The police are not
judge, jury and executioner. Peaceful protest is a Constitutionally-protected
right. When Black Lives Matter protests the extrajudicial killing of black
people, they are protesting the murder of someone who either did not commit a
crime at all, or at most committed a misdemeanor certainly not punishable by
death, which of course takes us back to the first part of the statement; the
job of the police is to apprehend someone whom they “suspect” of committing a
crime, and then if necessary it is up to a judge and or jury to decide if this
is the case.
This is part of my response when someone asks for my opinion
of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Part of the Black Lives Matter “mission” is: “Rooted in the
experiences of black people in this country who actively resist our
de-humanization, Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a response to the
virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a
unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by
police and vigilantes” (blacklivesmatter.com). This sounds to me like a
reasonable response to the violence committed against innocent black people in
this country, and to the institutionalized racism that is at the root of the
problem. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Black Lives Matter is portrayed
in the media. Just this week a police chief in Wisconsin stated that Black
Lives Matter was going to join with ISIS to take down America (Suen, 2015).
Also recently, a Fox News Host compared Black Lives Matter to the Nazis (Suen,
2015).
These types of statements align with what Jacques Ellul
called “Propaganda of Agitation” (Ellul, 1965), or what is now known as
“agitprop.” Ellul pinpoints hate as the epicenter of agitprop; “Hate is
generally its most profitable resource; hatred is probably the most spontaneous
and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one’s misfortunes and sins to ‘another’; propaganda of
agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery,
provided they are not too powerful”(Ellul,
1965). It’s hard to imagine a less powerful group in society than one that
represents just 13% of the population, have just 1/12th the wealth
of the majority white population (Luhby, 2015), and are descendants of slaves. In
this seemingly endless election cycle we have seen Donald Trump engage in
agitprop to successfully rally his “troops” by targeting Mexican, Latin
American and Muslim immigrants as the source of so much White-American misery;
again all comparatively powerless groups.
I have yet to see a positive portrayal of Black Lives Matter
in the mainstream media. A comparison of response to Black Lives Matter
peaceful protest to that of a riot at a nearly all-white college after a
pumpkin festival (Lennard, 2014) tells us an awful lot about race relations,
the treatment of black people in this country, and the Black Lives Matter
movement.
References
Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The formation of men's
attitudes. New York: Knopf.
Lennard, N. (2014, October 20). The great pumpkin riot
is a white riot worth taking seriously. Retrieved from
https://news.vice.com/article/the-great-pumpkin-riot-is-a-white-riot-worth-taking-seriously
Luhby, T. (2015, February 18). Whites have 12 times the
wealth of blacks, 10 times that of Hispanics. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/18/news/economy/wealth-blacks-whites-hispanics/
