How Black Policemen Can Be White Supremacists

One of the weirdest and most irritating things about people is that sometimes they totally misunderstand some person or concept, and then when that person or concept works in a different way than they expected they will say “lmao look at this hypocrisy” instead of “hey, maybe I’ve got this wrong somehow.”

Five policemen recently beat a Black man to death, and those policemen happened to also be Black, and now the world’s stupidest people are having the world’s stupidest conversation.

I try very hard to have empathy for everyone. For the most part, people do what they think is right; the problem isn’t their soul but their ideas about what “right” is. I do, however, find it nearly impossible to have empathy for Matt Walsh, the most incurious person in the world. This insufferable dolt has no interest in understanding anything and will in fact go out of his way to avoid anything that looks like knowledge. His is the cult of the cheerfully ignorant: “I know everything worth knowing; everything else is bullshit.” The hubris of it all has me longing for the return of the Greek pantheon and some old-fashioned Hellenistic justice. “And then, as punishment, Hera rendered Matt Walsh incapable of seeing, hearing, or thinking. Nobody noticed the difference.”

“How can Black people be white supremacist” is a question some people are asking in good faith. Others are not. For them, the question is not a question at all but a declaration of victory. Any attempt to actually answer is met with the Twitter equivalent of “Shut up, nerd.”

All that being said, there is an actual shortage of good, concise answers as to how Black people can act in the service of white supremacy. The above video, while correct, also only works for people with a shared understanding of the world usually restricted to people who go to college and/or spend a lot of time on left-wing social media.

Luckily, the well-educated woman in the above video is mistaken about one thing. We do not need a “huge massive lecture” to explain why five Black police officers can act in the service of white supremacy. I can do it in 700 words. Let’s go:

We live in a society, and by “society” I mean “group of people who share a basic set of assumptions.” You’re making a big assumption as you read this: that you and I both speak the same language and have a basic agreement on what the words you’re reading right now mean, even though these are just digital lines that signify sounds that only have meaning because we all agree they do.

Thinking about language that way feels profoundly stupid and like a total waste of time because the assumption of language is so universal. Every human being alive assumes that sounds have meaning and most share the assumption that the written word does also; unless you stop and consciously think about it, it might never occur to you that language is just something our ancestors made up hundreds of thousands of years ago.

We grew up with all kinds of assumptions, and most of those assumptions aren’t our fault but instead a product of how and where we were raised. Traditionally, Americans assume that freedom is the most important human value. I happen to think there’s a lot of merit to this assumption, but Americans usually feel no need to explain why it’s important. They assume you already know why. It’s part of our culture.

Here’s another assumption people grow up with in America: Black people are dangerous. I feel you tensing up and I need you to relax: it isn’t your fault. That assumption became part of our social make-up long before you got here for reasons we don’t need to go into right now. But there’s a reason so many people cross the street (or fight the impulse to cross the street) when they see a group of Black men approaching at night, and that reason is that we were taught to feel this way. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn that assumption. If you’re actively working on it, congratulations: you are making the world a better place through individual actions. Hats off.

Human beings might be racist but assumptions sure as hell aren’t: anyone can absorb them. Why would Black people somehow be immune to the American assumption that Black people are dangerous? Any given Black person might assume they are, in fact, naturally more dangerous than a white person, or that they are an exception to the overall rule that Black people are more dangerous, or they might not think about it at all. They might just see a Black person at night and have a zap of fear in their chest and never question it or know why.

I cannot go inside those five Black police officers’ brains and prove they looked at Tyre Nichols as more threatening than, say, a skinny white photographer on his way back from taking pictures of an especially beautiful sunset. But I can tell you that, when detaining someone, police are three times more likely to kill a Black detainee than a white one. This is not a “well maybe Black people just commit more crime” situation, this is a situation where we are looking exclusively at people already having an interaction with police.

We tend to think of racism as a form of hatred — there’s another one of those American assumptions we grew up with. It’s a lot more helpful to think of racism as a form of fear. When police officers tell you they “feared for their lives,” odds are they aren’t lying. The right question is why they were so afraid of the Black person they savaged or murdered

The problem isn’t the five individual cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death (though to be clear, fuck those guys). The problem is that we live in a society with very bad assumptions about Black people, and until we fix that, police officers — even Black ones — are going to continue to beat Black men to death at traffic stops.

No one alive is responsible for the assumptions we grew up with. That shit was here before any of us were born. It isn’t fair that we have to clean up a mess left to us by our ancestors but unfortunately, this is the position we find ourselves in.

Everyone grab a shovel. We’ve got an Augean stable to clear.

I am extremely aware that people often present the problem of racism as a very different thing. A lot of libs and way too many people on the left behave as though racism is in fact, entirely the fault of individual white people alive today. The thing I just described is systemic racism, but individual responsibility is one of the deepest American assumptions out there. We tend to reflexively see systemic explanations as excuses for individual behavior instead of explanations for it. Leftists are not at all exempt from this particular trap.

Thinking your way out of the assumptions you were born with is really hard work. It requires relentless curiosity and a willingness to be wrong. People like Matt Walsh are the biggest impediments to ever getting somewhere good, not because they disagree with me on nearly every issue but because they view questions as rhetorical cudgels rather than the only way out of this mess.

Walsh’s mud-wallowing pig-ignorance is an interactive demonstration of what authoritarianism does to the human brain: a mode of thinking that prides itself on strength but trembles like a cornered chihuahuha at the mere whisper of a question sincerely asked. The free mind — the American mind — is iconoclastic: unbound by the past and eager to learn.

Don’t be like Walsh. Be an American. And leave this place better than you found it.

What you just read was a kindergarten explanation of phenomenological sociology. If you would like to learn more about systemic universes and the reason we’re having such a terrible time in America right now, I go into a lot more detail in the the first chapter of my undergrad thesis. You can also skip the middleman and go straight to The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. This is your tax dollars at work, by the way; I got my political science lesbian dance theory degree thanks to the GI bill. If you hate it, you’re saying you hate the troops. I don’t make the rules.