Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.
Many of the similarities and differences between the two periods of unrest are obvious. The Sixties protests also pitted the police against demonstrators, and Blacks against whites, though this time the white resistance is not apparent except by the President and those he senses to be his supporters. Present in the Sixties was also the opposition between faculty and students, the former part of the party of order or else functioning as mediators between students and police or students and administrators. There was also, back then, a sense of ideological division. The protesters included Old Leftists who thought that intellectuals were the leaders of the proletariat in their conflict with the capitalist class. Opposed to them were the younger New Leftists who thought that the suffering of oppressed people, such as African Americans and women, gave people from those groups the wisdom to set the tone for a movement. Today, there are outpourings of feeling but very little detailed argumentation. So much is that the case that when I claimed last week that the idea of defunding the cops is unsustainable, I was told not to give too much credit to the slogan, its content still being worked out, as if people were not responsible for their slogans, what those implied.
It might seem that the present situation is distinctive because it is a double whammy, coronavirus as the backdrop for demonstrations coupled with some looting. Some have even suggested that the two are linked. People are fed up with the lockdown and feel liberated just because they take to the streets. A good cause for doing so just heightens the pleasure. And because police brutality is nothing new, more than a few of these incidents occurring every year, it might be thought that all of this protest would blow over just the way protests against mass shootings blow over until the next one comes along. The gun lobby knew to hold its fire until the anger had passed and the anger always did pass. This time people are not letting go so fast.
It should be remembered that the rioting in the Sixties, especially those which took place following King’s assassination, also blew over, though it took thirty years to rebuild the parts of Washington D. C. that had been burned. And that rioting also took place in a context. Many things take place in history at once. In the Sixties there was also the Vietnam War, also a cause for students, a few years later than the high point of the Civil Rights Movement, though close enough upon it that King felt compelled to come out against the war, which was not his main issue, because his followers insisted upon it. And there was also the spectre of nuclear war, the mid-Sixties a very dangerous time because both the Soviet Union and the United States were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons set for a hair trigger response.
It should also be remembered that the media environment today is not all that different from what it was in the Sixties. There were no body cams back then and there were no social media whereby today’s protesters can communicate with one another about where to meet and where looters can decide where to lay down supplies of bricks. But the media were very lively. You had next day footage on television of events at the front lines in Vietnam and you had next day footage of police violence in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere, and television coverage on the nightly news of what had happened in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963. In the expression of the time, both domestic and international relations were part of a “living room war”. Nobody could say they didn’t know what was going on, as had been possible during World War Two when Midwesterners just did not know about what was happening in the concentration camps because the Chicago Tribune did not cover it. Guadalcanal, yes; Auschwitz, no. So we are all, today and in the Sixties, accountable for what the government does, no hiding place available, whatever side we choose to back, because it is all laid out before us.
Then there is the now concurrent issue of getting rid of Confederate statues and renaming Army bases that carry the names of Confederate Generals, which might seem a tangential issue to police violence but is not. It has been suggested to me that we ought not to play around with history, not inculcate a cultural amnesia about the complexities of the past but, rather, come to terms with the past by studying it, and we can do that in part by keeping those statues in our midst so as to be living reminders of what the nation has undergone in its past and of which we need constant reminding so as not to fall back into that, which is what Freud said of the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square in that it was a visible remembrance of the historical past just as dreams are a manifest remembrance of unconscious feeling. There is something to be said for that point of view in that an unremembered past can lead to present folly or perhaps just to a less nuanced understanding of life. The Confederates believed in what they were fighting for and so it incumbent upon us to understand why they were so possessed by the idea and practice of slavery.
The present moment, however, requires us to do the metaphysical trick of reminding ourselves that the present moment is also history in that it has its own circumstances and messages. At the moment, Confederate statues and Confederate named Army bases are anathema for the very good reason that they are the symbols of “The Lost Cause”, the idea that the Confederacy lives on in our historical imaginations as a time idealized as noble and grand and in pursuit of decent ends. Rather, “The Lost Cause” was a cultural way to give nobility to Jim Crow and lynchings and the social and political disenfranchisement of black people, and was understood that way, in that many of these statues were erected so as to counter calls for civil rights during the Fifties and Sixties. We are all being asked, at the present moment, in this very non-ideological way appropriate to our non-ideological age, to take sides on whether to be for or against Black equality. The sad and tragic fact is that we are fighting these battles once again, a hundred fifty five years since Appamatox and fifty five years after the Equal Accommodations Bill. Why is the fight for Black equality not over? (I have given some reasons in previous posts.) Only then will we be able to look back on the Ante-Bellum South with some humor and irony concerning its quaint customs. Meanwhile, the Civil War rages on.
On the whole, then, I am pleased with the current round of protests. They are carrying out what was laid out in the Constitution as the way to bring about change in the society: by peacefully assembling to demonstrate grievances. That right is certainly to be protected. It is part of the still living elements of the Constitution in that the Second Amendment, which permits citizen to have their long rifles so as to allow for a militia that could challenge a national army, seems outdated, as does the Third Amendment, which protects citizens from having the government put soldiers in civilian quarters, as had been done by the British during the Revolution. Where I have trouble with the present day protesters is that they do not have, as I have suggested, an ideology of change, as even did the Black Panthers or Stokley Carmichael, who back then insisted that black power was no different from white power in that it would work its way through the ballot box. Rather, there are now just a set of feelings that have to do with injustice, a term never defined (perhaps because it can’t be) that point to particular atrocities. So people seem, as I say, self serving and self-righteous, letting an expression of pain take the place of argument, and that does not move things forward.
An op ed piece in the Times a few days ago goes a long way to exemplifying this point. Miriame Kaba said that she really meant it when she said she wanted to defund the police. As far as she is concerned, the police are just no damned good because as an institution they were founded to put black and working people down, and so they can never change. This is a misreading of the history of policing. Policing began in England as a way of controlling the ever growing urban populations from rioting and other mischief, including thievery and other crimes, so many of which were subject to the death penalty. It was a way not to call out the military which was the only expedient possible before the police came into existence. Police work would be an ongoing enterprise, part of the ongoing political system, while the intrusion of the military into civilian affairs made every riot into a revolution, a threat to the state. That division is clearly still applicable in today’s events. Military people do not want to have any part in putting down civilian disturbances. Policing came to the United States in the form of police departments established in Boston and New York City and elsewhere in the 1830’s and the 1840’s to get control, for example, of the Irish gangs that roamed what is now lower Manhattan. Those gangs were real, and so was the need to suppress them, and that useful social purpose for the police is just as real now because there really are gangs and drug criminals and cases of domestic violence where you cannot just send an unescorted social worker. Now, Ms. Kaba may provide a distorted picture of the history of policing, but that does not mean that she should not have her opinion piece in the Times until she gets her opinions satisfactorily backed up by history. But, then again, Senator Tom Cotton should be allowed to have his reckless opinions displayed in an op ed column, even if it does not meet scholarly muster, and certainly not serve as the cause for the firing of the Opinion Editor. Fractious times bring out the worst as well as the best of us, and that includes censorship in the name of what the censorious would consider a truly free speech.