By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, May 21, 2015
One can always count on Charles Blow to distill a handful
of hitherto inchoate silliness into column form, and this morning he did not
disappoint. Picking up each and every one of the witless tropes that have been
circulating since the travesty at Waco, Blow set about to establish that a
grave linguistic injustice had been done to America’s rioters. Since Sunday’s
gang fight, Blow averred, both the media and the public have demonstrated a set
of pernicious double standards, and thereby exposed the racial inequalities
that underpin the American criminal-justice system. Rather than calling the
motorcycle gangs “thugs,” he complained, the press has taken to calling them
“motorcycle gangs.” Rather than asking if the fight was the product of a
race-based “pathology,” commentators have been happy to treat it as a one-off.
And rather than asking serious questions about America’s culture, onlookers
have merely shrugged their shoulders — or possibly even applauded. These
dissimilarities, Blow concluded, represent not the natural semantic differences
that arise in reporting on asymmetrical situations, but a “societal and media
issue about the imbalances in characterization, which is itself a proxy for the
very value we place on different people simply because of their inherent
identities and their personal presentation.” The bottom line to the piece? The
bikers have been treated more nicely than the rioters were because they were
white.
This theory is presumably highly appealing to the New
York Times’ more socially conscious readers. On Twitter, too, it has been all
the rage. And yet on closer inspection it does not have a great deal to
recommend it. Indeed, insofar as it is true at all, Blow’s complaint is the
product not of a uniquely perspicacious and bravely critical eye, but of a
steadfast unwillingness to acknowledge a) that we have differing expectations
of everyday American citizens than we do of self-professed gangs, and b) that
our reactions to their respective wrongdoing will therefore diverge. There is,
Blow submits, “something about black violence that makes some people leap to a
racialized conclusion that the violence is about our fraying culture — that
it’s not simply about people behaving violently, but about the entirety of the
environment from which they sprang.” This, I’d venture, is incorrect. It was
not because the violence in Baltimore and beyond was black that we questioned the
“environment from which” its practitioners “sprang”; it was that, by changing
upon the instant from law-abiding citizens to public nuisances, the rioters
tended to surprise us. And when we are surprised, we proceed differently from
when we are not. (Look, by way of example, at the sky-is-falling manner in
which Americans reacted to violent unrest from students in the 1960s and
1970s.)
When a career criminal is convicted of a rape or a
murder, we do not spend a great deal of time trying to work out how it was that
he found himself in the dock. When the ostensibly nice kid from down the street
executes a handful of his classmates, by contrast, we all throw up our hands.
“Was he crazy?” “Was he evil?” “Are his parents to blame?” “Is there something
in the culture — video games or pornography, perhaps — that provoked his
spree?” “What do you think it was that made him snap?” All in all, there is a
pretty simple answer to the question, “Why didn’t Americans rack their brains
upon hearing the news that a motorcycle gang had shot up another motorcycle
gang?” That answer: Because that’s what motorcycle gangs do.
Ultimately, Blow appears to be mistaking the harmony that
has come with the universal condemnation of the bikers for the quiet that might
come with universal apathy. “The tone and tenor of the rhetoric the media used
to describe” the shooting in Waco, he proposes, stood “in stark contrast to the
language used to describe the protests over the killings of black men by the
police.” Indeed it did. Again, though, this is not because there was a double
standard at play, but because the Waco incident invited no controversy and the
#BlackLivesMatter protests did. In the United States, the type of rioting that
we have seen in Baltimore and in Ferguson will always provoke heated and
worthwhile political debate. Why? Well, because rioting in America is not
always seen as a social ill. This is a country, remember, whose character was
forged in a violent revolution; a country that hosted an unspeakable bloody
civil war; a country that for years accommodated a white-supremacist tyranny
that was eventually done away with by a combination of individual resistance
and collective moral clarity. In consequence, when angry Americans take to the
streets, they can expect a good number of the observers to ask in earnest,
“Well, do they have a point?” Naturally, this was not the case with the biker
gangs. By universal consensus they were held to be a menace. Of course we
talked about them differently.
