Karnythia sort of beat me to this, but I found two very interesting news items yesterday. One comes from James Fallows’ blog on The Atlantic, courtesy of an anonymous reader:
You all (and by you all I mean whites, yes I’m black) let this happen because the people being hurt by police brutality were mainly poor, black and brown, and in many cases, immigrants. It has always been this way.
…
The most frustrating thing for me in the last 24 hours after seeing the footage from UC Davis is knowing that if it was a group of people like me protesting there wouldn’t be the same outrage. It’s not every day you get told over and over again you don’t matter. It’s depressing
Do go read the whole letter, as the reader makes a salient point about how the military industrial complex has influenced our police forces.
The second item came from Naomi Wolf, via Twitter:
well I am very sad to say we do have our first death in the US caused by police violence and it is a fetal death:… http://fb.me/VQ5K50OT
…our… first… death?
Later, Wolf wrote that she meant “in these protests,” and that “I wish you give me or anyone the benefit of the doubt, it was an error.” Fine, but you know, I’m so very, very sick of white people fucking up and then immediately going on the defensive. What Wolf doesn’t realize is that in an issue so absolutely racialized as police brutality, a mistake like this one is not neutral. In misspeaking, you support a long, widespread, ruthless history of suppressing knowledge of violence against communities of color. Anyone with any sense of justice would be more disturbed by the damage such a comment can cause than by the backlash they received. Why was her first and only instinct to snap at people instead of to apologize?
Let me put it another way (and I’m not the first person to make this analogy): let’s say I accidently slam a door on someone’s fingers and, surprised and in pain, they bark out something I perceive as mean. Even if I later grumble to myself about how they shouldn’t have hurt my feelings, if I respect them as human beings, my first instinct is going to be to tell them I’m sorry and get them some ice.
H/T Brown Femi Power.
Weird thing is, it isn’t even the first white death to police brutality recently. If you read theagitator.com there are deaths from police raids almost every week. And at least every other month the thing the person did wrong was live next to a suspected drug dealer and be unlucky enough to have the cops put the wrong address down on the warrant.
White people aren’t nearly as privileged as some people may think.
Remember when I said I’d had experience running from cops in 3 different cities? One of the times it happened in Cambridge was because a local kid about college age got picked up by the cops late one night there because he’d gotten drunk, pissed off at someone and chucked a rock through a window. They’d picked him up for a few such instances previously. The cops tossed him into the back of a police wagon and a couple of the cops went in there with him. According to witnesses the wagon rocked back and forth for quite a bit. Then the cops got out and drove to the precinct house. The cops put him in a cell. He was denied medical help. Nine hours later he was found dead in that cell.
The law enforcement/justice system ran an autopsy but didn’t want to permit the family to do one. Eventually they had to. The young man had been beaten to death, and it would have been pretty obvious that he needed medical attention as soon as he got to the station if not before. The cops involved were put on paid leave.
That got the local Cambridge citizenry stirred up. I went to a meeting called by concerned citizens. A number of the local citizens stood up and spoke. One thing that particularly raised their ire (besides the death, obviously) was the paid leave situation – numerous people said “I wouldn’t be suspended with pay if I’d done that, I’d have gotten fired and be sitting in jail.” Some fool, likely a Harvard student, stood up and started in on telling people that this was due to the evils of capitalism and that they needed to vote Communist (or Socialist, I forget now). He got booed of the stage and almost got assaulted. One of the locals helping to run the meeting announced that political discussions were going to be discouraged, which was obvious to me when I walked in. They were not interested in being co-opted by the local radicals.
I got some suspicious glances when I walked in, what with the long hair and all. The crowd was mostly working-class people. I told people I wasn’t there to talk but just to observe and go along with their ideas. A rally/march on Cambridge police HQ was planned. I walked around offering technical assistance about what to do when the cops came down on them. I was pretty much told that this was not necessary, it was going to be a peaceful march and the cops wouldn’t beat up people like them.
Ha.
