Bad Apples and Sour Trees: Dante on Systemic Injustice, Rage, and Reform
by Elizabeth Coggeshall
In recent speeches on police violence and reform, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have sought to distinguish “bad apples” in police departments from the “good, decent people” whom both Biden and Trump have separately praised. The “bad apple” argument has once again come to the fore of public discourse since officer Derek Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has been reignited following recent incidents in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by officer Rusten Sheskey less than three months later.
This question is one of many that Americans are actively debating in the wake of the violence of summer 2020 and the protests that have followed: were the officers who shot George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and countless other black Americans “bad apples,” or were their actions the product of decades of policies in local policing that have led to staggeringly disproportionate displays of deadly force against BIPOC individuals, as opposed to their white fellow citizens? Where can we find justice in these cases? Is it enough to punish the individual (bad) actor, or do we need to uproot the intractable, even structural, systems of racial bias that plague our criminal justice system?
Bad Apple or Rotten Tree?
As Americans debate strategies for police reform, one reform-minded author can offer guidance on individual moral accountability under unjust systems: Dante Alighieri. To the popular imagination, Dante is much more associated with his Inferno and its seemingly merciless dispensation of sanctions for the violation of divine law. But it is his Purgatorio — an account of the individual’s moral reckoning for the sake of civic restoration — that may provide insight into the pursuit of justice for the violence inflicted on individuals and communities of color throughout our history.
Halfway through his ascent up Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim encounters Marco, a Lombard, who purges his wrath on the third terrace. Marco has been impossible to nail down to an identifiable historical personage, but Dante’s depiction of him as a champion of worldly virtue in the face of earthly corruption turned him into a legendary defender of nobility who readily spoke truth to power.
Marco’s brief remarks about the loss of virtue in the world occasion a question from the pilgrim: where does evil come from? Reflecting on the violent unrest that would lead to his banishment from his native city, the pilgrim says:
The world is just as barren of every virtue as you have said, weighed down and covered with malice. But I beg you to point out to me the cause, so that I may see it and may show it to others; for some say it comes from the heavens and some from here below.
The pilgrim’s question is of grave importance to the poem’s theory of justice: do the stars influence our behaviors, or are we free to choose as we will?
“The Heavens Begin Your Movements”
While the majority of Americans no longer buy into the idea of astrological determinism, many accept that various biological and/or cultural frameworks condition our choices. Our race, ethnicity, gender, religion, class, education, upbringing, family environment, peer group, genetic makeup — and, especially, the ways we perceive those facets of our identities — are all frameworks that we think of as curtailing moral freedom. The systemic racism which Americans have lived under for centuries predisposes each of us to certain modes of thought and behavior that orient our choices. “The heavens begin your movements,” Marco says. In other words, we are all born into systems that condition our perceptions of and actions in the world.
But Marco seems to dispense with the notion of determinism pretty quickly. The heavens may begin our movements, he says, but even within those conditions that impinge on our freedoms, a light is given to us to determine right from wrong, as is the capacity to freely choose one path or another. Such freedom of choice is essential for the operation of justice — whether reward for good action or punishment for ill. So, he concludes, “if the present world goes astray, in you is the cause, in you it must be sought.”
On this point, Marco is clear: these officers were “bad apples.” And, in order for justice to exist in our legal system, they must be held to account individually for their crimes.
But even the administration of individual justice meets obstacles. So long as officers are not held accountable for the injustices they perpetrate — so long as departments and unions shield officers from accountability, delay justice with insufficient internal investigations, offer their officers qualified immunity in civil court, rehire those who have been fired for misconduct, refuse to intervene in the wrongdoing of their peers — these supposed “bad apples” rot the very tree from which justice purports to grow.
Who Sets Hand to the Law?
The larger point, for Marco as for Dante, is not just that evil comes from the individual actions of bad actors. Even as Marco insists on the freedom and moral responsibility of the individual, he knows that each of us must also train our will to resist those forces that condition us to behave in accordance with unjust systems. As Marco puts it, “you have free will, which, even if it struggles in its first battles with the heavens, later it overcomes all.”
This is a particularly important lesson for white Americans in general — and white police officers in particular (Joe Biden’s “good, decent” cops) — to heed as we take stock of our own culpability in systemic oppression. In the individual’s moral reckoning with systemic racism, each of us takes the first steps in our “battles with the heavens,” the struggle against the systems that structure our behaviors and blind us to the evils that complicity propagates. If systemic racism is just that — systemic — it goes beyond the actions of single individuals like Derek Chauvin or Rusten Sheskey. Changing that system has to begin from the collective choices of individuals who reject the structural racism they are born into and habituated towards. Ibram X. Kendi likens such “battles with the heavens” to addiction:
Like fighting an addiction, being an anti-racist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.
Marco concedes that individual moral reckoning is a struggle. Guidance, he says, should come from the law, which was put in place to act as a curb on our worst impulses. But what if those who are meant to enforce those laws are the very ones who break them?
“Laws there are,” Marco laments, “but who sets hand to them?”
“Poor leadership has made the world wicked,” he concludes.
Elsewhere, Dante’s mentor Brunetto Latini makes clear the impossibility of just action under the watch of unjust leaders and institutions: “among soured trees the sweet fig can’t bear fruit.” Training that encourages force and militarization, accompanied by socialization that promotes fear and dehumanization, creates conditions that dispose even those “good, decent” cops toward discrimination, aggression, and violence.
Blinding Smoke
It’s easy to forget that the entire conversation between the pilgrim and Marco unfolds in a smoke so thick that it weighs down the pilgrim’s eyelids, so stinging that it feels like harsh cloth. The smoke, as with all punishments in Purgatory, is meant to heal and restore, drawing the penitent away from vice and toward its corresponding virtue. Here, the penitents expiate iracundia (a quickness to anger ungoverned by reason) and seek to instill what is often described as “gentleness,” but could just as well be fashioned as “nonviolent resistance.”
The smoke on the terrace of wrath recalls the tear gas to which thousands of peaceful protesters in over 100 U.S. cities were subjected by their own police forces, as documented by a striking photo-collage in the New York Times. Unlike Dante’s penitents, the protesters in these photographs were not subjected to a blinding, stinging smoke as expiation for personal sin. Rather, they stand up in resistance, facing state-sanctioned aggression to advocate for the purgation of the collective sin of systemic racism within American institutions of all kinds.
Among the Times photographs, there is an image of a Black protester in Atlanta, cutting through the smoke, his open palms raised. He cries out, a vox clamantis in deserto, in righteous rage against the injustice that killed George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans. His defiant approach is a picture of the words Virgil uses to describe his charge at the entrance to Purgatory: “He goes seeking freedom, which is so precious, as one knows who gives up his life for its sake.”
The freedoms demanded by this protester — economic, legal, political, bodily — are material ones. He seeks liberation from “the policies that ensnare” Black Americans in an unjust system. These freedoms are substantially different than the immaterial freedom sought by the pilgrim in his journey up the mountain. The freedom Dante’s pilgrim seeks, like that which we seek to restore to our civic institutions, is a moral one: the freedom of moral integrity, which comes from the alignment of one’s actions with one’s principles.
Elizabeth Coggeshall is assistant professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University, where she teaches courses in medieval Italian literature and culture. She specializes in the reception of Dante’s works in 21st-century American popular culture, and she co-curates (with Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College) the digital archive Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture (@dante_today), which tracks the transglobal resonance of Dante’s works across the 20th and 21st centuries. She is currently on the Council of the Dante Society of America and is a member of the inaugural group of participants in the Dante Speakers Bureau.
