by Chris Hayes
To desecrate the dead is to humiliate the living, and humiliation may be the most powerful and most underappreciated force in human affairs. The angry citizen can shout, and the terrified citizen can lock the doors, or flee, or move, or arm himself. But the humiliated citizen can neither express her feelings nor respond to the offense. For it is in the nature of humiliation that it happens at the hands of someone with greater power: the police officer who pulls over the young black man behind the wheel and wants to hear no lip; the corrupt bureaucrat who comes to inspect the businessman’s shop, looking for violations; the surly immigration official who goes through the immigrant’s belongings.
In Ferguson people were enraged at Michael Brown’s death and grieving at his passing, but more than anything else they were sick and tired of being humiliated. At random I could take my microphone and offer it to a black Ferguson resident, young or old, who had a story of being harassed and humiliated. A young honors student and aspiring future politician told me about watching his mother be pulled over and barked at by police. The local state senator told me that when she was a teenager, a police officer drew a gun on her because she was sitting in a fire truck—at a fireman’s invitation. At any given moment a black citizen of Ferguson might find himself shown up, dressed down, made to stoop and cower by the men with badges. Another anecdote from the DOJ report shows just how extreme the humiliation could be:
In the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man’s car, blocking him in, and demanded the man’s Social Security number and identification. Without any cause, the officer accused the man of being a pedophile, referring to the presence of children in the park, and ordered the man out of his car for a pat-down, although the officer had no reason to believe the man was armed. The officer also asked to search the man’s car. The man objected, citing his constitutional rights. In response, the officer arrested the man, reportedly at gunpoint, charging him with eight violations of Ferguson’s municipal code. One charge, Making a False Declaration, was for initially providing the short form of his first name (e.g., “Mike” instead of “Michael”), and an address which, although legitimate, was different from the one on his driver’s license. Another charge was for not wearing a seat belt, even though he was seated in a parked car. The officer also charged the man both with having an expired operator’s license, and with having no operator’s license in his possession. The man told us that, because of these charges, he lost his job as a contractor with the federal government that he had held for years.
Take just a moment to put yourself in that man’s position. You are sitting in your own car, minding your own business, and the next thing you know, a cop has accused you of being a child molester, pulled a gun on you, arrested you (for a series of ridiculous offenses), and thrown you in jail. For good measure, you’ve now lost your job.
We can all access some version of this feeling—even people of tremendous privilege can know the sting of humiliation. Take the simple example of a parking ticket. Just about everyone’s gotten one. You’ve been pulled over, and even if it’s completely justified, the sight of the cop or traffic agent scribbling on that flipbook causes a flood of neurochemicals. You experience a feeling of injustice, rage, and self-pity at the sheer unfairness of it all. And all this just for a parking ticket! A small citation and an entirely proper acknowledgment that someone, in his or her own small, innocuous, but irrefutable way, broke the law.
FOR SUBJECTS OF AUTHORITARIAN rule, humiliation is the permanent state of existence. “There is the man at the top,” Frantz Fanon wrote of his native Martinique, “and there are his courtiers, the indifferent (who are waiting), and the humiliated.” That’s it. In a colonial system, you can have power and be close to those with power, or you can be humiliated.
It was a sense of profound humiliation that gave emotional fuel to our own revolution. The humiliation that Britain visited upon the American colonists created such a powerful thirst for vengeance, it could be quenched only with extreme acts of ritualized public violence that tried to turn humiliation back on the oppressors. In 1769 a British customs officer named James Rowe was offered a bribe to look the other way as some goods were smuggled. He declined and chose to enforce the law, seizing the black market goods. “In response he was tarred and feathered, wheeled around the town in a cart, and forced to wear signs labeling him an informer.”
This happened in Salem, Massachusetts, a town that already knew a thing or two about rituals of public humiliation, but in the run-up to the Revolution, as the Crown attempted to crack down on smuggling, these outbursts of violent mob humiliation became routine. In Newburyport, a customs official was “put in the stocks, then paraded through town with a rope around his neck, hit with eggs, and locked in a warehouse over a weekend before being released.” In these moments the colonists could purge their own sense of impotence and transfer it to the agents of the Crown who had imposed it on them. Two centuries later Fanon would say that “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
To the Founders, the solution to the excesses of the Crown was revolution, then a republic. Of course, in the tortured and prolonged negotiations that ultimately created the Constitution, many of the original grievances—particularly the unreasonable searches and seizures, the lack of due process, and the heavy-handed quartering of soldiers in colonists’ homes—went unaddressed. Constitutional scholar Akhil Amar says that as soon as the final Constitution made its way out into the states to be debated and ratified, these omissions were immediately evident to the citizens engaged in the debate. Final ratification came only after they were assured that a Bill of Rights, which explicitly addressed many of the Crown’s egregious overreaches, was on its way. The framers thus included in the Fourth Amendment these words:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The existence of the Bill of Rights is an acknowledgment of the fact that democracy, by itself, is no guarantee against the potential excesses of the state’s police power. But on the ground in Ferguson, the Bill of Rights itself seemed to have no force. So the question that kept tugging at me, amid the tear gas and the sonic cannon, the shouts and protests and fires, was: What exactly was the “the law” in this heretofore little-known town? Whose authority held here, and why? Was it covered by the Constitution, or had we all managed to slip into some legal multiverse, where the standard rules, the ones our forefathers had fought and died for, that we pledged allegiance to as school children, simply did not exist?
