By Noah Rothman
Thursday, April 22, 2021
The jury empaneled to try former Minneapolis police
officer Derek Chauvin took just 12 hours to decide his fate. The evidence with
which they were presented was sufficient to find Chauvin guilty on all counts
for his role in the murder of George Floyd.
That was, ostensibly, what people like President Joe
Biden wanted. Just hours before the jury rendered its verdict, Biden said that
he hoped the jury would reach the “right” decision in accordance with his
understanding of the “overwhelming” evidence against Chauvin. They did just
that, but neither the president nor the vice president took much
solace from the outcome.
“America has a long history of systemic racism,” Vice
President Kamala Harris said in a joint primetime address to the nation. Biden
agreed. “It was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders
off for the whole world to see the systemic racism the vice president just
referred to,” the president added. “The systemic racism is a stain on our
nation’s soul.”
They weren’t alone in seeing this issuing of
deliberative, dispassionate justice as a moment to mourn “systemic racism” in
America.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren pledged to
“keep fighting to dismantle systemic racism and fundamentally transform our justice
system.” George Floyd’s murder was “a manifestation of a system that callously
devalues the lives of Black people,” Sen. Bernie Sanders’s statement
read. “We must boldly root out the cancer of systemic racism.” While the
verdict “provides some measure of justice and accountability, systemic racism
is still pervasive in American life,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy insisted.
And so on, and so on, and so
on.
From an activist’s perspective, the concept of “systemic
racism” has the unduplicable virtue of being vague. It is a blanket indictment
of various indistinct establishments, thus failing to pique the ire of and
produce a self-defense from the specifically accused. It is sufficiently
indiscrete so that it doesn’t lend itself to any focused remedy—something that
a more precise indictment of a specific institution’s culture of racial
discrimination wouldn’t be able to evade. Thus, the phrase’s broadness and
ambiguity render it unfalsifiable.
But occasions like the Chauvin trial provide us with some
evidence that undermines the theory’s fundamental precepts. “All we want is the
police to obey the law,” said former adviser to Barack Obama, Van
Jones. “And when they break the law, they should have handcuffs just like
anybody else.” Of course, he’s right. And what other mechanisms exist to
enforce that social covenant equally and without prejudice but our layered,
multi-institutional systems of law and government?
Ah, but what about when the law seems to be unevenly
applied? What about the privileges enjoyed by law enforcement that allows
abusive officers to evade justice? Jones also insisted that the dispensations
afforded police officers need to be pared back. But how? Via our systems of law
and government. Once again, the overlapping systems of constitutional
governance are not an insurmountable obstacle but the tool through which social
reformers can secure better outcomes.
This conception of systemic challenges lends itself to
the theory of “instrumental activism” sociologist Talcott Parsons identified as
a feature of the uniquely American political ethos. It is the idea that, not
only is the American playing field not so stacked against you that your
objectives are unrealizable, but that your own sense of agency is an empowering
source of individual salvation. That ethos is a problem from the perspective of
a particular sort of activist for whom invocations of “systemic racism” have
become a catechism. The understanding that the system is
malleable and reformable and that its conventions can and do produce just
outcomes forces you to engage with it. By contrast, the belief that
the system is irredeemably flawed demands little of you but fatalism,
hopelessness, and resignation.
Thus, the purveyors of fatalism, hopelessness, and resignation
appear resolved to frame this episode not as a victory but as more evidence
that the system is beyond redemption. “Is justice convicting a police officer,
or is justice convicting America?” asked successful author and director of the
Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, Ibram X. Kendi. “The problem is structural. The problem is
historic … Justice has convicted America. Now, we must put in the time
transforming this nation.” The chief executor of the New York Times’
“1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, agreed. Modern policing, she said,
“has direct lineage to the slave patrols.” Therefore, “it’s difficult to reform
an institution that, in many ways, is doing the exact function that it was
created to do.”
You see, the system can’t work. It
should not be capable of dispensing justice, and it cannot be subject to
incremental reforms that make the pursuit of equitable and just outcomes more
likely. If America’s problems are “systemic,” they’re too big for such modest
measures. The “system” must go.
You expect to hear these sorts of quasi-revolutionary
assertions from professional activists, but what sense does it make to hear
them reiterated by the custodians of that very system? From the president on
down, those who parrot these sentiments are positing a theory of their own
illegitimacy. That would be odd enough if it was supported by evidence, but to
hear it on a day when the system clearly worked is mind-bogglingly bizarre.
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