The New York Times on Tyre Nichols

Culturalism not Racism

Clyde McGrady has provided an informative survey of NGO and establishment opinions on the horrific beating death of Tyre Nichols. The evident incoherence of the analyses reflect the dominance of a single, omnipotent perspective that is increasingly divorced from reality.

As everyone knows, the death involved five Black police officers under the control of a Black police chief with a checkered history beating a Black man to death. At least one white officer was present but did not participate in the beating.

The dominant position of commentators is the following:

[the] problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism. It is the system and the tactics that foster racism and violence, they say, rather than the specific racial identities of officers.

In other words, while the Black officers weren’t racist against Black people because Black people can’t be racist against Black people, their treatment of Nichols betokens a systemic unfairness and harshness in the treatment of Black suspects. This implies that a person who doesn’t harbor racist beliefs can nonetheless act as if he harbors racist beliefs, because being nonracist doesn’t preclude one from being culturally racist. Officers of all races, according to an activist, “are indoctrinated into a practice that sees Black people and brown people as less than [sic].” One activist quoted in the article calls this “Culturalism.”

Simultaneously, a core precept of police reform activism has been the diversification of police forces. Diversifying police forces is supposed to cut down on the presence of officers with racist beliefs. This policy of course conflicts with the “Culturalism” described above if it is endorsed as a total solution to law enforcement racism. Thus many commentators claim that diversification must be accompanied by other reforms. What those reforms are is not clear, apart from some “defund the police” rhetoric from a Black Lives Matter activist.

Additionally, the swiftness with which the Black officers were fired and charged invited various accusations that racism motivated the punishment of the Black officers themselves. To maintain coherency, this must imply that there is a Culturalism of racism that empowers Black police officers to mistreat Black suspects but also unfairly punishes Black police officers for mistreating Black suspects. Instead of being evidence of successful reform, the swift response is distorted through a psychological defense reaction into further evidence of racism.

Understandably, ordinary people are having a difficult time processing this narrative. The article quotes Barrington Martin II, a former Democratic congressional candidate in Georgia:

“Can’t people be bad people motivated by their lack of maturity, self-awareness and inability to discern? Does every incident involving police and black men have to revert back to being an issue in race?”

Unfortunately for Martin, the official answer to this question is “no,” as the definition of Culturalism above makes clear. A person can have good character content and be anti-racist while simultaneously being racist. A bad person can have bad character but still not be responsible for their actions as a police officer. These strange beliefs are buttressed by an establishment social psychology which holds that the American belief that a person, not a system, is responsible for their actions is a myth designed to obscure and justify power structures.

What these activists want to make clear is that “when you put on that blue uniform, it often becomes the primary identity that drowns out any other identities that might compete with it.” This is a bad thing for the activists, presumably, because if race identity were more powerful than blue identity, then Black officers would never commit an injustice against a Black person.

But these activists don’t follow their reasoning to this conclusion. Instead, they stop at the abstract observation that “the theories of policing and styles of policing…propel violence and brutality.” How race fits in here isn’t clear, since these activists also believe diversifying police forces can reduce bias, which means they believe at least Black officers would resist overtly racist theories of policing.

We’ve reached a clear impasse with our civil religion. An individual’s character content is an insufficient guarantee against racism, which means there is no path for non-racists to follow to avoid injustice, and the redemption of former racists is no longer possible.

The convoluted rationalizations above are fixated upon the maintenance of a narrative that validates the omnipotence or grandiosity of the Black group self-image, to the detriment of our civil religion. Since nobody apart from antiquarians like Mr. Martin above care about the civil religion anymore, another negative consequence is that the opportunity to address institutional dysfunction is thwarted.

Today there are two law-enforcement reform movements that feature reasonable and paranoid-conspiratorial beliefs, but only one of them is afforded a platform, NGO investment, and legitimacy. The other one is concerned with secrecy, the conspiracy of silence, and unaccountability of Federal law enforcement, specifically as exhibited by the FBI and related domestic organizations in their politically charged investigative and prosecutorial activities. Beyond law enforcement is a broader reform movement that sees dysfunction at every level of government for a variety of non-racial reasons.

However, the prospect of uniting these movements is at least partially thwarted by the prominence of the racial agenda exhibited in the NYT article (there are other reasons, like local police union solidarity). Instead of unity under a common model of reform, activists from other reform movements have to racialize their own grievances to witness even a glimmer of hope that money and politicians will recognize their movement. This was made glaringly obvious by Elizabeth Warren’s attempts to racialize the issue of student loan forgiveness.