You Don’t Have to be Perfect for Your Life to Matter
The tools and true believers of the Right, the fascists and Nazis, the magas and the paid apologists, are determined that we all know that victims of violence, particularly state violence, are not innocents. We’ve seen a lot of this in opposition to the protests against police brutality sparked by the murder of George Floyd, from the Right’s longtime reliably racist lapdogs like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and the rest of the network’s Neo-Nazi fun bunch, as well as up-and-coming opportunists like Candace Owens. The usual line is that men like George Floyd do not warrant the pain and anger, and the resulting protests, that their murders provoke. Owens is infamous for calling Floyd a criminal and, while making the weak disclaimer that she doesn’t think he committed crimes warranting his extrajudicial murder on a city street, she stressed that he was a criminal who does not deserve to be mourned. She went on to rant that he does not deserve to be treated like a martyr or a hero, ignoring the definitions of both words, as well as the reality of what people are actually doing and saying. The public is not calling Floyd a hero or a martyr. No one has, so far as I’ve heard, other than the Right’s hate-mongers, insisting in furious tizzies against him being treated as such. His friends and family said some very nice things about him in interviews, in public statements, and at his funeral, because that’s what friends and families do when someone close to them is killed. As usual, the Right is swinging at windmills and wilfully missing the point.
George Floyd, to continue using him as an example, was a victim of police violence. His murder was an end result of systemic racism. That is, and should be, the beginning and end of the discussion. Who he was, whatever mistakes he might have made, the way he lived his life, are not matters of consequence in discussion of his murder. A person was murdered. He should not have been.
They did the same when Rayshard Brooks was shot in the back and murdered by police. He fell asleep drunk at a drive-through, he reportedly took an officer’s taser and attempted to flee when they made their move to arrest him. Brooks had a criminal history. He did not cooperate with his arrestors, perhaps fearful from having seen what happened to Floyd when he cooperated fully with police. He did not threaten or endanger anyone’s life. He did nothing to warrant extrajudicial execution.
The Right’s agents of white supremacy go to lengths in digging through victims’ pasts, dredging up transgressions and bleating away about them, beating the drum to convince their followers that the murders were not crimes and that the victims’ deaths were justified. They pick apart the histories, omit pertinent details, throw in toxicology reports and hypotheses on the victims’ thoughts and intentions, embellish the significance of their actions, to promote a narrative by which, even if what the victim was doing at the time of their murder was not at all an offense deserving of death, the victim is depicted as a criminal whose death is no great loss. Nothing to get worked up about. It’s a narrative which comes right to the point, and sometimes goes right for it, of saying that because of a person’s past actions and worse potential future actions, they deserved to die in the present. Forget that they were doing nothing so bad in the present; a characterization based on the worst moments of their pasts and groundless prognostications of their futures, determines that they had it coming. It’s a narrative which says that unless a person is perfect, their right to live is tenuous at best.
We are all flawed humans. We do not all deserve to die. No one should have to be perfect for their lives to have value. No one should have to be a hero or a saint to earn the right to not be murdered.
The Right’s babble-warfare army attempts to shield their racism with a stance of opposition to criminality. This, first, wilfully ignores the disproportionate criminalization and systemic police persecution of people of color, especially black men, without cause. Second, it is a stance belied by the fact of their silence when it comes to speaking for the irrefutably innocent. If what they cared about was law and justice, they’d be screaming with indignation against police corruption and brutality, rather than defending cops who killed a person that caught a minor drug charge years ago or was busted for shoplifting as a teenager.
The Right’s trolls claim it’s never a matter of race but individual character. They say that instead of wasting breath and time on “bad” people, activists should focus on the “good” ones. They insist that the Left is not championing the right people.
But if the Right wants heroes and saints and innocents to represent the movement against racist violence and oppression, it’s not as though there are none to choose from. The police have killed plenty such people.
Breonna Taylor was an EMT. By virtue of that job, she was a hard-working, life-saving professional. She was shot to death in her bed because the Louisville police were too fucking stupid to go to the correct address, and too malicious, callous, and cowardly to show discrection and refrain from firing more than twenty bullets into a home. Police murdered a hero. Champion her.
Elijah McClain was an anemic massage therapist who played the violin for lonely kittens at an animal shelter. He was, by every account I’ve seen, a sweet, kind, and gentle man. Sure, he never forced anyone to convert to a foreign religion or did magic tricks, so far as I know, but his behavior otherwise sounds pretty saintly. He was restrained, choked, and beaten by police, then injected with a dose of ketamine that would have dropped a man more than twice his size, causing him to suffer a heart attack, and die days later. Police murdered a saint. Champion him.
Aiyana Taylor was a seven year old girl. She was asleep on the couch with her grandmother when police fired a flashbang grenade into their home, setting aflame the blanket Aiyana was sleeping under, and then a SWAT cop shot her in the head. She was a child who’d done nothing wrong and hadn’t even had a life yet. Police murdered an innocent. Champion her.
If there were any honesty and morality among the Right, they’d be championing these people themselves. They don’t, because they do not care, and it does not serve their agenda. They either avoid discussion entirely of the unequivocally good and the innocent that are killed, or they jump through more semantic hoops to justify murder at the hands of police. If there’s literally nothing with which they can smear a victim, then it’s all defenses and excuses for the cops. Being a police officer is such a hard job. Everyone makes mistakes. No sympathy or consideration for whether the victim had a difficult life, let alone whether the actions of police were a contributing hardship in their life. No apparent appreciation of the irony that they’ll callously write off a murdered person as a criminal because of some petty charge in their past, but argue that cops deserve forgiveness and understanding when they make the mistake of killing someone.
It’s growing more tiring, stating the obvious in calling out that these people are simply racists and hypocrites. It would save time and trouble if they’d simply admit it and we could be rid of them all. To continue behaving as though they deserve any platform and are capable of honest discussion and debate is a doomed fantasy. They’re bigoted scum. Any pretensions of nuance beyond that are lies and window dressing.