state terrorism and racist violence in
THE AGE OF DISPOSABILITY
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
If
you want a picture of the future
imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.
George Orwell
When
fear and terror become the organizing principles of a society
in which the tyranny of the state has been replaced by the despotism
of an unaccountable market, violence becomes the only valid
form of control. The system has not failed. As Jeffrey St. Clair
has pointed out, it is doing exactly what it is supposed to
do, which is to punish those it considers dangerous or disposable
- which increasingly includes more and more individuals and
groups. Hannah Arendt was right in arguing that, "If lawfulness
is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness
is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian
domination."
In
an age when the delete button and an utterly commodified and
privatized culture erase all vestiges of memory and commitment,
it is easy for a society to remove itself from those sordid
memories that reveal the systemic injustices that belie the
presence of state violence and terrorism. Not only do the dangerous
memories of bodies being lynched, beaten, tortured and murdered
disappear in the fog of celebrity culture and the 24/7 entertainment/news
cycle, but the historical flashpoints that once revealed the
horrors of unaccountable power and acts of systemic barbarism
are both disconnected from any broader understanding of domination
and vanish into a past that no longer has any connection to
the present.
The
murder of Emmett Till, the killing of the four young black girls,
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise
McNair, in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the killing by
four officers of Amadou Diallo, and the recent killings of countless
young black children and men and women, coupled with the ongoing
and egregious incarceration of black men, in this country are
not isolated expressions of marginalized failures of a system.
They are the system, a system of authoritarianism that has intensified
without apology.
Rather
than being viewed or forgotten as isolated, but unfortunate
expressions of extremism, these incidents are part of a growing
systemic pattern of violence and terror that has unapologetically
emerged at a time when the politics and logic of disposability,
terror and expulsion has been normalized in US society and violence
has become the default position for solving all social problems,
especially as they pertain to poor minorities of class and colour.
If police brutality is one highly visible expression of the
politics of disposability, mass incarceration is its invisible
underside. How else to explain that "the United States
incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South
Africa did [and that in] America, the black-white wealth gap
today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the
peak of apartheid." Or that 77 percent of all inmates out
of a population of 2.3 million are people of colour.
When
ethics and any vestige of social responsibility and the public
good are trampled beneath the hooves of the finance state, there
is no space for democratic values or justice. We live in an
age of disposability - an historical period of increasing barbarism
ruled by financial monsters, who offer no political concessions
and are driven by a death-drive.
Under
assault are those individuals and populations considered excess
such as poor youth of color and immigrants but also those public
spheres such as public and higher education that offer a space
for critical ideas, thoughtfulness, informed exchange and the
development of modes of democratic solidarity. Democratic values,
commitments, integrity and struggles are under siege in the
age of neoliberal misery and disposability. The aim of the terrorist
state, as Arendt argues, is not only to instill fear, but to
destroy the very capacity for convictions. Under such conditions,
power is not only unaccountable, but it is free from any sense
of moral and political conviction. Hence, the rise of the punishing
state as a way to govern all of social life. In this context,
life becomes disposable for most, but especially for poor minorities
of class and colour.
I think
Bell Hooks is right when she states that "the point of
lynching historically was not to kill individuals but to let
everybody know: 'This could happen to you.' " This is how
a terrorist state controls people. It individualizes fear and
insecurity and undercuts the formation of collective struggle.
Fear of punishment, of being killed, tortured, or reduced to
the mere level of survival has become the government's weapon
of choice. The terrorist state manufactures ignorance and relies
on induced isolation and privatization to depoliticize the population.
Beliefs are reduced to the realm of the private allowing the
public realm to sink into the dark night of barbarism, terror
and lawlessness. Without the ability to translate private troubles
into public issues, Americans face a crisis of individual and
collective agency as well as a historical crisis.
As
an endless expression of brutality and the ongoing elimination
of any vestige of equality and democratic values, the killing
of innocent black children and adults by the police makes clear
that Americans now inhabit a state of absolute lawlessness and
extreme violence, one that both fills the Hollywood screens
with prurient entertainment and a culture of cruelty and, unfortunately,
provides testimony to the ravaging violence that marks everyday
life as well.