As the DOJ report makes clear, the violations of the Constitution in Ferguson were extreme and systematic. Repeatedly, it calls the Ferguson police department’s patterns and practices “unconstitutional,” citing various amendments, from the Fourth to the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth, that are habitually violated by the conveyor belt of tickets, citations, court dates, fees, and warrants.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the DOJ report is how open and honest the city officials are about their police department’s purpose, how certain they seem that no one is watching them. Their comments suggest no winking and nudging, as one might find in the e-mails of, say, bankers on the eve of the housing crash or Enron traders before the bankruptcy. No ironic and knowing smiles. Just plain statements of financial goals, of dollars and cents. At one point the department started a new “I-270 traffic enforcement initiative” in order to “begin to fill the revenue pipeline.” The masterminds behind it warned that the initiative would require “60 to 90 [days] of lead time to turn citations into cash.”
The point is that none of the people administering this enterprise appear concerned that what they’re doing is a gross violation of their duty to their constituents. And when you ask yourself how this report came to be written, the reason for their nonchalance is evident. The damning pages of the report exist only because a seventeen-year-old black boy was shot and killed by a police officer, and because that shooting led to an uprising. That uprising in turn led to the DOJ getting involved, which in turn led to the investigation that produced this audit.
But how many other police departments are like the one in Ferguson? We happen to know of this one because of this young man’s death, because of the outrage and activism and klieg lights that followed that death. But Ferguson’s practices were hiding in plain sight for all to see for years. And in fact, when I talked to people in Ferguson, they didn’t think there was much that special about it. Go to any of the surrounding little municipalities around Ferguson in St. Louis County: Jennings, Florissant, Kinloch. A Washington Post investigation of the municipal court system in the surrounding towns found identical violations across the board.
This is what “the law” looks like in the Colony, where real democratic accountability is lacking, when the consent of the governed is absent or forsaken or betrayed, and when the purpose of policing and courts isn’t the maintenance of safety and provision of justice but rather some other aim. In north St. Louis County that aim is to produce revenue, the same aim of the British Empire’s customs regime in the American colonies.
But empires of old kept their colonies at a distance: Rome conquered the Gauls across the Alps. France ruled Algeria from across the Mediterranean. King George III dispatched troops across the Atlantic to administer the new world. In the United States in 2016 such distance does not exist: the “rough” part of Ferguson is maybe a thousand yards from the “nice” neighborhoods.
And so the maintenance of the Nation’s integrity requires constant vigilance. The borders must be enforced without the benefit of actual walls and checkpoints. This requires an ungodly number of interactions between the sentries of the state and those the state views as the disorderly class. The math of large numbers means that with enough of these interactions and enough fear and suspicion on the part of the officers who wield the gun, hundreds of those who’ve been marked for monitoring will die.
One of those deaths was a Staten Island grandfather named Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York cop in July 2014. In a small working-class neighborhood in Staten Island, Garner would sell individual cigarettes—loosies—which are illegal in New York.
In other words: Eric Garner, like John Hancock, was a merchant trafficking in black market goods. He was offering what the market demanded—a cheaper, unbundled, untaxed cigarette. And the government seeking to crack down on this offense harassed him—he’d been arrested twice for selling loosies in 2015 alone. Day after day Eric Garner simply had to swallow a particular type of ritualized humiliation. He had to take it. Every day the humiliation and frustration built within him.
On the day he died, Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground and put into a chokehold as he screamed with increasing desperation, “I can’t breathe,” eleven times, until he lost consciousness and died. All this was recorded as plain as day on a smartphone, which, before the police officer placed Garner in a chokehold, had captured his final protests:
Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. . . . Every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.
Those final words could have been just as well addressed to a colonial customs officer:
Every time you see me, you want to harass me.
It stops today.
* In a later Department of Justice investigation, other eyewitnesses said Brown did not have his hands up and in fact was moving toward Officer Wilson and “appeared to pose a physical threat” to him. Ultimately the Department of Justice would conclude that the claims of Brown having his hands up were not consistent with the “physical and forensic evidence.”
