Update 06/16/2020: Sam Harris recorded his thoughts on this issue shortly after I posted mine. We agree on most everything, but he said it with much more detail, tact, and eloquence. You can listen here: https://samharris.org/podcasts/207-can-pull-back-brink/
Let me begin with a statement of belief to make sure that I am not taken the wrong way:
Law enforcement officers should only use lethal force as a last resort and when there is an imminent threat to their or others’ safety.
If you are unable to accept that it might be possible to support that statement while not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, please click away now. I have no interest in arguing with mouthpieces of ideology.
Ok, enough preface.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a much-longer-than-expected history of the US to try to put the US wind industry in context for a bunch of master’s students (most of whom come from Asia). The final section was titled “America, Divided”. In my estimation, the fall of the Soviet Union was the major catalyst that allowed the previously unifying (and suffocating) national ideology to start to crumble. In turn, Americans carried out political and social realignments that had started to form in the preceding decades. Now nearly three decades later, we live in a world even more segregated than the Jim Crow South. This time, however, we have segregated ourselves by choice. There has been physical relocation (much of which by intellectual ability), but our digital devices have allowed us to ignore each other almost completely. We can now create social communities of like-minded people regardless of where we are located with little need to figure out how to deal with non-like-minded people.
The result is a country in which millions of Americans vilify millions of other Americans based on their choice of political candidate and tens of millions of other Americans are so disillusioned by the whole thing that some of us just want to burn it all down and start over. I turn off the device or leave the room whenever I hear the President’s disjointed and incomprehensible speech, but I’m going to vote for four more years of Trump. Why? Because the post-Trump world isn’t ready yet.
Allow me to explain.
As much as I’ve tried to remain aloof of the recent flare up of racial tensions, I have been so unsuccessful that I am now clicking this out at 01:51 on a Sunday morning because these thoughts will not stop rattling around in my brain. It may be my steady diet of Peterson and Žižek (two guys who agree on a lot more than you’d expect), but I cannot find much of a way to align with either side because the dichotomy appears to be a construct that isn’t actually serving to achieve any real end other than continuing to drive deeper one of the many wedges that divide this country.
Given my social circle of mostly left-leaning and educated people, my social media feed has been dominated by media posts and short quips expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. I have had far more of a visceral reaction to this than I would have thought, and it has taken some real self-exploration (some of it psychedelic-assisted) to tease out exactly what rubs me the wrong way about this whole thing.
The first is simply the fact that these “protests” appear on social media. I have nothing but contempt for keyboard activism (or as described perfectly here, “slacktivism”). Do you really think that posting a black square on Instagram is going to do a damn thing in the real world? Put down your fucking phone and go do something useful with your life. Or better yet, close Instagram, open a Google search, and learn something because maybe you don’t know what to do yet (I know I sure don’t).
That brings me to my second point. Just because you see a problem doesn’t mean that you know what to do about it. There are many things wrong with major institutions like our capitalist economy, conventional medicine, criminal justice, etc., but despite their flaws, they’re the best society has come up with. The best thing to do for many of these problems is not to act, but to think. There have been many people who did put down their phones and go do something about a perceived injustice, but it doesn’t really seem like they know what they want. Do they even know what the problem is? Is it racism? Or just a criminal justice system that traps people of every color? Is it a few bad apples? Or a systemic issue? Even if it is systemic, should we defund police to punish them for their irresponsibility? Or should we increase police funding so that they can attract better police officers? None of those questions has an obvious answer, but there seems to be an obvious solution: go riot in the streets. No. Wrong. Sit down and think over it a bit because that’s all most of them will be doing in a few weeks when the news cycle has lost interest and getting on with life becomes more pressing again.
My third issue stems from this impulsivity and lack of commitment: it seems to be making the problem worse instead of better. Rosa Parks made her famous bus ride in December 1955, effectively kicking off the Civil Rights Movement. Eight years later, in 1963, President Johnson started pushing the Civil Rights Act through Congress and signed it the following summer. Why did things happen so quickly? The Montgomery bus boycott lasted over a year. Black Lives Matter started in the wake of the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the subsequent trial in 2013 that acquitted his murderer. It’s been seven years, and what have they accomplished? Deaths by police have trended slightly upward. How many BLM members do you think would refuse to drive (or use public transit if they don’t have a car) for a year? I would bet not many. The strategy is not working, and it may be for a lack of trying. But I think it has more to do with the strategy itself.
Let me reiterate: I too want to see fewer people killed by police! But I also want to see people start to focus again on what makes us Americans instead of what makes us black, white, gay, straight, cis, trans, rich, poor, or whatever other box the politically correct culture feels it’s necessary to put us in.
What has continually struck me about the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter or just about anyone commenting on the issue is the divisive and angry tone. Such feelings as anger and bitterness are certainly understandable, but emotions do not get results; effective organization and perseverance regardless of the emotions you feel are what get results. I’ve brought up the Civil Rights Movement because its rhetoric is still relevant, and the lessons to be learned are numerous. Hopefully, that’s why we learned about it in school.
