A Meandering Commentary: The Problem with "Both sides did wrong."

I'm a white woman. I grew up in a white family, in a (mostly) white town with (mostly) white friends. The various schools I attended have never been particularly diverse, and my circle of friends has a pretty high budget for sunscreen, if you get what I'm saying. I have spent the last nine years teaching predominantly not-white students, but aside from that, my culture and my associates are about as white as it gets.

My mom grew up during the 60s, when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing and racism was more outspoken and expected/accepted compared to America today. Although she lived in Massachusetts, a state that is about as blue as can be, she saw a lot of crazy shit first hand. When she happily and purposefully maintained friendships with the few black kids in her neighborhood, her white peers called her a race traitor and threw rocks at her just like they threw rocks at her black friends. She was a passionate, vocal supporters of the Civil Rights movement and was not afraid to walk the walk. Raising my brother and me in the 80s and 90s, my mother never shied away from talking about race and social justice, and was always very clear that all people were just people, no matter what skin color they had.

There were limits to the scope and content of her teachings, though. Limits that I only became aware of as I started bumping into issues of social justice in the 21st century. I found myself getting defensive in conversations about race. I found myself feeling very torn between aligning with my race and aligning with an aggrieved party. My gut reactions and my intellectual beliefs were not always in agreement. I did a lot of reading and listening, had a lot of conversation, and did my best to understand things and people better.

Finally, the thing that broke it open for me was learning about white privilege. It wasn't something that had ever occurred to me, but as soon as I read a few sentences about it, I immediately got it. This was the missing link. This was the piece of the puzzle I needed to connect my experiences with what I had been taught and what I had witnessed out in the world. It helped me understand why my childhood, throughout which I was varying levels of poor, was not exactly the same as the childhood of a person of color with the same economic background. It helped me understand why my relationship with authority figures and especially law enforcement was not the same as the relationship between, say, my students and their local cops. I stopped questioning practices like affirmative action. And so on and so on. I began to understand so much more, and perhaps most importantly, I began to understand how much I really didn't know.

Cut to July 13, 2013. My wedding day. It was also the day that George Zimmerman was acquitted after shooting Trayvon Martin. I purposefully avoided the news until the next day because I knew how it was going to go and I didn't want to be that angry going into what is, ideally, the most romantic day of one's life. Relative to my own awareness of current events, this was the first in what seems to be an endless wave of black people getting beaten or killed by police or, in Zimmerman's case, people who took on authority without actually having the responsibility or imperative to apprehend anyone. Of course, police brutality isn't new, but it just seems like things have really taken a turn over the last two years. I suspect, as others have posited, that this is more because of ubiquitous cameras, social media, and the concept of viral videos rather than an actual increase in incidents. Which is terrifying, because if these things have been happening at least this much for decades, that is, to quote the last chapter of 1984, "disquieting in the extreme."

As a white person, my relationship to these incidents and my role in discussing them is tricky. I teach high schools students of many different races. I feel responsible for helping them understand the larger world in context, for giving them information but also guiding them through their own understanding of it. I try to avoid "programming" them, and if something is my personal opinion, I say that, but I also feel a duty to help them be good citizens and good people. I am not afraid to tell them if something is right or wrong.

Last summer, in 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. That September, I began my first (and it would appear, only) year of teaching AP Language, a course that studies rhetoric and argument. I used the media portrayals of Mike Brown and all of the events in Ferguson to teach rhetoric on the very first day of class. Besides using current events and difficult subject matter to teach something about language, bias, and the media, my main focus was to push my students to question how things were portrayed on the news. I wanted them to understand that narratives were being consciously constructed and, for better or for worse, those pre-fab narratives were what they were getting on social media and through CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and so on.

Through my conversations with my students, my discussions with my friends and co-workers, my many arguments and debates on social media, and my endless reading on current events and various interpretations of those events, I have begun to see common tropes and trends in how people respond to events like the killing of Mike Brown. Some people are very ready to be angry at the police and the government and anyone else with authority, so much so that they don't care what actually happened and just react. Others are the hardline police supporters, who won't budge from their "police officers are saints" position no matter what the personal testimonies, videos, and even physical evidence all indicate.

One recurring attitude I see among my fellow white people is the desperate need to justify the actions of the police. Although many people who feel this way are capable of critiquing the behavior of individuals (they sure do love talking about "bad apples"), they stop short of talking about systems of oppression or large socioeconomic issues at play. With Mike Brown, the fact that he was suspected of stealing cigars was a relief -- a relief -- for some people. They may not have expressed their reactions aloud, but the general sense from some was, "Oh, thank god he was actually a criminal. Now this isn't racist and the cop's actions make sense." Any wrongdoing on the part of Mike Brown meant that his fate, while perhaps "excessive", wasn't exactly wrong. It was more unfortunate or sad than anything else.

The same logic has been applied, even more insanely, to riots and protests (two different things, if you weren't sure) after incidents of police brutality. If a single window is broken or a fire is set, the reason for the initial protest is forgotten. It doesn't matter if the police did wrong; if someone got angry and broke something, then the victim deserved what he got. Some people are bold enough to say things like, "If these people want equal rights, they should act like they deserve them." Most people don't say it, but it doesn't mean it never occurs to them.'

When the video of the police officers at the pool party in Texas surfaced, I didn't watch the whole thing. I had read descriptions of what happened, seen some stills, and scrolled through some reactions on social media. Honestly, this seemed pretty cut and dry: a police officer escalated a minor incident in a way that was violent and completely inappropriate. The whole thing was caught on tape. The victims were kids. The primary subject of the video, after the police officer in question, was a 14-year-old girl. Say what you want about chivalry versus feminism, but many people still feel very strongly that men should not use violence against women, and that's doubly true if he is an adult but she is a child.