Of
course, this is not simply a domestic issue or one limited to
the United States. As Arif Dirlik points out, "Life in
general is being devalued for entire sections of populations
across the globe. Let's not forget the callousness with which
people are being murdered by drones, US troops, Israel, Han
Chinese (Tibetans, Uighurs). The assassination of blacks by
the police across the US gives the impression of a vulnerable
population being used as guinea pigs, to warn the rest of what
to expect if we get out of line." Totalitarianism is on
the rise across the globe just as a growing number of populations
that are vulnerable are becoming more disposable due to modes
of governance wedded to militarism, unchecked market forces,
corporate sovereignty and updated forms of disorder.
Calls
for minor reforms such as retraining the police, hiring more
people of colour, equipping police with body cameras or making
the grand jury system more transparent will not change a political
and social system that has lost its connections to the ideals,
values and promises of a democracy. Just as calls for punishing
the Wall Street crooks who caused the financial crisis will
not reform the system that produced the financial debacle. In
fact, the pleas for reform are often made by apologists for
the punishing state in the aftermath of highly publicized examples
of police brutality, botched executions, the shootings of unarmed
black teenagers and the numerous reports of torture, solitary
confinement and the ongoing criminalization of social problems.
For
example, President Obama responded to the police violence and
national uprisings by chastising blacks for looting and rioting.
This is not merely another blame-the-victim narrative; it is
an act of moral duplicity coming from a president that makes
George W. Bush look liberal when it comes to violating civil
liberties and punishing whistleblowers while expanding the indiscriminate
killing of civilians through the use of drone warfare. In addition,
there is Eric Holder who refused to prosecute Wall Street criminals
and yet assures the US public that the government will conduct
independent investigations in the interests of the powerless.
Credibility is more than stretched in this instance.
It
gets worse. New York City police chief, Bill Bratton, vows to
retrain 22,000 police officers but evades questions about the
police force using chokeholds on innocent victims. Former New
York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appearing on Fox News Sunday
suggests that some police reforms may be necessary and then
gets to the heart of the matter by invoking the argument that
blacks inhabit a culture of criminality. His comments are worth
repeating: "But I think just as much, if not more, responsibility
is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police
officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community.
It's because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita
than any other group in our society." As if this argument
justifies the beatings, shootings and killing of innocent individuals
at the hands of the police.
These
calls for reform are not only disingenuous coming from people
entrenched in supporting the punishing state and the interests
its supports, but also because they are invoked to hide the
real causes of misery and violence in the United States which
come from a society immersed in racism, economic inequality,
poverty, the redistribution of wealth away from the public sector,
the ongoing destruction of the welfare state and a political
system now entirely controlled by financial elites. Chase Madar
is right in arguing that lawlessness is on the side of the police
and the law has become a license for them to kill with impunity,
and as such the question of police brutality has to be addressed
far beyond the discourse of liberal reforms. He writes:
What
drives the increasing brutalization and killing of innocent
people in the United States is a form of state terrorism free
of social responsibility, guilt and morality. This is a form
of state violence fed by gun culture, the criminalization of
poverty, the militarization of the culture of low-income and
poor people of colour, and the misery spurned by neoliberal,
slash-and-burn policies aimed mainly at the poor and the welfare
state. The face of terrorism can be captured in images of the
police spraying tear gas into the crowds of peaceful protesters
in New York City. It can be seen in reports of the police choking
students, firing hundreds of rounds of bullets into the cars
of civilians, beating a defenseless mentally-ill woman, and
in the ongoing comments of right-wing fundamentalists who instill
moral panic over the presence of immigrants, protest movements
and any other form of resistance to the authoritarian state.
How
else to explain the comments made on national television news
by Pat Lynch, the head of the New York City police union, who
stated that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo deserved to be acquitted
by the grand jury in the death of Eric Garner because Garner
was able to utter the words "I can't breathe," which
allegedly indicated there was no chokehold applied to his neck,
in spite of what the video displayed or what the medical examiner
concluded. Even Orwell could not make this up. Lynch overlooked
not only the evidence provided by the video of Garner's brutal
killing and the verdict of the medical examiner but also the
fact that Pantaleo has a history of racial misconduct in the
police force.