I would bet that the most well-known highlight of the movement was Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, do so now. It’s worth the 20 minutes of your life. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/smEqnnklfYs.
Dr. King is not afraid to point out the injustices faced by black people, and during Segregation, those injustices were obvious and rampant. Yet, he is quick to admonish the urge to fight back: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. … We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” Of course, they weren’t perfect, and things sometimes got messy, but I don’t hear this message of taking the high road from current activists. The “bitterness and hatred” that comes through is only a call to action to those who resist BLM and stand up in defense of their friends and family in uniform. Those who know members of law enforcement or who are putting on their own flack vest several times a week to protect a community they love are incensed by such rhetoric. It’s much harder to get angry at Dr. King.
The admonishments against violence, however, are dwarfed by the appeals to unity that ought to make such admonishment unnecessary. He repeatedly appeals to “all God’s children” and helps the crowd envision a world in which “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands”. This is not a message of exclusivity but one of inclusivity. For a group that wrote so much about their inclusivity on their “About” page, it seems very ironic to have adopted the label Black Lives Matter. Expectedly, #AllLivesMatter responded, and I can’t see how that slogan isn’t more appealing. Is anyone really surprised that racial tensions have only increased? That divisions in American society have deepened? If Black Lives Matter ever intended to unify the country, they have done an exceptionally poor job of expressing it.
This is only one of the many issues in which a false dichotomy has laid itself across the political landscape. You’re either a Republican or a Democrat. You’re pro-choice or you’re pro-life. You’re for gun control or you’re for second amendment rights. Many of us have simply abstained because such binary thinking is no way to run a modern nation-state. However, in this one, many people are being pressured into taking sides, the old “either you’re with us or against us” gambit.
I’m not going to play that game. I’m in favor of less violence. I don’t care what color you are. I’m not even convinced that the current issue is dominated by race. Some simple analysis suggests that it’s much more a function of being poor than being black. Where is the Poor Lives Matter movement? Would it list the names of all of the 114 unarmed people killed by police last year? Would it accept that no matter your color, your creed, your gender, or your sexual preference, that your life matters? But of course, it would still discriminate based on income and therefore leave out the most influential leaders.
I wish we could take back the All Lives Matter moniker because there are very few people who would be against such a cause. Police shouldn’t kill people if they can help it. Their job is to stop crime if they can. If they can’t, their job is to bring the accused before a sanctioned court who will pass judgment. It shouldn’t matter if you are black, white, brown, yellow, or red. All citizens of this country are to be treated as equals under the law. Not as equals in everything (that would be a miserable world if I had to hang out with people like me all day long), but equals as regards application of the law.
As Dr. King said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.”
I won’t argue that racism is completely gone in this country. Even I feel the urge to generalize when I see a black person in a shiny Cadillac or when see a Hispanic person standing around at a job site or when I overhear a group of Chinese students talking loudly in a language I don’t understand. With conscious effort, I remind myself that I know nothing about these people and that the cure for prejudice is individualism. I also remind myself that others must have these thoughts too, and I feel compassion for them when they do not express the better angels of their nature. We all have angels and demons raging inside of us. When we accept this human condition that we all share, then perhaps, we will begin to heal this divided nation. Perhaps, one day, we all will be able to see Dr. King’s dream of “a nation where [we] will not be judged by the color of [our] skin but by the content of [our] character.”
Rioting in the streets doesn’t express individualism; it expresses mob mentality. Posting on social media doesn’t bring about change; it let’s you stay comfortable in the status quo. There are many questions to be answered about the violence that we see in the news, and there are many more questions to be asked about what ought to be done about it. Here, I am only affirming my solidarity in our shared humanity. If you want to discuss this in person, I would love to see how we can find some common ground.
Black lives do matter. So do all other lives. Because we all add our own touch to the world. We are each an expression of it. Each and every one of us is unique.
Just like everyone else.
In all of this, I’ve somehow forgotten about Trump. Amazing how that happens when we focus on real issues instead of incendiary tweets. And that’s the point. Trump is a divisive person, but I don’t see how a President Biden would be any less so. The vast middle of the country hates the politically correct culture that demands that we give precedence to people based on the color of their skin, that attacks establishments that have been fundamental pieces of their lives, and that looks down on them as “deplorables”. The Democrats are just as out of touch with the reality of the country now as they were four years ago, and I believe that putting a Democratic president in the White House will only make the next backlash even worse than Trump. So far, he hasn’t burned the world in a nuclear holocaust, but hopefully, the thought of Trump having 1,461 more grumpy mornings in the Oval Office will scare the Democrats awake. Or even better, it’ll scare the Republicans awake!
Geoffrey S. DeSena 
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