I posted this a while back in Rock Du Jour. It's an attempt to suss out exactly what the charge of "systemic racism" entails and why it's so important to the left that it be used and accepted as the jumping off point for discourse when discussing policing and the methods that modern police are using and why they use them with seeming impunity.
Posted August 27, 2020 (edited April 18th)
I guess this is where I post my musings. Today I'm struck by the movement towards diffuse yet personalized blame for police brutality. We know of the black man in Kenosha shot in the back, and the black man killed in Georgia (there have been charges). What my question is, I guess, is how liable are we, as members of the society in which this happened, to blame for the shootings? It strikes me that there's an ever-present movement, however fringe, to assign blame to every citizen enjoying the privileges of our democratic laws for these incidents because they stem from a nebulous concept of the state as embodying an institutionalized racism, a theory about our society that holds that society as constructed, by our choice, is somehow inherently unfair toward blacks and other minorities. This is not a new intellectual phenomenon but has gained traction from the universities and the radicals to the everyday Joneses. Under this theory, instead of assigning blame to the culprits of the incidents and crimes and prosecuting them under the law, the movement grows and the drumbeat gets louder to implicate each and every individual member of society as complicit in another person’s actions.
Perhaps this can be traced back to something fundamental: the use of force by a select few who are chosen to dispense justice. Out of necessity, we, as a society, have assigned or charged a select few to have a monopoly on force. This is, some argue, a necessary trade-off for society to exist. We accept the notion of a different class of people, our guardians and peace keepers, when we allow a monopoly on violence with the imprimatur of the state. It is important to consider that this monopoly of force is consented to by the citizen. The citizen sanctions the monopoly so that there is not anarchy, but some semblance of order. Sounds good, right? But this transfer of power has intended and unintended consequences. The intended consequences are that we have a class of individuals entrusted by the state to keep the peace and order. We separate them from society. This leads to a certain tension inherent in the selection: We are tempted to no longer hold individuals charged with dispensing force to the same standards as the citizen. Indeed, we know that there is the potential for such discretionary actions that are wrongly undertaken. Therefore, we've come up with artificial legal constructs like qualified and absolute immunity to protect these government agents from life disturbances. We separate the agent from the action. What this has as its practical effect is that when the immunities provided are abused, those that are aggrieved and on the receiving end of injustice (or even pure justice) charge the entire citizenry, the entire system, with the fallout from the use of illegitimate force. Our top men are no longer as liable to moral and legal agency as the citizen that employs force. This, some can and do argue, has had the effect of making the system seem unfair and unjust towards the dispossessed at the expense of the undisturbed and compliant. We have become a people that is ruled not by a nation of laws, but of men. But this has a counterargument. The counterargument goes that special treatment is a necessary trade-off that we accept when we allow a monopoly on violence with the imprimatur of the state. The citizen sanctions the monopoly and protection so that there is not anarchy, but some semblance of order. This, importantly enough, is to the aggrieved a method of existence consented to by the citizen. What this does is that when the immunities provided are abused, the aggrieved charge or blame the citizenry with the fallout from the use of illegitimate force. And thus we sit today. We have assigned the dispensing of force to a protected few and the aggrieved argue that it is a reflection of each of us, individually as part of the whole. We are to blame. So what to make of this, as posited? That each and every individual is to blame for the sins of the rogue few charged with enforcing the law. Is the violence endemic to the law itself? This is what is charged. It is not as easy as the protestors and dissenters think to answer in the affirmative, nor is it easy for simple bystanders to dismiss out of whole cloth.
I answer thusly: It is a thorny problem of political philosophy to separate the personal from the political, but we do out of necessity's sake. Our systems are sometimes divorced from our own impetuses, our own impulses. The tension inherent between a person as a citizen and a person as a bystander and individual is felt, and deeply these days. We are all accused of wrongdoing per our existence within the system. J'accuse! There are those that refuse to note the distinction between the individual and the state apparatus of enforcement. The reformer, or agitator over the past few days, insists that one cannot be a political and moral agent yet also retain individual grace in the face of injustice to others. The reformer assigns blame to each individual to accomplish his nebulous sense of justice. It is diffused throughout the citizenry, all of us guilty, all of us complicit in wrongdoings by state actors. It is the legal equivalent of pollution and third-party effects. One rogue company spoils the public supply, and therefore it is all rotten.
This, however, strikes me as a tyrannical and totalitarian impulse and cannot withstand the scrutiny of the fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness, of the right to be left alone by others, by the overweening state. But this abuts the reformer's sense of justice. The reformer cannot tolerate the individual being divorced from the state, for then there is no power or grounds upon which to reform an entire system, which is what is sought by Marxist reformers, and thus we have a tension. It has been interesting to watch the past few days play out. We have been mau-mau’d into solidarity with a list of nebulous grievances not even explained. Property has suffered. Arson reigns in the city. To live and let live has come under scrutiny. The reformer asks: How can we live and let live when we are all responsible for injustice? Should we not be held accountable, each of us? And for some reason, we are browbeaten into no longer seeing ourselves as individuals but as culpable for the sins of the system. So we sit, with our parades voluntarily canceled, our displays muted, a pall cast over the most innocent displays of athleticism lest we not be in solidarity with the dispossessed, the aggrieved. It is now each individual on trial because of our societal sanction of the monopoly of force that has gone awry. The actions are no longer the agents' actions within their own agency, but ours collectively. We have been adjudged collectively guilty for the actions of a few, and surely we will suffer for it. This seems right. We have farmed out the duty, the duty has failed, therefore we are to blame as each individual.
But this line of thinking is the spark of totalitarianism. It is no accident that a group such as Black Lives Matter is couched in Marxist rhetoric and put into place by ardent Marxists; its impulse is obvious to all but those who would refuse the easiest surface scratch. BLM finds the system inherently violent not because of the laws in the system, but in the system itself. This rogue agency, the bad cop, is endemic to any capitalist system. Individuals that benefit from the rule of law within this system are not innocent bystanders or individuals; they comprise a class collective that injures a different class inherently. The system is responsible for collective wrongdoing, but in seeking reform, the group must also must hold each individual who comprises it to be liable. This is the Marxist way. It is total in scope, individual qua individual, or citizen qua citizen does not matter. It cannot conceive of a dissenting individualism, or the right to be left alone, so it works itself out in frustration against those who will not go along for the ride. Arson, forced oaths, looting, rioting. The old mantra whereby if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Damn the unwitting bourgeois and its improper elevated place in our society! These are the claims the revolutionary Marxist/anarchist makes. The violence, the forced solidarity, the isolation of those who do not stand with amorphous calls for a removal of the current system -- these are the tools of the revolutionary, however much grief suffered unjustly, however deeply-felt his abstract notions of injustice are. And so we sit here today, kowtowing to an amorphous force that has judged us collectively guilty, acquiescent in theory and practice, waiting for the next instructions of the totalitarian impulse that resides in so many these days.
That is all.