This being so, Charles Blow’s contention that the gangs
have been in some way let off the hook — or even romanticized – is an utterly
perplexing one. “President Obama and the mayor of Baltimore,” Blow complains,
“were quick to use the loaded label ‘thugs’ for the violent rioters there,” and
yet “the authorities have not used that word to describe the far worse violence
in Waco.” In a dull sense, this is true. But it is also somewhat beside the
point. When we are discussing what happened at Waco, “biker club,” “gangs,” and
“outlaw motorcycle gangs” are considerably more accurate descriptions of the
offenders than the vague and unusually multi-purpose pejorative, “thug.”
Really, the only way that one could infer a preference from the use of the term
“outlaw motorcycle gang” is if one believed it to be a term of endearment.
Surely Blow does not believe that?
Well, actually . . . he does. “The words ‘outlaw’ and
‘biker’ while pejorative to some,” Blow argues, “still evoke a certain
romanticism in the American ethos.” Indeed, he suggests, “they conjure an image
of individualism, adventure and virility.” Really, one has to wonder where the
evidence for this assertion is. Thus far, I have heard not a single person
justify or express admiration for the gangs’ behavior. I have heard no talk
whatsoever of mitigating factors, of poverty, or of understandable
dissatisfaction. I have seen nobody propose that the shooters were merely
trying “to communicate.” America’s complex history — often blamed for its
modern ills — has not been recruited as a rationalization. There have been no
GoFundMe pages set up to pay for the perpetrators’ legal defense, nor have
there been any songs or poems or obsequious essays penned in their honor.
Twitter has hosted no sympathetic memes. No politicians have jumped to their
defense or favorably hijacked their activities to make a broader point.
Hollywood is not haggling over the movie rights. There has, in sum, been no
glamorization at all. Instead, there has been condemnation without caveat, and
nothing else besides.
In Texas, the authorities have been equally uniform in
their denunciations. It has been said in the aftermath of the shootout that the
gangs benefited from “white privilege.” One has to ask, “how?” Certainly, the
police did not give the groups a pass because they were mostly white. Rather,
terrified that they were likely to kick off at any moment, they had been
tracking them for months. When things did eventually blow up, the cops were on
hand to return fire, and they did so without mercy. By CNN’s unofficial count,
police shooters killed four of the suspects and arrested 170 — almost all of
whom have had their bail set at a considerable $1 million each. Now that the
shooting has stopped, the state intends to stick around for a while. In order
to ensure that there is no further violence, the Waco Tribune reports, locals
have seen “a very significant increase in law enforcement in McLennan County,”
with “local, county, state and federal agencies . . . involved in
investigations” into the gangs. There hasn’t been this big a police presence in
Waco since the Branch Davidians had their white privilege affirmed back in
1993.
Human beings tend to grasp instinctively that not all
criminals are alike. In one corner, we have the Charles Mansons and the Jeffrey
Dahmers — the people, that is, who have no sense of what is good and what is
evil and who must be treated as little more than cancers to be rooted out. In
another, there are the professional criminals — the mafia, the motorcycle
gangs, the Crips, the Bloods, and so on. And then, in pockets up and down the
country, there are the people who surprise us. These are the sometime-rioters,
the overzealous dissenters, and the desperate petty-crooks, and their behavior
can be reasonably attributed to overexcitement, to the animating adrenalin of
injustice or of passion, and to the wider cultural trends that are the subject
of our broader socio-political debates. In order to distinguish between these
phenomena, civilized societies have developed a set of linguistic habits: The
mafia is the mafia, the gangs are the gangs, the serial killer is the serial
killer, and the guy who smashes up a CVS because he is angry is . . . well,
what is he? Evidently, we do not know, and in not knowing we argue so that we
might find out. In the process of doing so, we throw words around with abandon:
some say “thug”; some say “protester”; others are not sure what to say at all.
We must not allow a misplaced desire for uniformity to intrude upon our deliberations.
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