III
Just after Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann fired his sidearm from the passenger side of a police cruiser, his partner Frank Garmback radioed dispatch. The neighborhood that the two officers were patrolling was, from the perspective of two white cops, poor, black, and violent. The park to which they had been summoned with word of a possible active shooter contains a memorial to two other police officers who’d been killed there in the line of duty.
“Shots fired,” Garmback told dispatch. “Male down, black male, maybe twenty.”
Maybe twenty. Perhaps a few years younger: eighteen, say. Or older: twenty-three. We do not know at what point it was revealed to them that Tamir Rice, whom Loehmann killed with two shots within two seconds of arriving on the scene, was, in fact, only twelve years old. He was not a man with a pistol. He was a boy with a pellet gun.
Loehmann would tell investigators he had had no choice: he saw Rice reach for his waistband and thought he was about to pull out a gun and shoot him. Loehmann wasn’t charged. He told the grand jury he was scared, and the grand jury believed him, as did the Cuyahoga County prosecutor who explained the decision: “Believing he was about to be shot was a mistaken—yet reasonable— belief given the high-stress circumstances and his police training. He had reason to fear for his life.”
“WAR ZONE” IS THE cliché people tend to reach for when describing poor urban neighborhoods. Various representations of the Bronx in 1980s, like the films The Warriors and Fort Apache: The Bronx played up this metaphor. In popular culture at the time, my home borough might as well have been Beirut. People constantly used the phrase “bombed out.”
This is a common way of understanding urban environments. Not long before Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, the Department of Justice issued a scathing report on the Cleveland police department’s patterns and practices of discrimination and the use of force. One detail sums up the entire problem with the mindset of policing in the Colony. The DOJ had “observed a large sign hanging in the vehicle bay of a district station identifying it as a ‘forward operating base,’ a military term for ‘a small, secured outpost used to support tactical operations in a war zone.’ ”
Forward operating base. That phrase captures the psychology of many police officers: they see themselves as combatants in a war zone, besieged and surrounded, operating in enemy territory, one wrong move away from sudden death. And here’s the thing. It’s not an act. I’m sure Timothy Loehmann was indeed terrified. That fear, the fear of the occupying solider, is the entire problem.
The mindset of the occupier in restive and dangerous territory is not unique to the Cleveland police department, of course. Nor is the mindset that led to the death of Tamir Rice new. More than fifty years ago, before the war on drugs, before SWAT teams and mandatory minimums and private prisons and “stop and frisk,” before the entire modern-day Colony was constructed, James Baldwin wrote that a white police officer “moves through Harlem . . . like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.”
If the white Harlem cop in Baldwin’s day walked the streets stalked by fear of the natives, aware he was fundamentally foreign to the land he patrolled, then he was partaking in an American tradition that stretches back, in a literal way, to the country’s origins.
To be outnumbered and afraid in a land not your own, and to attempt to bring it under your control—this is the great recurring theme of the American project, and it is shot through at every moment by fear and violence and subjugation. That fear stalks our history’s winners even as they conquer and conquer and settle and conquer some more.
The first European settlers who arrived in Jamestown were attacked almost immediately. The early colonial governor of Virg
inia George Percy, who helped sail the Virginia Company of London’s first fleet, recalled the first day of landfall in 1606.
At night, when we were going aboard, there came the Savages creeping upon all fours, from the Hills, like Bears, with their Bows in their mouths, [who] charged us very desperately in the faces, hurt Captain Gabriel Archer in both his hands, and a sailor in two places of the body very dangerous. After they had spent their Arrows, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise, and so left us.
The experience of Jamestown was dire and miserable, a tale of violence, sickness, death, and ultimately abandonment. Six hundred miles north in Plymouth, things wouldn’t be quite as bad, but despite our Thanksgiving myth of peaceable coexistence, fear cloaked life in its every instant. The relationship between settlers and Indians mostly consisted of mutual terror punctuated by atrocities. Squanto, the lovable English-speaking Indian of the Thanksgiving story, was actually a man who’d been kidnapped from his village, then transported across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery in Europe. He would escape and make it back to America only to find out his entire village had been wiped out by European disease.
The Thanksgiving tradition we celebrate today with a feast actually commemorates a betrayal that happened two years after the first arrival of the colonists. In 1622, Myles Standish, an English military officer working for the Pilgrims, heard that Indians planned to raid the newly established white settlement of Wessagussett. Standish organized a militia to repel the attack, but no Indians appeared. So he decided to preemptively attack by luring two Indians to Wessagussett under the pretense of sharing a meal. When they entered the house, Standish and his men killed them.