Then I posted an article about the issue of age in the pool party incident to my Facebook wall. As is the case with most social media, my Facebook friends mostly represent an echo chamber of like-minded individuals who may often disagree on tricky topics (freedom of speech, especially in comedy, for example) but who are generally very closely aligned on social justice (don't do this). But when I posted the article referencing the McKinney pool party incident, things went straight to Wackyland. The main debate centered around the culpability of the kids (specifically the aforementioned 14-year-old girl) for what happened when the police arrived. The issue being so multifaceted and complicated, and me being reluctant to side with one friend over another, I let the thing play out without any commentary or mediation from me. I had already said my piece by posting the article and pulling the quote that I found relevant. I was fine letting people duke it out.

Then my mom said this: "I am pretty sure there is plenty of blame to go around.One thing I do know for sure is that if you had mouthed off to me at that age I would not have grabbed your hair, or thrown you to the ground, or put my knee on your back because I was the adult and THAT is child abuse."

I found her comment interesting, and very indicative of the strange crossroads that her beliefs inhabit. Her viewpoint and her attitude about race was radical in the 60s, even the 70s and 80s. She was always extremely progressive. That being said, the first sentence is something I have heard her express many times before, and a reaction I've heard echoed throughout many conversations on incidents in Ferguson, Ohio, California, Staten Island, Baltimore, and a dozen other places. "There is plenty of blame to go around." The rest of my mom's comment seems very clearly to side with the girl and those who would see the officer fired for his actions. But that first sentence suggests a reluctance to commit fully to a side. My mother has always been the great negotiator. She excels in teamwork and collaboration, is adept at helping others sort through their problems, and has always been eerily good at empathy and understanding. Her desire to spread out the blame for McKinney is part of a larger instinct for her, where she would much rather keep the peace than start some shit. She has a profound and rock-solid respect for police officers, something clearly at odds with her feelings about the treatment of the girl in the video.

She was not the only one who felt this way in the comment on my wall. The culpability of the teenagers kept coming up. They were trespassing. They disrespected the officers. They weren't supposed to be there.

Here is the problem with that argument.

By pointing out the (extremely minor) wrongdoings of the party who is clearly the victim in this scenario, it lessens the scrutiny placed on the perpetrator (in this case, the police officer). The unsaid correlation is that the teens attending a pool party that was too large according to the neighborhood by-laws justifies all the police officer's actions. Some may argue that this is NOT what they intended to suggest by pointing out the trespassing. My question then is this: what is the point of bringing up the trespassing or the back-talking? If the goal is not to excuse the officer's actions, what purpose could it serve? Likewise, why would it matter if Mike Brown stole cigars? The only reason to bring it up would be to suggest that the theft meant that Darren Wilson was justified in his actions that day in Ferguson.

On top of that, this whole argument ignores the larger issue of race and policing. Studies have repeatedly revealed racial bias in policing in multiple areas across multiple types of police interactions. Black people get stopped more often and pulled over more often, handcuffed more often and taken to the station more often, have charged pressed against them more often, are convicted more often, and get harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Controlled for socioeconomic status, criminal history, geographic location, and gender, black people are simply treated worse by the entire criminal justice system than white people. It's not a theory or a possibility; it's a fact. From neighborhood policing to sentencing, the justice system is a meat grinder for black people.

This doesn't mean that cops are automatically racist, that white cops are bad, that no black person has ever committed a crime, or that cops shouldn't be allowed to arrest black people. If you think I'm arguing any of those things, I don't know why you bothered reading this far, because you're obviously not willing to listen or think right now.

What it does mean, however, is that a white person's reaction to an interaction between police and black people is not always going to be couched in the context necessary to understand it. Let me explain what I mean. I'm white, so I experience the criminal justice system as a relatively fair and predictable machine. Cops are on my side, courts are on my side, and it's basically all there to protect me. I smile at police officers when I pass them. They usually smile back. My encounters with police officers are NOT the same as the encounters of, for example, black teens growing up in Texas. We experience two different criminal justice systems.

So if I bring my uniformly-white perspective on police officers to a conversation about McKinney, I may not really be able to understand the full scope of the issue. I might wonder why the kids didn't just sit down and stay quiet as they were told. I might wonder why some of them fled when they saw the police car pull up. I might wonder why they felt the need to record the incident on a cell phone. I might wonder why, when the police officer had the 14-year-old girl smashed into the ground with his full body weight on her spine, some of her friends and relatives tried to intervene. Seeing a police officer clearly upset, swearing at children and running around like a maniac, I might automatically assume that his actions are justified and correct, and therefore wonder why the kids were making him panic so much.

Before starting this blog post, I made myself watch the full video of the McKinney incident. To me, it was clear as day: the children were innocent. I don't mean that they were angels or that every single thing they did that day was lawful and good. I mean that they intended no harm, were having fun, and did not pose a threat to anyone. They were kids at a rowdy party.

They were kids.

When white kids misbehave and the cops intervene, the dominant narrative is not police brutality. Warnings, rides home, calls to parents, maybe a night in jail if the offense is really that serious and the kids is older. It is very important for the punishment to fit the crime. Fairness is a real concern.

Then white people see white cops brutalize black children at a party and we think, "those thugs must have done something to deserve it."  They didn't. They didn't. They didn't.