Absence Of Consequences.

Excitement And Pride: The reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

WHEN THE SETTLERS from Har-Bracha approached the security checkpoint the Israeli Defence Force soldiers waved them through. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not when the West Bank of the Jordan was a bubbling cauldron of hate and violence. The idea of allowing Israelis from the Jewish settlements to enter Palestinian territory should have been as unthinkable as allowing Palestinians to pass in the opposite direction. But, the soldiers – like everybody else in Israel – knew that, only the day before, two brothers from Har-Bracha had been killed by a Palestinian gunman. It was payback time. Ignoring their orders, knowing full well what was likely to happen, the soldiers opened the gates and let the settlers pass. Within the hour, the nearby Palestinian village of Zaatara was ablaze.

The forces of law and order do not exist in a social vacuum. They are members of their communities, citizens of their nation, and just as likely to get caught up in the ebb and flow of public emotion as everybody else. They’re not supposed to. In theory, they are expected to remain aloof from the tidal tug of popular passions: impartial upholders of the law; keepers of the peace.

In theory.

When the white police officers and/or sheriff’s deputies whose presence in the rigorously segregated black communities of the Jim Crow South suddenly disappeared from the streets, everybody knew that trouble was on the way. The unheralded withdrawal of these racially charged armies of occupation could only mean one thing. That, for the next few hours, law and order would take a terrifying leave of absence.

The photographic images that have come down to us from this America of a century ago are hard to look at. Not only on account of the “strange fruit” hanging from the poplar trees on the outskirts of town. More difficult to stomach, or even to comprehend, than the charred bodies are the lynch-mobs that gathered to witness and celebrate the victims’ agonising demise.

Men and women, resplendent in their boater hats and summer frocks, look directly at the camera, their faces alive with a chilling mixture of excitement and pride. There is no shame here, no guilt. Would they have brought their children with them to observe the spectacle if they believed they were doing wrong? They wanted their kids to understand that this was something that simply had to be done every once and a while – to keep the community safe.

The local newspapers would recount these lynchings in enthusiastic prose. The dastardly deeds that sparked the community’s righteous anger. The apprehension of the perpetrator by the aroused populace, and his inevitable demise. The grim warning left hanging where those most in need of its terrifying message could not fail to receive it.

Such blatant abrogations of the rule of law – be they in the Deep South of a century ago, last month on the West Bank of the River Jordan, or last weekend in Auckland’s Albert Park – are able to occur for one reason, and one reason only, because those participating in them do so in the confident belief that they are doing “the right thing”. Because the government, the news media, and even the forces of law and order have all conspired – wittingly or unwittingly – to convey the impression that the extra-legal enforcement of “the right thing” will incur no penalty.

Eye witness accounts of the attack upon Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in Albert Park describe how the frenzy of the protesters suddenly increased when they realised that the Police were not going to interfere in their righteous punishment of the “Nazi-adjacent”, “anti-trans activist”.

And that’s the reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do these terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

Considering that when the mob came, proudly bearing their threatening banners and placards, and the Police stood by and did nothing – not even when elderly people were being punched, kicked, thrown to the ground and begging the Police to assist them – it is a small miracle that “Posie Parker” escaped with her life.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2023.

Choke-Hold

Suffocating Justice: The New York Daily News's cartoonist, Bill Bramhall, captures the shock and dismay of liberal America at the frightening implications of a New York Grand Jury's refusal to indict those responsible for the homicide of Eric Garner.

 

“I CAN’T BREATHE!” Who could hear those words and not respond? What sort of police officer, effecting the arrest of an unarmed black man by placing him in an illegal chokehold, could hear that anguished cry and refuse to lessen his grip?
 

The first part of the answer is, quite simply: a person who has never learned how to look at a black person and see a human-being. The second: a police officer who understands that, if the deceased is a black man, then his arresting officer/s will never be made accountable for his death.
 

Racism, and the informal legal protection afforded to racist police officers by America’s Grand Jury system, is what makes the deaths of unarmed African-Americans, like Eric Garner, inevitable. In spite of the fact that the NYPD officer responsible for Mr Garner’s death had a record of “racial bias”; and regardless of the fact that the whole outrageous incident was recorded on a witness’s cellphone; a Grand Jury composed of “ordinary” New Yorkers declined to press charges.
 

The widespread protests that followed the Grand Jury’s decision have made headlines around the world. Less visible, however, was the counter-protest of a group of female primary school teachers against their union’s condemnation of Mr Garner’s death. These women, all of them white and all wearing an “I support the NYPD” t-shirt, took a photograph of themselves and posted it on Facebook. They were all employees of a public school with African-American and Hispanic children on the student roll.



Racist to the Core: Teachers from Public School 220, Queens, New York, indicate the value they place on the life of a Black father of six.

 

What shocked liberal Americans was not only the nature of the counter-protesters’ profession – these were teachers, for God’s sake! – but also their absolute and deeply disturbing ordinariness.
 

Presented to the public gaze were not the angular, lock-jawed matriarchs of some 1960s Mississippi backwater staring malevolently into the lens of a photojournalist from Life magazine. No, these were “Soccer Moms” from Queens. Gals next door. The sort of friendly, fresh-faced suburbanites Americans bump into every day at the super-market. The “lovely women” encountered several times a year at parent-teacher evenings. The trained professionals who teach their kids!
 

Racists to the core.
 

The teachers’ Facebook posting produced the same jarring effect as photographs taken at lynchings during the 1920s and 30s. Surrounding the charred remains of the lynch-mob’s Black victims were, typically, scores of perfectly “normal” white people (and their children!) who had turned out to watch the “fun”. The bland, smiling faces of the female staff of New York City Public School No. 220 offered a visual echo of those dreadful images from 90 years ago. They bear grim testimony to a white community every bit as oblivious to its complicity in racial injustice and exemplary violence.