Turns out the cops were all too happy to whack people around and tear gas them regardless of age, heritage or local address. Mr. and Mrs. Middle America had never been tear-gassed or arrested or beaten before. That little march opened up a few eyes about what the student demonstrators were going through. Unlike the young punks like me these folks couldn’t outrun the cops.
At the end of the day the kid was still dead and the cops were on paid leave. I can’t remember now what the end result was. Doubtless it was caught up in the courts for years. But a lot of people found out that you don’t have to be black or a student to get beat up by cops.
you don’t have to be black or a student to get beat up by cops
But it sure helps! That’s kind of the point, RonF.
As for Wolf, she’s been a self-absorbed asshole for some time now. I don’t at all believe she “misspoke”; she probably did, in fact, not think in the slightest about any other victims of police brutality, and surprise, when called on it instead of doing the decent thing and saying “my bad, I should have been clear I meant the protests, sorry”, she goes into full How Dare You Suggest I Am Wrong mode. Her 15 minutes were up a long time ago.
Wolf lost credibility for me the moment she held up Bhutan as an alternative model. The fact that she thinks she’s somehow earned a little badge that allows her to be wrong as much as she wants without getting criticised for it is new but not surprising.
Not only is this not the first death from police violence, nor even the first white death, it’s probably not even the first fetal death! I mean I don’t have any specific examples but I find it hard to believe nobody’s pregnancy has ever been damaged by police action before.
I guess it might just be the first white fetal death.
Hugh:
It’s certainly not. Unless you mean “the first white fetal death having to do with the Occupy movement.” In which case I don’t know.
Grace
I’m inclined to give =anyone= using Twitter to get news out a lot of benefit of doubt — it’s an extremely limited medium and Naomi Wolf has no history of being an asshat.
Let’s reserve horizontal violence for people who deserve it …
I love how criticism is only labeled “horizontal violence” when it’s leveled at white folks.
Come on, it’s implicit this isn’t the first death given the context. And how much can you get in a tweet – 140 letters? I couldn’t even get
People, are we actually suggesting that it’s okay to distort the truth just because of space limitations? Is this what we’re doing? Are we doing this now? Because we can do better.
Jesus. Criticism ≠ violence.
Also, if you’re going to argue that she just couldn’t possibly fit “in OWS” or something to that effect into her tweet, “well I am very sad to say” strikes me as a rather inefficient use of space (and trust me, anyone who’s written for magazines has practice in cutting stuff to fit length constraints). I really doubt she was sitting there scratching her head and going, “how can I fit all this in!?”
Plus, and I think Julie makes this point quite well in her post – it’s not just that she neglected to qualify her statement. That could have been a genuine mistake. It’s that her response to the mistake being pointed out wasn’t “I’m sorry, you’re right, it was an stupid mistake and I regret it”, or something to that effect. It was “Stop pointing out my errors! I’m the victim here!”.
People make mistakes all the time, and it’s very easy to focus on one issue and in the process make problematic statements about another. But the fact that these mistakes are easy is exactly why it shouldn’t be a problem to own up to them and clarify one’s intent.
FurryCatHerder: sorry, what? It’s OK to say dumb shit if you’re too lazy to check stuff you read on Twitter? Criticizing Wolf for being wrong is “horizontal violence” but Wolf lashing out rather than admit she fucked up is perfectly OK?
And yes, Wolf absolutely has a long and ongoing pattern of being an asshat.
I’m trying to read Naomi Wolf’s comments in context before I form an opinion and respond, but no link was provided. Is there any link to either an article quoting the full text, or to the comments themselves?
Okay, I found the whole quotation on her twitter. It’s basically what was relayed in the OP:
Is it reasonable to say, based on that quote, that she is snapping at people?
It’s a stretch to say she’s doing anything but snapping. Seriously, how hard would it have been to stop after the first sentence or to simply add “Sorry if that was not clear” or “My apologies” instead of insinuating that her critics are mean and judgy people?
The belief that you should always be given “the benefit of the doubt” is also a sign of privilege. Because no, if I as a privileged person do something that contributes to the systemic problems of people I am pprivileged over, then they do not have to give me the benefit of the doubt. I have to prove to them that I will try not to do it again and that I will do what I can to minimize the damage.
