Is
there a name for the half-hearted disclaimer attached to
victim-blaming essays—the disavowal at the end of an argument
implying that a dead or raped person had it coming? There should be.
Rod
Dreher—whose writing I generally find compelling, interesting, and
often beautiful—recently offered a standard example of such a
disclaimer in his post titled “Tips
for Not Getting Shot by Cops.”
Responding to Michael Brown's shooting death in Ferguson, Dreher
argues that if Brown hadn't been a rude, bullying thief, he would
still be alive today. Note that Dreher does not focus on the shooting
itself—the circumstances that would justify or condemn the shooting
in court. His tips have nothing to do with whether or how Brown
attacked Darren Wilson. Instead, he focuses on Brown’s history as a
trouble-maker, his theft and aggression earlier in the day, and his
allegedly defiant attitude towards Officer Wilson. In keeping with
the dictates of the genre, Dreher finishes his post with a
disclaimer: "None of this means that Wilson was justified in
using deadly force against Brown." We need a good name for that
kind of disclaimer—the one where an author unconvincingly denies
the very thing he spent a great deal of time implicitly arguing.
Every
time an unarmed young black man or youth gets shot by police (or a
neighborhood watchman), there's a frenzy to unearth every crime he's
committed, every mistake he's made, every instance of aggression or
rudeness, whether in person or through social media. And tagged onto
the end of each of these lists of failings is the half-hearted
disclaimer: “Of course, none of that justifies...”
The
victim-blaming genre doesn't just apply to dead young black men.
Young women who are raped or murdered often undergo the same
treatment, with each mistake or character flaw duly noted until a
list of indictments has been compiled. Take conservative hack Debbie
Schlussel's response to a recent abduction and murder here in
Charlottesville: “Not that I excuse any crime or violence, but if
you walk around alone and drunk in half a shirt at night, this kind
of thing does happen.”
[I
refuse to link to Schlussel’s post because, unlike Dreher's, it is
flat-out vile and deserves no further publicity. And in contrast with
Dreher, the vapidity and cruelty are entirely in keeping with her
typical output.]
~~~
Here's
the deal: If Michael Brown attacked Wilson as Wilson describes (or at
least in a similar manner), and if he was shot while charging at
Wilson, then the shooting was justifiable, though still a tragedy. If
witness Darian Johnson's version of events—Brown on the defensive,
surrendering when shot—is closer to reality, than it wasn't
justified. And that’s it.
All
this sound and fury about him being a thief and a bully and a rude
and foolish person—all of it is a distraction that serves no
purpose except to suggest on the sly that winding up dead is the
proper outcome of such character flaws. It implies that there's an
obvious progression from simple theft, bullying, and rudeness to
getting shot by a cop—that the latter constitutes a proportionate
response to the former. It justifies the frenzied unearthing of
personal mistakes invariably used to portray the dead as somehow
deserving of their fate due to their flaws and failings. The implicit
message is not one of mourning for the death of one of God's
children. Instead, the message is good riddance.
~~~
The
genre responds to other narratives at work. The shooting of Michael
Brown has been overtaken by and enveloped in the events that
followed—in the perceived sluggishness of the police department's
investigation, in the protests and the subsequent militaristic police
response, in the overarching narrative of structural racism in
America. Thus, Michael Brown ceases to be simply the person that he
was, instead becoming the exemplar for all black victims of police
abuse. Officer Wilson transforms from a human being into a type—the
racist and violent cop. The death of Michael Brown has become one
piece of the larger story that is #Ferguson. And to those for whom
Brown becomes a rallying cry, the particulars of the case become
obscured, irrelevant, or even inconvenient. From this combination, we
get the perpetuation of an increasingly unconvincing portrait of
Michael Brown as a “gentle giant.” It is against this narrative
that Dreher reacts.
