Against Reductionist Aphorisms:Some things aren't as simple as they sound
In light of the recent events surrounding the murder of George Floyd, a number of short phrases, cliches of a sort, have made their way into the common parlance. Often, these punchy phrases attempt to convey a fairly mainstream message - usually a message asserting that police brutality is a “black issue,” that the violence and looting at protests are justifiable or at least “understandable,” or that serious concerns about the riots and frustration with the rioters shows that somehow, the person concerned with such things really just doesn’t care about black lives or is unconcerned with police brutality. Here, I would like to present a few of these phrases and express why I reject — and further, disdain — them.
“Black Lives Matter”
Probably the most prevalent phrase used is “black lives matter.” Before anyone objects to my concerns with this phrase, I would like to clarify: my response to this is not “all lives matter.” I understand that the point of the phrase is to emphasize that black lives are somehow in more peril than those of other ethnicities and that we need to empathize with the black community in their struggle against racist police brutality. My reason for rejecting the phrase is twofold. For one, I reject this premise that black lives are in more peril than white lives (or other lives, for that matter), all things equal. Any discussion about this tends to follow a pattern something like the following:
A: “Black lives matter! Systemic racism must be stopped!”
B: “Well, you do know that more white people are killed by the police than black.”
A: “That’s not the point. Black people are killed by police at a higher rate.”
Typically, one would expect B to capitulate and admit that that seems to indicate a sort of bias or systemic racial injustice. However, B is a little more researched than A wishes and was simply trying to bait A:
B: “That is true, but what you’re doing is adjusting for the percentage of the population. When attempting to discern systemic unjust treatment on the basis of race, you have to factor in the percentage of the population as well as crime rates.”
Observing statistics from 2018[1], approximately 6.912 black people per million were killed by police. For whites, this number was approximately 2.647. This seems like a staggering difference - black people were killed approximately 2.611 times more often than white people! This must be a sure sign of racism, right? Wrong. Let’s add in a new factor: crime rates. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics[2], approximately 3.488% of black people were responsible for committing violent crimes, while this number was 1.577% for white people. That is to say, black people committed violent crime 2.211 times as often as white people. The ratio of increase in police killings to increase in violent crime rates is approximately 1.165. Sure, this still may seem to indicate that the rate of increase in police killings still exceeds the rate of increase in violent crime. However, this 0.165 on top of the one could so easily be explained by a variety of factors, to the point that statistical noise and randomness are more likely to be responsible for that nudge than some systemic racism. For, if systemic racism were the issue, one would expect a drastically higher ratio of the increase in police killings to the rate of violent - something akin to the “2-3 times as many blacks are unjustly killed” that we so often hear when police shootings like George Floyd’s occur.
Now let me be clear, lest it seem I am attempting to defend the integrity of the police. George Floyd was indeed murdered, not justly killed. There is not only no excuse for what happened, but the cop who killed him deserves to be hung — though he probably should have been nearly 15 years ago when he murdered another man. My concern and hesitation has nothing to do with the question of whether Floyd was murdered. Modern conservatives have a tendency to give cops the undeserved benefit of the doubt, but there is no quarter for the State police in my mind. A militarized police force rife with corrupt policies like qualified immunity does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least in the eyes of the public. My point in writing this is not at all to do some sort of “police apologetics” or defend the integrity of a vile State institution. My intention is to set straight the popular narrative and redirect attention to the actual source of the problems with the police. It is not some sort of abstract concept of “systemic racism” that is categorically distinct from, but deeply embedded in the institution of the police. Rather, it is the very nature of the State police — being the enforcement agency of the institution which maintains a coercive monopoly on the “legitimate (relatively speaking)” use of violence in a region — that is conducive to militarization, brutality, lack of accountability, etc.
The second reason for which I reject the phrase “black lives matter” is more a cultural one. No word or phrase exists in a vacuum, associated only with its denotation and nothing more. Every given word or phrase exists in the context of a culture, and is constantly linked with connotations beyond its raw meaning. In this particular case, “black lives matter” is inevitably associated with the organization of the same name. This organization is outspoken in its support for abortion and the LGBTQ+ movement, both of which I am staunchly opposed to. It adopts a method of interpreting the conditions of the world in terms of an “oppressor/oppressed” model, which tries to frame every perceived cultural issue in terms of some “oppressor” group bearing moral responsibility for the difficulties of the “oppressed.” Debunking this worldview lies outside the scope of my intentions for this work, but at least for anyone of the right-wing persuasion, such a worldview cannot be tolerated, as it seeks to frame nearly every hierarchy as unjust and worthy of abolishing, then goes on to frame nearly every perceived problem as being caused by hierarchy. The logical conclusion? Egalitarianism — the idea that all hierarchies should be abolished. An idea which should make anyone with half a mind shiver in fear.
