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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.
4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis
I'm kind of unsettled by the fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew that it doesn't matter if you have black cops, black chiefs of police, black prosecutors, black judges, black city councils, black mayors, black members of Congress, black Presidents: systemic white supremacy makes them all racist too. Just going to chuckle nervously and assume that all of these online people aren't real.
Hard not to wonder if 100 years from now, white people could be only 5% of the population of the US but every bad thing that's done is considered latent white supremacy.
Most of the rhetoric around "white supremacy" is, of course, infantile nonsense, but surely it is not so unthinkable that some might buy into a system or a set of ideas that rationalized their own disadvantage, is it? Untouchables in India certainly did so historically, as did the person quoted [here}(https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/12/magazine/god-created-me-to-be-a-slave.html). And that is what Gramsci meant by "cultural hegemony", which certainly seems to have some truth to it. And note some of its similarities to the concept of The Cathedral.
Note, also, the claim that that black cops are also racist against black defendants is hardly a new one. See this scene from Boyz in the Hood (1991) and these lyrics from "Fuck Tha Police" (1988): "But don't let it be a black and a white one; 'Cause they'll slam ya down to the street top; Black police showin' out for the white cop." John Singleton was 22 or 23 years old when he made Boyz in the Hood; Ice Cube and MC Ren were 19 when they wrote the lyrics to "Fuck Tha Police"; perhaps they had personal knowledge of what they spoke?
I don't mean to dismiss the idea of systemic white supremacy completely. Cultural baggage is obviously real and doesn't go away at the stroke of a pen.
More like immediately jumping to 5 black cops exhibiting lethal brutality towards a black civilian = systemic white supremacy at work.
This is blaming every bad thing that ever happens to black people on white people. Both the victim and the cops In this case, sorry, it's a bit much for me.
It comes across as saying black cops in 2023 are still not responsible for their actions. Give me a break?
The first Untouchables that have equal rights are probably going to be pretty baggage laden. After, oh, I don't know, 2-3 generations of Untouchables achieving the heights of power I have less sympathy for the seemingly complete disavowal of ownership of decision making.
When do we get to stop kneejerk blaming every bad thing on systemic white supremacy? That's the roadmap I want to see.
Again, as I said, most of the rhetoric around "white supremacy" is infantile nonsense, but "systemic white supremacy at work" is not the same as "blaming . . . white people." Or at least not current white people. It is blaming a system. (Yes, I am sure that there are some people who conflate the two. But that does not seem to be the claim made in this specific instance).
Typically, proposed solutions to "systemic white supremacy" involve extracting some cost from white people, or holding non-white people to a different standard. Whether or not this is actually "blaming white people" is a matter of the bow that's put on it.
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In principle, I could see how this could be true. In practice, the "systemic racism" argument seems only ever to be deployed as part of motte-and-bailey arguments.
If you think that, you need to broaden your reading. Even people like Glenn Loury talk about systematic racism (while expressing skepticism re its causal effects)
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It’s the world’s most perfect motte-and-bailey: most people hear “white supremacy” and think KKK meetings or maybe poll taxes and poll tests. Academics, meanwhile, have been trained to think of whiteness as an orderly society where people take personal responsibility for the consequences of their choices, big and small.
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