Black Lives Matter: The Right Side of History

by Burr Deming

My conservative friend needs to reconsider Black Lives Matter.

It was a chilly, drizzly Sunday morning.
I was not attending worship services. Not this Sunday.
Not after the cancellation of our contemporary service.

For a few years, we had maintained two services.
The traditional service seemed to satisfy older members.
The contemporary service was not truly contemporary, but it was a step.

I had drifted away from the traditional service.
I found the traditions a little silly, one more barrier between ordinary folks and our creator.

The Elizabethan English, with it’s mandatory Thee and Thou substitutions for modern words, the songs from past ages:

Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art

It was not entirely indecipherable.

C.S. Lewis had written his memorable fictional senior demon’s advice to an underling. If the senior demon could get a junior demon to redirect worship toward a mental image or even a location, it would be a minor subversion that could lead to bigger things. The senior demon wrote fondly of an earlier subversion, as a devout soul imagined God as residing in the upper, forward rafters of the sanctuary. Soon he had her worshiping the rafters themselves.

Senior wanted junior malignant to avoid the spiritual antidote. If the devout subject were to direct prayer not as I imagine you, but as you really are the underworld battle for that soul would be lost, at least until the next engagement.

So, instead of “naught be all else to me, save that Thou art,” why not simply say: I want to worship you as you truly are, not according to my flawed imagination? Would not that fictional subversion of worship be more directly defeated by clarity? Could we not put away our decoder rings and simply worship?

There seemed to me to be dozens of moments, directed chants, overly announced rites, stop and go music, that were disruptions, interruptions of a sort of spiritual flow. I wanted a simpler connection. And I felt that others did as well.

But the leadership of the church asked for a leap of faith. Attendance had declined, and a certain dynamic might be re-established if we combined services into a greater filling of pews.

I had committed to transporting a couple of young people and I wanted to keep my promise as long as I was needed. Another congregant could take them back that morning. I dropped off my passengers. They waved as I headed away. The next week would be devoted to finding a new spiritual home.

Ahead of me, in the light rain, I saw the green light change to red. The driver of the pickup truck did not seem to notice. He drifted into the intersection. The collision was dramatic.

The next several minutes were spent running back and forth between vehicles. I pulled the young woman from behind the wheel. She seemed shaken up but uninjured. The middle-aged black man in the pickup did not seem to be injured. His words were slurred and he had trouble understanding me as I asked if he could lie down.

Someone yelled from a car. I told her to call for help. Police and an ambulance. Other drivers stopped. I directed help to both drivers and got someone to guide traffic around the accident.

Then the police came, a single young white cop. The woman did not want medical attention. The officer got an ambulance to the pickup, helping emergency people talk with the driver.

Then he interviewed the only witness. Me.

It was a quick interview. It was easy to see who was at fault. I told him the black driver was clearly under the influence. He shouldn’t have been driving that morning.

The officer got the car started and told the woman he would follow her home, a block or so away. As the pickup was towed and the debris was cleared, the young officer escorted participants to their cars. I was last.

He thanked me for temporarily taking charge. I asked about the pickup driver. Was he okay? It was hard to tell through the alcoholic haziness.

No, the officer said, he had seen that sort of thing before. The man had not been drinking, and it was not a drug-induced stupor. The man has been overtaken by a medical condition. He had gone into a sudden diabetic coma. It may have been his first.

After walking me to my car, he was gone, getting the young woman back to her family.

It was one of my better moments with police over my adult life. In almost all cases police have behaved pretty much as you might expect from watching cops-in-action shows. In a few cases, they have gone a little beyond compassion and understanding. In a couple of cases, not so much. Not a bad series of encounters overall, considering my advanced years.

It is typical of the experience of most Americans.

Tom Zebra is an exception. He has become an internet personality, recording pretty much every encounter he has with police in and around Los Angeles.

In one contentious interview an unnamed police lieutenant in Hawthorne, CA, makes an obvious admission.

I admit that there are cops who do things wrong.

But he follows up with a view most Americans find compelling. When you take a large population of almost anybody, you will find some small number of outliers, exceptions to a general rule.

How many cops here in the United States? There’s what … I don’t know … five hundred thousand of us? Of course, you’re gonna get a bad apple here and there.

But the rule itself should not be disregarded.

Let me tell you this:

My firm opinion is 99.999% of the cops are hard-working men and women who do a good solid job and follow the law.

Street Interview: Hawthorne, CA, May 30, 2016

The interview was antagonistic, with both participants quite willing to interrupt. But I was impressed. Both seemed interested in listening to arguments with which they profoundly disagreed. The police lieutenant seemed to hold up his end pretty well, and the encounter looked like it was fairly presented by the interviewer.

The 99.999% statement by the police officer was hyperbole, but let’s not lose his point: that the overwhelming majority of law enforcement is fair.

And it seems representative of the view of my conservative friend Darrell.

We, as Americans, already have long agreed that the rare instances of illegal and unwarranted police brutality should be swiftly punished through legal means. What then are these “protesters” trying to accomplish?

