Matt Waggoner, assistant professor of philosophy is the author of this essay, which he presented during the Justice Panel hosted by Albertus Magnus College on the main campus in March 2015. He voices his opinions on the recent events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, and on what he feels is in need of change within the United States justice system.
Civil disobedience in the 1960s exposed the nation’s habit of equating blackness with criminality, deviance and inferior morality. Protesters were branded as criminals and publicly beaten while the rest of the world watched on television. This was strategy. It was designed to bring racism out into the open, to dramatize what it looks like when the violence of ideas and attitudes manifests itself in the form of physical violence. There’s a belief among many today that racism has ended, that it’s in the past. It points to athletes and entertainers as anecdotal evidence of black success in support of the conclusion that we are O.K. now. This belief is belied everyday in cities and neighborhoods where people of color suffer brutal poverty and police brutality.
I won’t say it’s intentionally pernicious, because I don’t think it is, but its delusional denials of racism’s persistence aren’t helping. At worst, denial is complicit in racism’s tenacious ability to endure. We need to be honest with ourselves that American civilization has, from the start, viewed black and brown bodies as worthy of two things: plunder and punishment. Events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Florida and too many other places are not exceptions but symptoms of a dark national legacy that we still have not laid to rest.
What’s to be done? How can we lay to rest a legacy so deeply entrenched in our nation’s fabric?
For one thing, we draw from other legacies and traditions, like the tradition represented here today, which is one of honesty, open dialogue, contemplation and dignity. We must also draw from the legacy of those, like Sir Thomas More, who were not only willing to confront society’s inadequacies, but to imagine a better society; dialogue and contemplation, but also imagination. Are we courageous enough to imagine a different kind of society in which equality and dignity are not rhetoric but reality?
In the months before Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, he began to suspect that racism’s political afflictions would reinvent themselves as lasting economic afflictions… that freedom and equality would be denied by other means. He worried to Harry Belafonte that they had “integrated into a burning house.” He was organizing at that time with the Poor People’s Campaign. Together they were calling for an end to the war in Vietnam so that previously promised funds could be reapportioned to Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives — funds that had originally been assigned to full employment, decent housing and a universal living wage. King was right – these things must be done. Until we make equality a concrete reality, equal respect will remain an abstraction.
Racism is agile. It houses old attitudes inside new language once the old language has been discredited. In the decade after the civil rights movement, racism’s old language was discredited. But it invented a new one aimed at ensuring that while blacks would be given political equality, they would not be given social and economic equality. This new language of racism popularized the belief that people’s failures socially and economically were their own doing. Weak moral character, broken families, a sense of entitlement and laziness were the things causing their poverty. According to this new, coded language of racism, the implication was that black people were not poor because of the lasting effects of centuries of wealth deprivation and unequal education. They were poor because they were morally deficient. It’s the return of familiar attitudes couched in the rhetoric of personal responsibility, the glaring hypocrisy of which is that this new rhetoric permitted the nation to avoid responsibility at every turn.
Still today, degrading the character of black people serves as an excuse for denying them equality. This has become the unofficial language of racism in our times, and this is why I say that the criminalization of blackness by default, which we see happening in many of these instances of police brutality, is not an exception but a symptom. American civilization is still racist because it still equates blackness with deviance, criminality and moral weakness. This is not something that can simply be addressed as an individual affair by promoting respectful behaviors and mindsets toward one another. We should do that, we must do it, but at the root of the problem lies our relentless denial of the kinds of social and economic equality that are the foundation of respect in any society. In 2015 we are still living in a burning house of inequality, and until we are prepared to douse the flames of that fire we are going to continue to see signs of a crumbling structure, as we have been witnessing in Missouri.
I would like to end with two quotes. The first is from Theodor Adorno, who said “there can be no emancipation without the total emancipation of society.” The second is from King, who said that “flinging a coin of compassion to a beggar is not enough. It’s recognizing the injustice of a system that produces beggars.”