“We live in a society where property matters more than people!”
Perhaps one of the most infuriating aphorisms which has emerged into the popular discourse recently is this claim that “we live in a society where property matters more than people” in response to assertions that the people looting companies should be shot, or at the very least, thrown in prison. Now maybe this would be the case if people were getting shot left and right for swiping rubber ducks or the like. However, that’s not the situation. Stores are being damaged and looted of all manner of goods. The simplistic idea that “property matters more than people in our society” because libertarians and conservatives believe looters should be repelled with force — even lethal force — is incredibly myopic in its reasoning. The argument seems simple enough — “You are willing to take somebody’s life to protect an inanimate object. Therefore, you care more about that inanimate object than you care about that person’s life.” It seems simple because it is. In fact it’s so simple, it’s reductionist! It relegates “property” to simply being merely “inanimate objects.” Not so! Property ownership is what creates the basis for people’s well-being. Some would respond by saying, “well, duh. It provides for the well-being of rich CEOs!” but once again, this view is myopic. The property in the store is the source of revenue for that store — and as such, generates income that is used to pay employees and give them job security. When stores are destroyed or emptied by looting, people’s jobs are at stake. People’s livelihoods are endangered. Private property is the basis for the well-being of ordinary people.
Given that private property is an important foundation for people’s well-being, actions that undermine it are a threat to a person’s well-being and their own life, so it should be easy to see that even lethal force in protection of property isn’t that difficult to justify. Using lethal force no longer reduces to “taking a life to protect a trinket,” but is understood as “taking a life in defense of one’s own livelihood and security.” In some cases, such as in the case of the Scores sports bar in Minneapolis[3], countless hours of hard work and thousands upon thousands of dollars can be permanently lost through rioting. Although funds were raised to rebuild and restore the bar, more work will have to be done to rebuild it, and new material will have to be purchased. A man’s (and in a bitterly ironic twist, a black man’s) livelihood was gravely endangered by destruction of property and looting, and there is no doubt in my mind that he had a right to shoot any and all looters in defense of his business.
Again, there is a clarification that needs to be made. I do not support the use of lethal force as punishment for thieves that are caught after they have already escaped with their loot. There isn’t much basis for executing somebody to punish them for stealing, but there is a rather large difference between punishment and prevention. And the restrictions on what may be done to prevent something aren’t symmetrical to the restrictions on what may be done to punish something. For example, execution isn’t a fitting punishment for assault, but lethal force is certainly justifiable in attempting to prevent assault. As such, we should not view prevention methods in light of what constitutes proper punishment, and so arguing that execution isn’t a proper punishment for thievery doesn’t justify the claim that lethal force is an invalid means for protecting private property.
“If you’re more angry about the riots than the killing of George Floyd, then you really don’t care about police brutality/black people.”
The inanity of this claim knows no bounds. It shows a complete ignorance of proportionality and detailed examination of the evils the riots have produced. If someone tells me I should care more about the individual killing of George Floyd than the brutal beating and near-murder of a man protecting his business[4], drastically increased violence (for example, in Chicago[5]), and mass destruction of property (as discussed earlier), then I have nothing to do but laugh in your face. The murder of George Floyd was horrific, but the riots aren’t nearly a “secondary issue.” They should be wholeheartedly condemned, and every instance of fatal violence in them should be responded to with just as much rage as Floyd’s murder. Anything else is evidence of a vile double standard. After all, what does your “advocacy” mean if you care about the deaths of Floyd and others such as Breonna Taylor but don’t give half a damn about the other people who have been killed as a result of these violent breakouts? My opinion is that, in such a case, your advocacy is empty, fraudulent, and not at all concerned with fixing real issues — only with obsessing over “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” etc.
Conclusion
The thing about these aphorisms that makes them so popular is their ability to make a point by means of reductionist arguments packed into easily remembered catchphrases. However, thinking minds should know better than to accept reckless reductionism. We must analyze the arguments these phrases are really making, and show that their simplicity is not a blessing, but a curse. Not that simplicity is bad per se, but that reductionism often comes in the guise of simplicity. We must learn to distinguish when an argument is easy to follow because it reveals a simple truth and when it is easy to follow because it omits the necessarily complex nature of a situation or system.
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