Remarks on Heather MacDonald’s “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism”
MacDonald’s apparently descriptive remarks are designed more to instigate and misdirect readers than to provide them with a perspicuous vantage on the world. While it may be pragmatic to adopt this as a guiding principle for reading the news, it is at least as instructive to pause and examine how such framing techniques operate. Below are some observations made in this spirit:
First, it is a fact about English that ‘revived’ applies in contexts where something has been deceased or put to rest. Neither condition is satisfied in our context. By describing the resurgence of anti-racist fervor in terms of revival, the author misuses language, and betrays the inadequacy of her criteria for what does and does not count as alive. She is like the villager in Monty Python’s plague-stricken town who tries to pass off the old man as a corpse, despite the man’s outcries. “I’m still alive” is one of those assertions whose utterance should provide its own evidence. Either MacDonald does not hear these utterances echoing around her, does not want to, or believes that the struggle for real equality does not amount to a true vital sign.
The second point regards how this movement is relativized to the Obama presidency. The name ‘Black Lives Matter’ does trace its origins to that period, but the movement itself is rooted in a far-reaching history of violent persecution, systemic opportunity denial and phobia-fueled inequity that telescopes back through time to increasingly odious degrees of maltreatment. These conditions are definitive of the African American experience, and it is patent obfuscation, at best, to pin the tale on the donkey. At worst, it is a device intended to conjure up uncritical criticality in readers whose anti-Obama sentiments are more useful to her than their reflective thought.
Third, a note of caution: the word ‘narrative’ invites intellectual complacency, and is probably best avoided if writing with the intent to sow clarity. The problem isn’t that the word does not apply, rather that it applies universally, and is therefore trivial. That we grasp the world through narrative is not a novel point: events have meaning as causes or consequences, anomalies or concomitants, examples or exceptions, et cetera. We classify events as one or another of these kinds by giving an account, telling a story.
To say understanding is susceptible to the forces of narrative, however, is far from calling everything fiction. It means only that our vision is not wholly passive, and that what we see conforms in part to storylines we’ve already licensed. So long as we are concerned with truth, we ought to remain open to the incompleteness of our own perspective. Only in the cradle of a broader, organizing narrative can a social fact can exist either as an explanation or as a thing-to-be-explained. If we grasp this, we must grant that MacDonald’s use of ‘narrative’, indeed, any such use, is diversionary and borderline demagogic. It exploits readers who crave some form of no-nonsense realism, and flatters them by suggesting that their conclusions result, as though by necessity, from the hard-nosed and unpolitical appreciation of pure facts.
So far, these observations have concerned how MacDonald chooses words to frame her argument. Equally instrumental to that end is how she chooses the words of others. Reading her article, one gets the impression that Obama declared our institutions and hearts are infected with bigotry. Regardless of the truth of this claim, it is important to note that this is not what was said. MacDonald’s paraphrase omits two significant elements.
The first is the phrase ‘unequal treatment’, which Obama had conjoined to ‘bigotry’, a conjunction neither accidental nor arbitrary. Broadly speaking, bigotry and unequal treatment represent the psychological and material dimensions of the phenomenon of racism. Given that these dimensions are interrelated, the phenomenon cannot be fruitfully thought of as divisible into discrete parts. Analogous here is the literary concept of hendiadys, a figure of speech whereby a single idea is expressed as the conjunction of two nouns that would more usually be constructed as an adverb and a verb, or as an adjective and a noun. Shakespeare’s substitute of ‘sound and fury’ for ‘furious sound’ is an example. While the phrase ‘bigotry and unequal treatment’ is not a stylistic deviation from a more usual expression, it nonetheless exemplifies the hendiadic trait of referring to something conjunctively that cannot be reduced to either conjunct. Such a reduction would be analogous to describing ‘sound and fury’ in terms of ‘sound’ by itself. The loss of meaning here is obvious. Dismayingly, this is what MacDonald’s paraphrase amounts to: it reduces the movement against racism to a crusade against bigotry, i.e., the psychological aspect of racism.
This reduction is consistent with the tendency to keep the meaning of ‘racism’ anchored in the attitudes of individuals, and to prevent it from gaining application beyond these manageable limits. If the word’s meaning can be guarded so as to only denote the intolerance and ethnophobia exhibited in individual speech and action, then becoming non-racist can be achieved without too many foundational adjustments to one’s life and outlook.
Indeed, one’s life and outlook may be the very things that can justify belief in one’s own non-bigotedness. ‘Bigoted’ resembles other descriptors such as ‘greedy’, ‘unreasonable’, or ‘short-sighted’, in that it is usually not applied to oneself in the present tense. The word connotes a myopic devotion to one’s own opinions, and a resistance to reflect on the merits of contrasting views. Due to the fact that people usually grant their own cognitions and lines of reasoning the favored status of prima facie validity, most bigots can demonstrate (or at least reassure themselves) that they are not bigoted. For this reason, those who fall within the blast radius of leftist social critiques may find it strategic to reduce those critiques to ad hominem criticisms of character, counterevidence to which can be easily sourced from their perception of themselves as tolerant, benevolent, rational people. In light of this, MacDonald’s omission of ‘unequal treatment’ is difficult to regard as anything but the bad-faith misconstruction of a thought too fraught and uncomfortable to represent uncensored.
Surprisingly, the other element MacDonald omitted from her paraphrase is actually the head of the whole noun phrase, in which ‘bigotry’ and ‘unequal treatment’ stand as subordinate parts. Obama’s original sentence was not even about “bigotry and unequal treatment”, at least not explicitly; it was about “the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment”, and how this legacy infects the soul and structure of society.
This is not mere semantics; or, rather, semantics are not mere trifles. Meanings set the agenda, and influence the direction and scope of understanding. If one presumes that the campaign is against bigotry, then one’s thoughts and actions will take a certain form. If, however, it is a legacy of bigotry that is the target, those thoughts and actions will be improperly suited to the cause. They will create friction with, and misperceptions about, the thoughts and actions of others who take aim at bigotry’s legacy.
This is not to say that bigotry and unequal treatment are not being actively reproduced in society today, only that the push for racial equality essentially involves the practice of reckoning with racist history. By forestalling this reckoning, through intellectually lazy or disingenuous writing, MacDonald only mires us deeper in the problems she purports to address.
