Yesterday, a black man from Missouri ambushed six officers in Baton Rouge. Three of have succumbed to their injuries. While a nation struggles with the fatigue of death (or perhaps just the media’s coverage of it), the American flag must continue to be flown at half mast. The police who died in the past few weeks are worthy of this sentiment. They surrendered their safety out of duty to their communities and they payed the ultimate price for taking the oath of service.
Of course the flag has never dropped an inch for the lives of innocent people of color who died at the hands of police. As the investigations into the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile begin, communities of color have little hope for healing or for justice. Nearly every officer charged in the death of a black man in 2015, armed or not, were exonerated. And without a #LatinoLivesMatter movement to promote investigation into the recent death of Anthony Nuñez, or a #SouthAsianLives Matter movement to challenge the acquittal of the officer who paralyzed Sureshbhai Patel for the rest of his life, POC know that the deaths in Dallas and Baton Rouge will further emboldened the white majority who already regard their claims with hyper-critical suspicion. Thus their position is impossible. POC never consented to being in harms way, but they are. They never consented to having to fight for recognition, but they must. And POC can little mourn the officers who died, not without overcoming their own fear of police, and not without adding fuel to the flame that threatens to reduce their movement to ash.
That flame is finding kindle. As an event following the death of five officers in Dallas, conservatives have been quick to connect Baton Rouge to the Black Lives Matter movement and the media’s coverage of the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. At the RNC, the new Trump/Pence promises to be the “law and order” candidates, speaking of the deaths in Dallas and in France. The supporting rallying call is “#BlueLivesMatter,” a revised hashtag since #AllLivesMatter failed to silence the voices of black people and elide the realities of police brutality against communities of color. As a piece of metadata, the hashtag catalogues sentiments crying for the safety of men and women in uniform. On the surface, these seem like noble sentiments, and ones that Trump and Pence claim to be sympathetic toward.
But the implicit message in “law and order” and the #BlueLivesMatter hashtag is that the lives of police officers are always more important than the lives of POC. This is why the hashtag exists. It doesn’t matter if POC are innocent, it doesn’t matter if they are unarmed, or armed with the proper conceal-carry license, police are justified in defending themselves regardless because racist America believes to its core that black people especially, and POC generally, are inherently more prone to violence and criminality. That’s why “black on black” crime makes so much sense to this crowd despite it being a useless statistic for assessing police brutality. That’s why stopping traffic seems like such an egregious act.
But even more dangerous, the Republican right believes in earnest that the 2nd Amendment makes us safer not only from each other, but from the very governments that hire the police to maintain their supremacy. Ted Cruz championed this view on the campaign trail when he said, “It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny -- for the protection of liberty.” The mythology tells of armed conservative heroes toppling any government agency that could turn the US into a fascist state. Or maybe that has already happened? Perhaps that’s why police are dead, as armed citizens are taking arms against tyranny?
Their names were Micah Xavier Johnson and Gavin Long. Both military veterans, both believed strongly in the 2nd amendment as a means to protect themselves and their communities from any enemy foreign or domestic. They believed their community was under attack, and the numbers don’t lie: unarmed people of color are more likely to die in a police encounter than an armed white person. If the Republican right believed them, then Johnson and Long’s story is a conservative’s wet dream dripping from the barrel of the cold steel they covet so earnestly. And yet, this same Republican right does not identify with Johnson or Long. The key difference, of course, is that they are black.
They won’t say that. Instead of “black” they will say “former Christian”, or “former nation of Islam member,” or “radical”. In #BlueLivesMatter-world, Johnson and Long are different without any overt explanation as to how. That’s how racism works to keep itself hidden. The formula is simple: Johnson and Long’s pain is illegitimate, their service to their country irrelevant, and their belief in taking up arms against their government, a perversion, because reasons. Most importantly in this view, it’s Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton they should be fighting, not officers who may view them as a more dangerous threat because of the color of their skin. Government is indeed corrupt and needs to be fought, but the killing of POC is not a crime. In this view, legitimate victimhood is reserved for white people, as is legitimate retribution through the 2nd amendment.
Back to reality, President Obama was right when speaking at the funeral of the victims in Dallas: “We have our divisions, and they are not new.” Indeed, racial profiling and its consequences are well documented in psychology, sociology, criminology, critical race theory, rhetoric, literary study, and more. Black men are twice as likely to be arrested, twice as likely to be convicted if arrested, and three times more likely to face full sentencing and capital punishment, resulting in 1 in 3 black men being incarcerated at some point in their lives in the US, mostly for non-violent offenses. The most egregious example of this inequity in justice is to look at underage men on death row. Despite the fact that the majority of underage murders are committed by white boys, 100% of underage boys on death row are black. Juries in this country believe black boys are inherently dangerous while white boys are capable of reform. Examples like these show the full scope of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Why isn't this common knowledge? In some ways it is a complicated academic conversation that doesn't make for exciting news. Moreover, keeping fake debates alive makes for more ratings, even when one side is clearly malicious, if not fictitious.
And like the US as a whole, some media are just genuinely committed to white supremacy. Networks like Fox news love "black on black crime" because it fits their suspicions that black people deserve to be killed in nearly every case regardless of circumstance. Fox news focuses almost exclusively on crimes committed by people of color while parading hero police. The nuances of white supremacy are another 1,000 words or more, but capture beautifully in the movie Don't Be A Menace?, the scene where a store owner follows Shawn and Marlon Wayans around the store saying "Hurry up and buy!" while the white man robs her blind? It's like that, but on a national scale.
Trump and Pence are the crooks in the store. They seek to score political points off of the deaths of POC and police alike. Any sentimentality from Obama or Hillary will be re-framed as weakness in the face of an enemy — here, American citizens of color — and a call for the death of police. For Democrats, any concern with the realities of racial inequality become political liability, because the math is complex, the solutions are elusive and daunting, and the path to change is made more difficult by a white electorate who fails to acknowledge these facts. By contrast, Republicans are a political opponent ready for the reverse-race war they already believe is happening. The southern strategy of cultivating white resentment has worked for Republicans many times before, most recently by attenuating the change promised by Obama’s presidency. If they can’t defeat Hillary because of her emails or her record as Secretary of State, this will be their haymaker, proving again that law and order have rarely anything to do with Justice.