Faces At A Lynching: "Ordinary" people utterly oblivious to their complicity in racial injustice and exemplary violence.

 

The example of New York’s, Eric Garner, like the example of Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown, and countless others before them, has exposed the extent to which African-Americans remain the despised “Other” of United States’ Society. Many other ethnicities have had to endure the scorn of America’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. But, while the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews eventually found their hyphenated niche within the American Dream, African-Americans remain, overwhelmingly, on the outside looking in.
 

Can anyone honestly say that the extreme animus directed towards the presidency of Barack Obama owes nothing to his colour? That the Tea Party’s extraordinary political traction among elderly white Americans has nothing to do with a Black President’s determination to admit African-American and Hispanic citizens into full membership of the national family? That the relentless arithmetic of demographic change, which points to White Americans falling below 50 percent of the population within the lifetimes of children living today, has not reignited the same primal fears that spawned the intractable racial violence of the Deep South?
 

Those of us who remember the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s also recall the central role Southern law enforcement played in the enforcement of racial segregation and the maintenance of white power. Southern county sheriffs and local police departments had always provided the front-line troops of Dixie’s racial war. On the rare occasions Southern police officers were charged with offences against African-Americans, Southern juries inevitably voted for acquittal.
 

The fate of Eric Garner points to the “Dixiefication” of the whole of the United States. The same racialization of poverty and powerlessness that characterised the Deep South has migrated both North and West. The same fetishisation of skin pigmentation as the crucial determinant of one’s place in the social hierarchy now infects even that last, great bastion of liberal influence, the teaching profession. And, finally, the near universal contracting-out of the practical business of racial oppression to local law enforcement is leading thoughtful Americans to the grim conclusion that, in the long-run, it is the South that won the Civil War.
 

America, herself, will soon be gasping: “I can’t breathe!”
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 December 2014.

Not A Gentle Species

Strange Fruit: A Florida lynch-mob of the 1920s admire their handiwork. Human-beings exhibit a deep fascination with the public infliction of pain and violence.

I HEARD Cindy Kiro being interviewed on the radio the other day. The Children’s Commissioner was talking about bullying in schools. Towards the end of the interview, she said something which struck me as very funny: "Schools should prepare us for life", Ms Kiro declared.

I burst out laughing.

If schools really were about preparing us for life, they’d not only teach us how to endure bullies, they’d teach us how to become one.

What is a bully, after all, but a person who has embraced the basic principles of social organisation more ruthlessly than his or her peers?

Bullies intuitively grasp the brutal, but essential, truth that all human communities are held together by the threat, or, where the threat fails, by the actuality of violence. Experience has also taught them that when the weak are being bullied by the strong, most people will do absolutely nothing to protect them.

Indeed, history shows that human-beings exhibit a deep fascination for the public infliction of pain and violence.

Just examine the photographic record of the scores of lynchings which took place in the southern United States during the first three decades of the 20th Century, and you will be stunned by the participants’ expressions. Though they have just witnessed the torture, emasculation and incineration of a fellow human-being, you will find no traces of horror, fear or disgust upon their faces. On the contrary, they’re smiling broadly for the camera, and their eyes glitter with excitement. Even the faces of the children (some might say especially the faces of the children) wear expressions of fierce triumph and frank pleasure.

We are not a gentle species.

Millennia have taught us that when the powerful start exercising their power the smartest thing for those not involved to do is stand well clear. Those brave (or foolish) individuals who, in ages past, displayed their empathy too openly, or recklessly intervened on behalf of the victim, were clearly placing themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage. Incurring the wrath of the dominant individual, or group, is probably not the most effective method for ensuring one’s genes get passed on to the next generation.

Endorsing the bullies’ choice of victim may not rate highly in terms of ethics, but it’s an excellent survival strategy.

And it is this, the brutal logic of evolutionary advantage, which lies behind the behaviour of so many school principals when confronted with evidence of bullying. Punishing the strong, on behalf of the weak, makes absolutely no evolutionary sense.

Almost unconsciously, the people in charge of our schools – its dominant individuals – will align themselves (emotionally, if not formally) with the bully rather than the victim. In their heart-of-hearts they know that, in the world beyond the school gates, it’s the bullies who go places. They will be the managers, the bosses, the sergeant-majors and – yes – even the headmasters in the workplaces our children will enter upon leaving school. Punish the bully and, by implication, you condemn the intricate system of multiple hierarchies upon which our entire, unforgiving society depends.

So, you see why I laughed – not unkindly, but ironically – at Cindy Kiro and her stalwart ally, Rosslyn Noonan, the Chief Human Rights Commissioner. If they have their way (and in the face of the less-than-sympathetic Education Minister, Anne Tolley, I’m pretty sure they won’t) our schools will be transformed into islands of empathy, decency and justice in a vast sea of social brutality and indifference.

I can’t see it, myself. The fact that the bully’s right to an education is so clearly spelt out by the Education Ministry, while nothing at all is said about the rights of the victim should tell our idealistic Commissioners something about the State’s real priorities. It would certainly explain why, nine-times-out-of-ten, it’s the victims who are forced to leave the school in which they were attacked, and the bullies who remain.

Dear Ms Kiro! Brave Ms Noonan! They’d have us all behave in the "real" world, as they’d like to think our children behave at school. And, of course, the Commissioners are right: we should defend the weak from persecution and injustice; we should empathise with the laughed-at, the picked-on, the excluded and the "other". That should be the nature of the world into which our children sally forth.

Why shouldn’t they have something to teach us?

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 20 March 2009.