Friday, May 16, 2008
Protesting the police killing of Amadou Diallo is no way to organize a movement for social justice.
Feb 24, 2000 | In 1989, when a grand jury discredited Tawana Brawley's claim that she'd been raped by white law enforcement officers, a defiant Rev. Al Sharpton brought her to the trial of six young men charged with raping and nearly killing a jogger in Central Park. Incredibly, he had her shake hands not with the victim (who lay comatose in a hospital) but with the defendants who'd soon be convicted of violating the jogger.
Sharpton claimed that the defendants, black and Hispanic, were being "railroaded" and that Brawley should "see how the criminal justice system responds differently for a white victim than it does for a black victim." But the "system" had sought perpetrators aggressively in both cases, regardless of color. It was Sharpton who responded differently, to reinforce the lie that assistant district attorney Stephen Pagones, the Brawley case's true victim, was a racist and rapist.
The lesson is that racially charged criminal trials and movements for social justice don't mix well, even in the case of the moment -- that of four New York City police officers who pumped 19 bullets into an innocent African immigrant, Amadou Diallo. Such cases win justice, if at all, only by subverting and confounding the sweeping racialist and ideological narratives that get attached to them -- in this case, not only by Sharpton but by media moralists at the New York Times, which has flogged the Diallo case relentlessly and myopically as the fount of a new "movement" for social justice.
As New York's monthly City Journal noted, in the first eight weeks after the shooting the Times ran more than three stories on the case every day, many asserting that, as one headline put it, "Dazzling Crime Statistics Come at a Price." Editorial after editorial proclaimed the rise of a new "movement" against police abuses of minority New Yorkers. Times stories and another editorial read like promotional leaflets for an April 15 Diallo protest march over the Brooklyn Bridge. Yet attendance was anemic, suggesting few in the city shared the Times's sense of what Diallo's killing meant.
Dramatizations of oppression may be compelling in churches or cultural theaters, but they don't work in and around courtrooms, where people of vastly different persuasions have to affirm and enforce the legal and civic rules by which, to adapt Rodney King's plaintive words, we all get along. And yet from the Brawley and jogger cases, through the O.J. Simpson trials, up to Diallo, the nation has watched as impresarios of racial street theater, political opportunists and naive media moralists sidetrack American liberalism again and again by turning criminal cases into "show trials" of their ideological opponents.
No one should have to die as Diallo did. To affirm this, many New Yorkers got themselves arrested at police headquarters, ceremonially but no doubt sincerely. Had he been white in a mostly white neighborhood, argues New York University law professor Jerry Skolnik, cops wouldn't have cornered him in a vestibule and shot him. The Bronx district attorney accused the cops of harboring racial preconceptions that, beneath the formal courtesies of everyday etiquette and the law, deny blacks a chance to change misperceptions of them. And in this case Diallo paid for that misperception with his life.
But that argument itself harbors a preconception of what was in these cops' heads. Diallo's death may have reflected not the "racism" that looms so large in the liberal imagination but the stark correlation of violent crime with nonwhite skin -- in statistics and in cops' hard-won experience. The Diallo cops' Street Crime Unit doesn't operate in middle-class neighborhoods, black or white, as much as it does in poor black ones. But racism doesn't explain that discrepancy; the demographics of violent crime do. A disproportionately high number of police killings of blacks are by black cops. Washington, D.C.'s heavily black police force uses deadly force far more often than New York's does.
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