Darrell Michaels, August 5, 2020

The logical flow can be found floating around a number of issues. If racism is a vanishingly small part of American life, those who campaign against racism must have some other motivation. So racism must be nothing but a rhetorical cudgel, a case of name-calling with pretty much nothing behind it.

And if the number of malevolent, unfair, police actions are so microscopically tiny as to be almost non-existent…

99.999% of the cops … do a good solid job and follow the law.

…then any movement against police misconduct must be a subterfuge.

This is how my friend puts it.

Surely this is about much more than fighting racism. 95% of America already agrees with that stance. Look beyond the surface of BLM’s website and you will find what this is really all about.

August 5, 2020

And you can certainly find excesses in rhetoric and action with which to characterize the movement, the fraudulent movement against what, for the most part, does not exist.

As in any argument, the temptation is to accept, uncritically, testimony from those who will make up such incidents. Occasionally, even religious leaders are quite willing to bear false witness against those with whom they disagree, especially if those who embrace God believe they are lying in service to the Lord.

But suppose the incidence of racial bias among police was not one one hundredth of one percent? A recent poll conducted by Morning Consult was startling. An overwhelming majority, 64%, of police officers had an unfavorable opinion of white supremacists. Speaks well of them. And it corresponds to what most folks experience.

But 23% of police officers had positive feelings about white supremacists. That would be nearly one out of four police officers, officers a reasonable member of a racial minority would be wise to avoid at all costs.

Was the poll accurate? I have my doubts. The police composed a small sub-sample of the entire poll. And the raw numbers were small, a total of 250 police officers which were then broken down into sub-groups.

But if for the sake of argument, we accept that only one out of six officers have toxic views toward minorities, that would make each encounter for a black person pretty much a hopefully non-lethal game of Russian roulette.

One out of ten, perhaps? I have had more than ten encounters with police over my long life. I do not feel comfortable with the thought that each of my children, each grandchild, would, over a lifetime, likely run into at least one officer who will regard my loved one as less than an equal, deserving member of humanity.

And if, as in Ferguson, MO, some small municipality depends on police fines for its budget, the temptation among city managers will be great to pressure the best to behave as do the worst.

Black families do not, cannot, rely on statistical analysis. Parents of black children know to administer “the talk.” Our little ones must be taught early on that tragic consequences can come from an encounter with a malevolent officer, or with even a normally friendly officer having an abnormally bad day. Truly good officers provide safety, but there is no way to tell. No-one wears a badge that says “I’m one of the many good ones.” A portion of each of our periodic extended-family gatherings usually includes the latest advice on what routes a black traveler may safely choose to avoid harassment and danger. After all, officers do occasionally move from one police community to another.

I’m a support-your-local-police kind of guy, and also a BLM kind of guy. I don’t see a contradiction.

Support your police because the overwhelming majority deserve our thanks and support. And support Black Lives Matter because, to a dangerous few, those lives do not matter enough.

For most Americans, the choice became clear, not with a dispassionate examination of the evidence. They became convinced as they watched a police officer casually stare into a video shot, hands in pockets, demonstrating his complete control, ignoring the pleas of bystanders, with no apparent emotion, demonstrating the effortless ease with which he could turn a living human being into a lifeless corpse.

Power on camera for all to see.

I have known my conservative friend for many years. Our connection began in debate and continued by the internet. Although we have never met, the bond has grown. He was there with words of sympathy during a critical family illness. He offered understanding and reassurance in a frightening time as we lost contact with our young Marine during and after an attack on his base in Afghanistan.

And I believe him when he says this:

We, as Americans, already have long agreed with the sentiment that black lives truly do matter.

August 5, 2020

This qualifies him, it really does, for full membership in Black Lives Matter. Membership does not exempt him from the obligation he will feel to criticize excess within the movement. When violence or destruction or excessive rhetoric occurs, he can and should condemn it. As did the young man in this video, shouting angrily.

There is a huge separation from the antagonizers and the protestors.

The angry young man defines just what that difference is:

They are giving a speech about Black Lives and you want to destroy about black lives.

Channel 4 News, August 4, 2020

You may want to follow another example, as a pro-Black Lives Matter blogger simply tells the truth:

A really good way to protest is peacefully, persistently, and in huge numbers. Over and over. And that’s what’s been happening in Portland. That is the story here, or would be, if the sanctimonious late shift could be persuaded to confine their fireworks to Mommy’s trash can.

Murr Brewster, July 29, 2020

She puts that pretty well, actually.

The political world is not divided between those who oppose injustice and those who support it.

Very few people are comfortable with injustice, my friend. We simply deal with it differently. When confronted with wrong, some will fight for what is right. Some of those will likely veer into wrong directions. Others will deny that there is anything to fight. They may deny that injustice happens. They may declare injustice actually to be just.

You may want to devote your considerable talents to the right side of history.
The lives of some folks, sometimes, too often, do not matter enough to those who happen to hold those vulnerable lives in their hands, or in their arms, or under their knees.

Some future C.S. Lewis, writing about inner demons, will need to know which choice you made.

Many thanks to our friend Burr Deming of Fair and Unbalanced.

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