Mirror Sites: CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest Update: August 9, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

This essay is based on Steve Rosenthal's post on PSN on August 9, 2001: Hampton, VA, cops killed Black woman for DWB. Steve's post caught my attention because it offers some story telling that reminds me of moments I have witnessed like this.

When he speaks of black women who are fearful of driving home after working late, I am reminded of black women who spoke with similar fear that their husbands would be killed by racist police just for driving on the street. They expressed this fear at a series of meetings we held at the CSUDH campus to deal with feelings about the Rodney King Decision in Simi Valley.

Some of you will question what was meant by "white liberal," and why the white woman who spoke early in the program offended many of the blacks. The problem with the white liberal position is not that it condones the racist practices that result in tragedies like that in Virginia. The problem is that in focusing on the fact that they do not "condone" racism, white liberals fail to recognize what postcolonialism has brought home so clearly: that racism and its effects permeates our society so thoroughly that we bear a responsibility not only to "not condone" it, but also to speak out against those who do condone it and do act on their beliefs. (See Charlton Heston's speech at Harvard in 1999. And see the photograph of cormorants above, and it's explanation below.)

Of course, there are good police, whom we depend on and need. But when racism rears its ugly head, then is not the time to speak of the good cops we love, for that seems to deny the very existence of "bad cops" or cops whose unstated and unchallenged assumptions lead them to make poor, or in some cases evil, decisions. What's wrong with such liberal defense of the good cops is both the timing and the situatedness. At a time of intense affect and informal, collective response, rational argument has little place. (See Edward T. Hall on affect in Silent Language. .) And in a setting in which the issue is racist cops, speaking of good cops seems like a diversion from the real issue.

The validity claim in DWB is that blacks are placed in fear of harm from police simply because they are black. The issue is not whether all police are racist, or even whether all police condone violence and harassment against blacks. The issue is how we are to cope with social justice in a setting where such genuine fear exists. It is the genuine fear we need to hear in good faith. And rational arguments which permit us to deny that fear are "bad faith." Even if they are ignorant bad faith, they are bad faith. Social justice demands a good faith hearing. (See Lewis R. Gordon on Anti-Black Racism.

On Saturday, August 11, 2001, jeanne added:

I missed the word of the day yesterday, and went to see what AWAD had posted on "cormorant" this morning. To my surprise, the quote of the day and the photo of the greedy cormorant who requires us to speak out, as Heston says, fit this discussion well:

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

Quote from AWAD, August 10, 2001.

Cormorant picture from AWAD Site Archive Index for August, 2001. Scroll down to August 10, 2001.

The cormorants are a good metaphor for what we are describing, the need for civil disobedience, for us to stand and be counted as "not condoning" what the "greedy person" or the "racist" person does, for if we do not speak of what we do not condone, we become complicit in his greediness or racism, or whatever. And the quotation from Samuel Johnson says eloquently what we have tried to say about the affect caused by the white woman's speech. The crowd was there to grieve over a wrongdoing and their fear of more such wrongdoing. There is a need to let that grief and fear be expressed without denying its reality. The time of grief is a time of out-of- awareness expression of affect. Not the time for moving the discussion to a technical level.

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