What Is Civility Anyway?
This week, video surfaced on Twitter of a man in Baton Rouge, La. being pinned to the ground by two police officers. As one of the cops’ knees punctures into the man’s chest, the other unlatches his weapon and leverages himself with the man’s arm, forming a sort of slingshot with his body as the fulcrum, before shoving the weapon inches from the man’s face. The video, filmed by members of a local police monitoring non-profit, goes black as you hear five gunshots go off. The man, 37-year-old Alton Sterling, is now dead.
It goes without saying that Mr. Sterling, a father of five, was black. The circumstances of his interaction — a stop caused by selling CDs outside of a store, immediate escalation, the prejudged sense of danger — are only a sampling of the indignities faced by black people in America daily. Not even 24 hours from Sterling’s death, another grizzly video — this time on Facebook Live — surfaced. 31-year-old Philando Castile, a black man who worked for Falcon Heights, Minn. public schools, was pulled over in a car with his girlfriend and daughter. In the video, his girlfriend—whose name is Lavish Reynolds — says that Castile, a licensed gun-owner, informed the officer that he was legally carrying a weapon. According to Reynolds, after Castile was instructed to provide his license and registration, he reached for his wallet and was immediately subjected to a barrage of bullets. The video pans to the grim sight of Castile, drenched in blood, his life draining from him by the second. Toward the end of the clip, after the visibly frightened officer orders them out of the car (with his gun still drawn), Reynolds, whose demeanor for the majority of the video was in stark contrast to the officer’s — calm and composed — out of necessity, screams.
Her daughter can be heard saying, “It’s OK. I’m here with you.”
Hours before the widespread dissemination of the Alton Sterling video, and just a few hours after the initial confrontation, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a speech to a crowd in North Carolina. “We’re going to take care of the African-American community,” Trump declared, his voice reeking something at the word “African.” The real estate mogul went on to deride Obama for being “all talk” on the issues facing minority communities, adding that he’d “bring jobs to the hispanics who don’t have them.” The qualification there — the ones who “don’t have them” — is racist, based on the tired assumption that hispanics are “taking” jobs. Trump’s statement on Obama’s legacy in the black community, while egregiously false, was also racist.
The video of Sterling’s murder and of Trump’s remarks were sandwiched together on my Twitter feed one afternoon in a case of perfect irony. Here, condensed on social media, could I not only see the breadth and audacity of American racism, but also the pernicious way that it refuses to acknowledge itself. The comments on both clips derided the black community for behaving like “thugs.” Charts of black killings vs. white killings, or of black murders on white victims were shared as if the folder containing these (erroneous) data were saved directly on these people’s desktops. As happens on Twitter, users tried to fire back with simple lines of questioning “Shouldn’t some cops be arrested?” “He was pinned down, why did he have to shoot him?” These inquiries were almost always followed by more erroneous statistics.
The reflexive defensiveness of white people in the face of these tragedies is telling. Surely, a man being shot in the presence of his child is unacceptable. The only way to see such an image and focus primarily on “insubordination,” as a televised anchor on Fox News did, is to say, not-so-subtly, that you don’t believe these people to be human beings. It has become distressingly normalized to not call these things what they are. To see Donald Trump as activating “racial anxieties” as if that is a real thing, as though white people’s longstanding, and well-documented, hatred of black people is some sort of affliction, a mere “anxiety.”
All of this begs the question of what exactly black people are supposed to do right now. Much has been said for the need to behave in these situations with “civility.” The word bounces around a lot when a particular demographic has reason to be foaming-at-the-mouth angry at the majority population in this country. It was thrown around when rioters expressed outrage that the police departments charged with protecting them were killing them, it elicits the comments from white parents around the country that “Destroying their own neighborhood won’t solve anything,” as if anything has ever been done about the issue of police violence, ever. Even in the face of mounting video evidence, even when a child was gunned down for holding a toy gun, or when a man carrying a bb gun in Wal-Mart is gunned down or whe —
To demand “civility” is to suggest that, no matter what, the only way to truly overcome is to never get too mad at white people, no matter what they do to you or people like you.
Frankly, I’m sick of being civil.
