Month: December 2014

My colleague Ed Kilgore was raised in Georgia which gives him a totally different perspective than I got being raised in the relatively “enlightened” and idyllic Ivy League town of Princeton, New Jersey. What Ed lived with every day, I mostly learned about in textbooks. It also helps him that he is a little older than I am. Racial tensions in Princeton were significantly more pronounced for my brothers, who are ten and thirteen years older, than they were for me. By the time I was in third grade, a Georgia Democrat was our president, and the Jim Crow Era was taught in school as something shameful from the distant past.

Ed visited the Atlanta exurbs this past week, and it ain’t seeming like the distant past to him.

I’ve just spent nearly a week back home in exurban Atlanta, and I regret to report that the events in and in reaction to Ferguson have brought back (at least in some of the older white folks I talked with) nasty and openly racist attitudes I haven’t heard expressed in so unguarded a manner since the 1970s. The polling we’ve all seen about divergent perceptions of Ferguson doesn’t even begin to reflect the intensity of the hostility I heard towards “the blacks” (an inhibition against free use of the n-word, at least in semi-public, seems to be the only post-civil-rights taboo left), who have the outrageous temerity to protest an obvious act of self-defense by a police officer…

…Putting aside the legal issues (you can’t really expect lay people to understand how grand juries work unless they’ve served on one), there seems to be a complete lack of reflection on the fact that it’s the black kid who is dead and the cop who is alive and free. This skewed perception of the equities of the matter is what most reminds me of the very bad old days back home, when to a shockingly overwhelming degree white people believed all that civil rights stuff was a fabrication of outside agitators and lying yankee reporters inciting the normally placid if potentially dangerous local helots to “act ugly,” richly earning whatever hellish retaliatory violence that might ensue.

I think Ed was better prepared by his upbringing than I was to meet America in the Obama Era. I had unlearned a lot about race relations in this country prior to 2008, but I still harbored delusions that most of the ugly past was dead and buried. Didn’t the success of Barack Obama in some sense prove that?

In reality, it proved something different. It proved that we could beat these folks in pitched battle, but it also revealed that this would be more necessary and more urgent than I ever imagined.

Mark Twain advised us to “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Good advice, perhaps, but not the end of the story. This kind of acquiescence in the face of injustice did not impress Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” King also warned that “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict” and “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

These are two great and wise Americans, and both were keen moral observers of our society. In Twain’s case, his quote wasn’t intended to be taken entirely seriously, although he was issuing an important warning. What’s changed since his day is that ordinary citizens don’t need to purchase ink by the barrel to reach the eyeball’s of millions of people. We have blogs and the Internet, now. Those who seek to combat injustice are no longer bringing spitballs to a tank fight.

That is, unless the Supreme Court has the tanks. I can get quite anguished about how far to go to protect free speech, and issuing threats on social media should not be legally protected in all circumstances. Certainly, making threats to kill that are perceived by the proposed victim as credible has to be crossing the line.

But I also have noticed that governments across the world like to censor (or attempt to censor) social media whenever they are facing popular unrest. And there is a temptation to try to draw distinctions between eyewitnesses on Facebook and Twitter and the “press,” which is sometimes defined in a way that excludes anyone who doesn’t work for a large corporate entity.

What I do for the Washington Monthly isn’t really materially different from what I’ve been doing for ten years at Booman Tribune, and the way I am treated legally shouldn’t be any different in the two cases.

It’s a very difficult subject. In the case of people making threats, I fear that we’ll use our legitimate desire to stop the next school shooting to aggressively go after dozens of teenagers who were just having a bad day and wrote some ill-advised and impulsively intemperate things. Maybe we even want to err on the side of caution, knowing that we’ll be ruining some people’s lives in the process.

But I get nervous whenever the Supreme Court starts to consider the limits of free speech. I don’t want to go back to the day when you had to buy ink by the barrel to get heard in this society.

From the “Awww, Poor Baby” Files:

Reacting to five members of the St. Louis Rams coming onto the field for Sunday’s game displaying the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ gesture, a St. Louis police officers fraternal organization is demanding the team discipline the players, and that the team and league issue a formal apology, reports KSDK…

Responding to the display, the statement reads, “The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.”

You know what ELSE is “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory”? Subverting a grand jury process so a cop doesn’t have to face charges. Conducting a secret trial designed to exonerate said cop. Announcing grand jury results well after sundown and calling a state of emergency a week before the decision. Smearing the kid’s parents. Burning down the kid’s father’s church. These are all things that, in my opinion anyway, are a lot more “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory” than a few football players expressing their opinion.

Also, too, I find that the St. Louis policemen’s misunderstanding of how the First Amendment works to be “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory”:

[SLPOA Business Manager Jeff Roorda said] “I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products. It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do. Somebody needs to throw a flag on this play. If it’s not the NFL and the Rams, then it’ll be cops and their supporters.”

Somebody call the waaaahmbulance, because I think Jeffy’s gonna make a poopoo in his diaper.