It's Not About Race, It's About Racism

I try not to watch much Fox News these days. Well, any days. I mean I've never watched any Fox News, except for that one time when Stephen Colbert went on the O'Reilly Factor. But in general I try to keep my exposure level to Fox, and to conservative media in general, to a minimum. That's the kind of thing that gets you rather criticized in some parts, but seeing a few clips of Fox's coverage of the Ferguson situation has reminded me why I have this policy. It... was kind of shocking. And disturbing.

But anyway, one of the themes of the rantings of the people on Fox was that it was wrongful of liberals generally to make Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown about race. So here's what I have to say about that: it's not about race. It's not about race at all. Michael Brown's shooting is not outrageous because Michael Brown was black. It's outrageous because a young man was murdered. (Yes, that's conclusory, but as far as I can tell there's no reason to think it was anything other than murder, except that the perpetrator was an on-duty cop and there seem to be people who increasingly think that it's just a logical impossibility for an on-duty cop to commit murder). It's doubly outrageous because the murderer was a member of the government, of law enforcement, sworn to protect the people. Which, you might think is a bit inconsistent with murder. And the outrage is compounded by the fact that this happens a lot. And it pretty clearly doesn't have to: other countries simply don't experience significant numbers of murders by their police officers (and also don't suffer rampant violent crime by the thus-emboldened criminals).

So where does race enter the story? Because essentially all the victims of police murder in this country happen to be black. Or to put it another way, race only enters the equation because racist, violent police officers put it there. Michael Brown's death was an outrage simply because he was human and he was murdered. The point is that he was murdered because he was black, as an awful lot of other people have been. So it's really not about race, and it's certainly not really about his race. It's about racism, and the racism which seems to spawn most of the police violence and brutality in this country. This is also, of course, why you see lots and lots of white people every bit as outraged as any black person about Ferguson (or at least very nearly; I wouldn't want to presume that those of us who don't live under this threat can quite understand just how terrifying it is). The conflict here isn't white against black, it's racists against non-racists. The former are a rather large subset of white people; the latter are a coalition of non-whites and white liberals. And those of us in the not-racist coalition are all equally outraged about Brown's death, and about the conservative indifference to his death (sorry, did I say conservative? I meant racist, it's so easy to get confused these days). We'd be equally outraged at the shooting of a white person by cops, except that, well... that doesn't happen so much.

Any guesses why that might be, Fox contributors?

::crickets::

Big Government, but Actually

So, I've written before about how I dislike the phrase "big government," or at least the way it gets used these days. This week's disaster in Ferguson, Missouri, where yet another young, unarmed black man was shot and killed by police and where those same police have responded to the wave of protests said murder occasioned by using military equipment on their own citizenry, is, I think, a really powerful demonstration of that point. Because this is big government, real big government. This is government which is big not in its budget or in its bureaucracy but in its capacity for physical force. And let's remember, physical force is what makes a government a government. Literally, governments are defined by their relationship to violence. That's how you tell what's the government in any given area, really: you look to see who has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Well, I say "legitimate," because I guess they're only one competitor in the illegitimate-use-of-force market, if a rather major player. And so I think the most meaningful possible sense of the phrase "big government" has got to be a government with an aggrandized relationship to violence. Like, say, a government which has gone around equipping local police forces with military equipment mainly because it (the military equipment) was there, meaning that the so-called "War on Drugs" just had to turn itself into an actual, literal war against the American people, or rather against those of the American people who have the misfortune of dark-colored skin. That's what we're seeing in Ferguson, and that's what's really worth railing against. That and the highly-related surveillance state form of "big government." There's a pretty good reason to think that a government which is spying on its populace and which has in essence armed itself against that populace as against an enemy military power is doing something wrong, and is at the very least a pretty real threat to the people it's meant to serve. There's no great a priori reason to think that a government with many regulations or with a large budget is doing something wrong. One of these things deserves to have the derisive "big government" label slapped on it, the other doesn't. At least Rand Paul has the decency to object to both.