No, White Supremacy Isn’t to Blame for Tyre Nichols’s Death

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, January 30, 2023

 

Q: What do you call it when five black cops brutally beat a black man to death, in violation of their oaths, their duties, and all respect for the sanctity of human life?

 

A: White supremacy.

 

Alas, I am not kidding. In a piece for CNN on Friday, the political commentator Van Jones argued that the killing of Tyre Nichols showed “it’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers Black lives,” and, in particular, time to comprehend that “one of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects.” “At the end of the day,” Jones wrote, “it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

 

In Saturday’s New York Times, Clyde McGrady provided a panoply of quotes in support of this notion. Nichols’s killing, McGrady suggested, has “brought into focus what many Black people have said is frequently lost in police brutality cases involving white officers and Black victims: that problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism.” Putting this case more bluntly, Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D., Fla.) tweeted out: “Doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.”

 

There is little to be gained from euphemisms at a time like this, so I’ll be as blunt as I can: This is absurd. Take a look at the flow chart that Van Jones, Maxwell Alejandro Frost, and Clyde McGrady’s interviewees have built, and you will note immediately that, under their approach, there is no circumstance in which the killing of a black American will not be deemed the product of white supremacy. If the cops act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops don’t act consciously in the name of white supremacy, that’s white supremacy. If the cops are white, it’s white supremacy. If the cops are not white, it’s white supremacy, too. Whatever the input, whatever the details, the result is always the same: white supremacy. That’s not logic; it’s magic.

 

Worse yet, it’s a theory that treats black Americans as if they are inferior citizens who cannot be judged by the same standards as everyone else. If, as you should, you sincerely believe that all people are equal, then you cannot cast some of them as mere automatons when it is politically convenient to do so. To acknowledge a person’s intrinsic equality is to fully accept his capacity for good and evil without engaging in transparent special pleading, without making vague appeals to “the culture,” and without offering excuses for his conduct when you would condemn a culprit of a different race unequivocally for the same behavior.

 

There is, I’m afraid, not a great deal of substantive difference between the case that Van Jones and Co. are making in (indirect) defense of the five officers in Memphis, and the case that the bigots of the past once made against treating non-whites as full members of society. Certainly, their intent is different. But, at root, both cases rely upon the same ugly implication, which is that the behavior of black American citizens is ultimately beyond those citizens’ control. I do not believe this. The five cops who killed Tyre Nichols did a heinous thing, and it is precisely because I believe in their full and irrevocable equality that I intend to judge them unreservedly for having done it. Those men are my peers, and they should be treated as such.

 

What is the alternative? In fact, there are a couple.

 

The first is that the five cops should be treated in precisely the same way as would a self-professed white supremacist. If, as has been claimed, the actions of the five men were indeed driven by the “pernicious effects” of “anti-Black racism,” then the men presumably ought to be charged with hate crimes, just as a white cop in a similar situation would be. In his column, Jones proposes that “it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.” Well, if we follow that thought to its logical end, we must surely conclude that the victim was explicitly targeted because he was black, and that the cops are therefore guilty of discrimination. And if that’s the case, then why not charge them as such? Naturally, we would not want a situation in which the race of the cop does not matter except for the purposes of his punishment.

 

The second cuts in the opposite direction. If, as the Times’s McGrady submits, our “problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people more than of interpersonal racism,” then the cops in this case must be victims, too. And if the cops in this case are victims, too, they must surely be treated leniently by the courts. The purpose of talking about “entrenched cultures” is to diffuse some of the responsibility for specific malfeasance. It would be mightily unfair, would it not, to identify a grand, all-encompassing, overarching conspiracy behind such malfeasance, and then to treat the patsies who bear proximate responsibility for that malfeasance as if they were its sole architects? And if, indeed, “white supremacy” permeates the culture of American policing rather than just motivating the decisions of independent, individual police officers — if that “white supremacy” is the villain no matter what individual cops might be thinking — then surely we must extend the same forbearance to white police officers who end up in the same situation?

 

To my ears, both of these alternatives sound ridiculous and grotesque. With the notable exception of insanity — a condition that can be applied only to individuals, never to groups — our culture and our laws are built atop the supposition that all men are created equal, and that, irrespective of their immutable characteristics, they are all endowed with the same capacity for love, hate, benevolence, greed, altruism, selfishness, ambition, disinterest, bravery, and cowardice. Once we abandon that principle — as far too many people seem tempted to do — we enter a realm of caveats, conditions, mysticism, pseudoscience, sophistry, and caprice, from which there is no escape, and from which nothing good can ever come.