions of group domination, subordination, and Power.
It must be reiterated that Whiteness is a cultural and institutional force. As such, there are black and brown people who benefit from, worship, and are complicit with Whiteness and White Supremacy.
Clarence Thomas is one such person.
As seen in the Daily Mail story, Whiteness and White People exhibit and are afflicted by what social scientists have described as "white fragility". This concept describes how white privilege and other types of social conditioning can make white folks feel defensive, threatened, and vulnerable when they are held accountable for their complicity with racism.
This is a handy defense mechanism: if science fiction is one of the most political of storytelling forms, white fragility is like the death curse of the xenomorphs in the Alien films.
Like H.R. Giger's classic monsters in that movie franchise, Whiteness spits acid on its enemies when either hurt or killed.
This is an apt metaphor for White Victimology.
White Victimology twists reality, robbing white folks of ethical culpability and responsibility for their active and passive benefiting from White Supremacy. Stated differently White Victimology is the psychological predisposition and decision rule that allows white perpetrators and beneficiaries of racism to reimagine themselves as being unfairly judged.
In post civil rights America, this crystallization of white racial logic deems that being accused of racism is a far worse thing than being a victim of white on black and brown racism.
[For example, white victimology also allows white folks to be more offended by their being asked not to use hateful language such as the word "nigger" than by the evil wickedness--never forgetting that "nigger" was a word invented by White Society--which birthed it.]
Reading the Daily Mail story about white cop victimology blues in Ferguson, I wonder if the crying police officer shed any tears about Michael Brown, the black folks whose jobs were lost because of police harassment, the wage and wealth theft by Ferguson's police against the black community, or the state of terror and racial intimidation inflicted upon African-Americans by the Ferguson police?
Did this hurt and pained Ferguson police officer ever out his racist peers? Did he defend the black folks of Ferguson who were being victimized by a racist debt peonage collection scheme?
Where were the tears then? I think we all know...