But
more importantly, the New York City police force has a long
history of racist practices and violence extending from an aggressive
policy of racial profiling to bullying people in the name of
the broken windows policing theory, which is a synonym for harassing
young black men. It gets worse as fatal police encounters with
black men reach epidemic proportions. Necropolitics now drives
the everyday existence of poor people of colour. As David Theo
Goldberg points out, how else to explain "the account Darren
Wilson has given publicly about his sense of Michael Brown as
a large, violent, probably armed young black man? Or the shooting
with absolutely no warning of 12-year-old Tamir Rice for carrying
a pellet gun in an otherwise empty snow-filled park . . . Or
the luckily unsuccessful shooting at a black father by mistaking
for a weapon the 6-year-old daughter he was rushing to save
from a severe asthma attack?"
It
doesn't end here as the nightmare videos appear of a cop viciously
beating a 50-year-old, mentally-ill black woman along a busy
Los Angeles highway, and another report of a young black man
being killed in a Walmart store for allegedly "brandishing"
an air rifle which he had reportedly been holding and leaning
on, as if it was a walking stick. In totalitarian regimes, the
mass psychology of authoritarianism runs amok as such indiscriminate
acts of state violence are followed by the language of demonization,
racism, cruelty and mad utterances of hate. Black men are called
dangerous criminals, thugs or drug addicts. This is a discourse
of abusive certainty, unmoved by its ignorance and determined
to legitimate massive extremes of inequality, material deprivation
and human misery as it produces widening zones of violence and
abandonment.
Under
such circumstances, the language of reform has become the discourse
of apologists. None of these alleged reformers situate the violence
done to Garner within a wider context of state violence. For
instance, Garner's death is not analyzed in the context of the
charge that the New York City police force is a corrupt and
lawless institution, which raises questions about a society
that produces such lawless institutions. No connection is made
between how police are trained and regulated, and the evidence
that the killing of a 12-year-old black child was committed
by a cop deemed incompetent by his previous department. Only
recently has the militarization of local police forces become
national news, but the latter is largely unassociated with the
rise of a permanent warfare state and the militarization of
the entire society. Little is learned from the ongoing evidence
that blacks are mostly terrified of the police who act like
an occupying force in their neighbourhoods, which are treated
like war zones. What ties all of these events together is that
all of these acts of violence, corruption and incompetence are
not isolated practices but add up to the new face of domestic
terrorism in a post 9/11 United States.
Lawlessness
in the authoritarian state thrives on the purported existence
of an alleged culture of criminality. The culture of criminality
thesis has taken on a new register as the punishing state increases
the range of social behaviors it now criminalizes. If somebody
is poor, unable to pay their debts, violates a trivial rule
in school, is homeless or viewed as the other, they are prime
targets for the criminal justice system. As the police become
more militarized and the culture of cruelty becomes more pervasive,
the senseless harassment of young black men is followed by a
spate of racist killings. Under such circumstances, the criminal
justice system is not noted for its respect for justice but
for how it has "become criminal in its lack of justice."
Unfortunately, there is a culture of criminality in the United
States and it resides in the mega-banks, the ultra-rich hedge
funds and other apparatuses of the finance state. But on this
issue there is nothing but silence from alleged patriots.
Calls
for such reforms do not challenge the totalitarian politics
and financial forces that rule US society. They simply give
the system a veil of legitimacy suggesting it can be fixed.
It can't be fixed. This is not to suggest that it is better
for cops to wear cameras than carry military-grade weapons or
that there is no point in creating new policing models. But
these are short-term solutions and do not address the larger
structural violence and racism built into the neoliberal financial
state. It is a death-dealing system ruled by political and moral
zombies, and it has to be transformed through the ongoing, nonviolent
mobilization and development of social movements that can imagine
a democracy that is real, substantive and radical in its calls
for justice, equality and freedom. The dark possibilities of
our times are everywhere.
The
killing of Eric Garner is a flashpoint that has mobilized people
all over the country. The demonstrations must continue full
force and as a first step criminal charges must be brought against
rogue cops and lawless police departments that believe that
they can engage in racist repression and brutalize black neighborhoods
by treating them as war zones. The racist ideologies, institutions
and language of the new authoritarianism are part of a systemic
project of disposability, harassment and expulsion and provide
the formative culture necessary to treat blacks, as Robin D.G.
Kelley points out, "like enemy combatants," which
constitutes the first step toward brutalizing and in some cases
killing young black men with impunity. But then the hard work
begins of creating political formations at every level of government
that will dismantle this barbarous system run by financial looters
and backed up by rogue paramilitary forces. Let's hope the killing
of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner provides the beginning
of a political and social movement to fight what has become
a dark and gruesome political state of governance in the United
States.
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