When
it comes to the victimization of women, it can be difficult to
distinguish which narrative responds to which. Only recently has the
long-standing tendency to degrade rape victims been rightfully
denounced. Victim-blaming is wrong because it shifts the focus from
rapist to the victim’s flaws, and because it implies that rape
amounts to a just response to foolishness, imprudence, and vice. But
in media and academia, the rejection of victim-blaming now occurs on
other grounds—namely, the idea that moral judgments are inherently
arbitrary and oppressive. Even prudential considerations are deemed
unacceptable when they risk trampling on the autonomous individual’s
sovereign will. Any behavior—no matter how destructive or
debauched—is acceptable, so long as it is chosen. Moreover, calling
dangerous behavior dangerous is highly offensive in a society in
which the greatest conceivable good is choosing. When it comes to the
rape or murder of young women, the acceptable response among college
administrators seems to be finding ways to reduce the consequences of
bad decisions—more
lighting, more cameras, more police—without
ever calling for better decisions.
Schlussel
and Dreher see themselves as clear-eyed prophets speaking hard truths
to a soft culture. As the title of his post implies, Dreher claims
that he's not offering a justification for Brown's shooting. “I
simply want,” Dreher writes, “to say here that the behavior of
Brown and Johnson on that day is a good example of What Not To Do.”
Similarly, Schlussel's “bottom line” is a P.S.A. to parents:
“Teach your child to take personal responsibility for what happens
to him or her.” In other words, these kind souls are not minimizing
tragic deaths so much as offering sage and compassionate advice.
When
it comes down to it, it’s hard to disagree with most of the
“advice” offered by Dreher and even Schlussel. Don't be a thief
or a bully. Don't be a rude idiot to anyone, police included. Don't
get drunk and wander around alone at night while scantily clad.
Behaving in these ways is imprudent, stupid, and foolish.
But
if you place all that foolishness on the one hand, and on the other
hand you place the violent death of a young man or woman, the
discordance becomes jarring. The focus is skewed. There's great
tragedy—bloody crying out from the ground—and these writers want
to focus on the proper way for a polite young man or nice young lady
to comport themselves in society.
What
causes this misplaced focus on the victim’s flaws? Sometimes
callousness or indifference is at work. In Schlussel’s case there’s
a downright terrifying degree of spite for the dead and for the
family of the dead. I suspect she’s chasing the notoriety and
celebrity of the Ann Coulter persona.
But
victim-blaming can also be a complex phenomenon. When confronted with
tragedy, many of us wish to shift attention away from the
inexplicable and onto a circumstance within our control. We want to
put rhetorical distance between the victim and ourselves or those we
hold dear. I think what’s happening is a kind of line-drawing
between the good people to whom such terrible things could never
happen and the not-so-good—who may not have deserved their tragic
demise, but who surely would never have met it if only they had
behaved better. We all would like to live in a world in which bad
things only happened to bad people. Even when we intellectually know
that this is not so, we wish it were. And so we shift our gaze from
the terrible monstrosity—the shooting or the rape—to the person
shot, the person raped. Or, rather, to their mistakes.
These
responses are inhumane and uncharitable. They transform women from
victims of tragedies into object lessons for the moral education of
the youth. At the expense of the victim, we insulate ourselves from
worry and excuse ourselves from wrestling with tragedy in any
meaningful way.
Dreher’s
focus on the rude and foolish behavior of Brown echoes the
helpful advice of Sunil Dutta—a
veteran police officer and professor of homeland security at Colorado
Tech University. Dutta suggests that “if you don’t want to get
shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the
ground, just do what I tell you.” Like Dreher, Dutta would never
advocate police brutality. If a police officer violates your rights,
Dutta urges you first to accept your abuse calmly and meekly. “Later,
you can ask for a supervisor, lodge a complaint or contact civil
rights organizations if you believe your rights were violated. Feel
free to sue the police!” Indeed! And you can rest assured that the
abusive officer will be brought to justice! Maybe. Five
years later. If you were lucky enough to catch the abuse on tape.
There’s
so much more that is worth our time and effort. It seems that a new
tragedy unfolds every day. With the authoritarianism and
militarization
of police forces
everywhere, with black boys being shot for holding
BB guns in parks,
with young black men shot for holding
BB guns in Wal-Mart,
with police
assaulting young black men for the terrible crime of sitting on a
bench while waiting to pick up a child from preschool....
With these just being the recent and recorded instances of police
brutality among so many other victims forever consigned to obscurity,
unknown and anonymous to all but their grieving families and friends,
Dreher chooses instead to focus on how one particular young man was a
rude and foolish bully. And he follows it up with the most
unconvincing of denials—a half-hearted disclaimer intended to
exonerate him from the clear thrust of his own argument.
