Now What?

I’m old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam War protests (one such is pictured above) that dominated the news back in the 1960s. It was a pretty consistent reflection of the great American divide: young, hip and iconoclastic youth – mostly of college age or recent grads – against a body of white traditionalists from both sides of the aisle touting patriotism and supporting governmental actions and decisions, a reflection of rural family values. To many, these protests were simply an extension of the civil rights movement, where leaders ranged from Malcom X to Martin Luther King.

In the case of the Vietnam War, the goal was a pretty basic demand for one big change: withdraw U.S. forces from a failing and drawn-out war where too many felt we just didn’t belong. It required one decision and one resulting action. The anti-war movement slowly prevailed. The civil rights movement hasn’t been so easy. As we can see from today’s headlines, despite a litany of civil rights legislation (albeit with a recent Supreme Court partial rejection of voting rights statute), the struggle is far from complete. According to a recent Bloomberg poll, 53% of Americans believe that there has been deterioration in race relations in this country over the past decade.

The issues surrounding what is rather clearly a double standard of law enforcement between whites and black include a complex combination of a dearth of defined and easy implementable goals with a lack of clear leadership to take us through a process that would be able to implement a fix. Exacerbating the complexity is this continuing schism between rural values – where being a good citizen is supporting your local police – and urban communities who no longer feel defended by or even respected by the local constabulary. “They deserve what they get, they made that criminally-driven world” vs “why do police kill us, always assume the worst and simply refuse to listen to us?”

We’ve ask police to wade through social complexity, knowing that their budgets are approved by the traditionalists, who have always supported the police. With generations of police officers having had real world military combat experience, they have attempted to deal with the rather open flow of sophisticated automatic and semi-automatic weapons (with big magazines) at levels this country has never seen before using the same but inappropriate equipment and tactics they learned to confront “insurgents” in lands far, far away.

We are now asking police officers to change that machismo, that military élan and efficiency admired by their peers, cheered by the traditionalists who see their tough battle against “criminal elements” as appropriate and accept instead an egalitarian approach to communities that have long ceased to trust them. Cops, white and black, find themselves at odds with minority communities across the land. It’s a big ask, and it is unfair to expect police forces to figure it out without some serious guidance and new directions of state and national policy.

Just as the Cosa Nostra arose by reason of failed police efforts in Southern Italy, American gangs reign supreme in minority neighborhoods, often replacing local cops and imposing the same levels of warfare and illicit economics that have always followed such efforts. But with a lack of trust epidemic in minority communities, with official threats ranging from instant deportation for the undocumented to almost certain conviction and incarceration (and perhaps a risk of instant death) for black youths, it has literally become an “us” vs. “them” divide between demon police and minority communities with gangs (“at least they’re our demons”).

With the United Nations looking at our seemingly imperious legal system, where grand juries appear to be nothing more than rubber stamps for local prosecutors who rather totally manage the process, there are nascent observations that the United States is a rather egregious violator of human rights of its own citizens. Too many minorities are killed at the hands of the police, the plea bargaining world and overburdened public defenders seem to generate an amazing conviction rate of minority perpetrators, and the levels of mutual fear and distrust have never been higher.

That a heavily redacted report generated at the behest of the U.S. Senate supporting too many instances of U.S. governmentally-approved torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, with very limited useable and reliable information generated, is coming out (elements constantly being leaked to the press) doesn’t seem to help counter that image. Republican leaders may allow token changes to the system, but the groundswell of support for the police “just the way they are” in the majority of state legislatures controlled by the GOP tells us that change isn’t going to be effected at the state level in most of America. With both houses of Congress clearly under Republican control, it is equally unlikely that new empowering legislation aimed at bridging this great divide will emanate from that once-esteemed body.

So that leaves the Department of Justice within the administration of an unpopular, lame-duck president to deal with the issue. While it seems, there may be sporadic movement to fix the system in a few major urban centers, states with high concentrations of minorities, the overwhelming trend will most probably be to do nothing… until the next big blow out. Minorities have hurt their own cause by staying away from the polls in droves. It’s been a notion of “our votes don’t matter anyway, so why bother” with downright hostility in many states against minority citizens even casting a ballot. Voter ID laws and gerrymandering are absolutely focused on the political disenfranchisement of minorities.

But isn’t this massive movement, with hundreds of protests across the land, different? “The next few months could test that approach as pressure grows for protesters to turn their expressions of anger and grief into concrete policies in the form of state laws and congressional action. Often, it is the tough going of policymaking that causes loose-knit movements to fall apart, said Martin Berger, a professor of art history at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has written two books on the civil rights movement.

“‘The lack of movement leaders is both a strength and a weakness,’ Berger said. ‘It is a strength in that these are grass-roots movements of people coming together with a lot of different grievances. But that lack of leadership often leads to a fracturing down the road when there is disagreement among the participants and when it becomes difficult to move change.’” Washington Post, December 8^th.

Some say that the “new leadership” is being defined in a shared consciousness via social media: “Social media fills some of the gaps left by a traditional leader or organization, so it makes sense that some young people would reject the idea of a person or an organization as a standard-bearer, said Matthew C. Whitaker, director of the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

“They prefer ‘leadership that’s shared and that doesn’t rely so much on one major leader, because history has shown we kill those leaders,’ he said. ‘We marginalize them. We undermine their reputation. We do something to undermine their ability to execute and lead. And, as a result, vacuums are left and the movement crumbles.’” The Post.

Yet traditionalists have police unions, legislatures, a formal connection to the governmental bodies they serve and equal access to that same social media. Nevertheless, the steam inside this roiling boiling tea kettle is set to explode, perhaps to a level no one really expects, and failing to deal with the root causes, real and perceived, only increases that pressure over time. Sooner or later…

I’m Peter Dekom, and failure to act and solve obvious problems always makes the issues much, much worse.