(Also a asign of privilege: Believing that intent matters more than the actual consequences of your actions.)
I think it’s brilliant that she left a word out of the sentence that she typed in her response. That probably communicates her point much more efficiently than anything she actually typed.
Do you suppose that was intentional, or just serendipity?
Phil @18 – I don’t understand. What word was left out? Is it “would”? Or anything else? If it is “would”, how does that communicate anything?
Yes, I think that the word “would” was left out of the tweet.
As such, are you asking me how leaving out a word while writing a tweet to explain that you did not say what you meant to say in a previous tweet communicates anything? If she did it on purpose, it’s brilliant, but cynical. If she did it by accident, it’s even better, at least as far as the purpose of the 2nd tweet is concerned.
I still don’t see the parallelism between the two omissions. The word “would” is droppable precisely because it’s a purely grammatical function word that does not affect the meaning of the sentence. Her second tweet is poor English, but it means exactly what it says. Leaving out a whole history of institutional violence against minorities is not a typo. Note that I’m not saying that it was in any way deliberate – I’m pretty sure (as most of her critics, here at least, are) – that Wolf’s omission was unintentional, coming from the blissful obliviousness granted by a position of privilege toward the reality of the less privileged. I don’t think how leaving out words to show that she’s a sloppy writer actually defends her against the accusation that she needs to think before she writes.
Here are the two tweets that Naomi Wolf was responding to:
@Jennyjinx:
@itgurl_29:
Neither one brings up “a whole history of institutional violence against minorities,” and while it is certainly true that there is a long history of police violence against minorities, it is not true that police violence=violence against minorities. This thread seems to be attacking Wolf for not talking about minorities in a one-sentence statement where she wasn’t talking about minorities. The people who called her out were calling her out for either her accuracy or her sloppiness.
In this context, is it reasonable to write about Naomi Wolf as if she were getting batshit crazy defensive after being called out for racism when she wasn’t being called out for racism?
Mythago, is a person saying “Fuck you” being a mean and judgy person?
It’s not a genuine mistake. It’s simply not NECESSARY in a Tweet of that type.
Quick: Who here can actually name a single person they know who would both (1) read Wolf’s post and (2) believe that the dead fetus was the first death ever cased by police violence?
Anyone? Anyone?
So when Eytan complains that
I don’t know that I’d use the word “victim” (did she?) but yeah: ignore the context much? Say you made that sort of entirely-normal filtering decision–say that your 140-word tweet about Nazis references the Roma and doesn’t specifically mention the Jews. And I respond with a big FUCK YOU EYTAN!! Would you consider that reasonable? Or would you feel (rightly so!) put upon?
Julie concludes:
Because anyone with any sense of history–and certainly the type of people who presumably give a shit about Naomi Wolf’s tweets–might be expected to grok the context.
After all, police have been killing people as long as there have been police. Do those people without an anti-Wolf axe to grind seriously think “Wolf has deliberately erased, ignored, and forgotten everyone killed by police?” Or even more ridiculous, “Wolf has deliberately ignored the existence of police violence?” Because it’s not like there is ONE person on the “killed” list. People have been getting killed for centuries.
Saying “fuck you” to Wolf implies she’s an uneducated boor. No doubt she got a bit offended.
I don’t particularly care one way or another about Wolf. But the process makes no sense. Maybe it’s unreasonable to ask for the benefit of the doubt when it comes to something esoteric. But “the police have killed people” isn’t esoteric. I learned about it w/r/t the Civil Rights era in middle school, for chrissakes.
First, let me concede that the word “victim” in my paraphrase was perhaps too strong.
Second, if you were to do that, I would feel put upon. If I were in Wolf’s shoes and I got the two tweets cited in @22, I wouldn’t even respond to the second one. But the first one, for all its rudeness, makes a valid point – and if I were using a 140 word medium, I would respond to people’s points, not their tones. Probably most of the criticism – certainly, my criticism – could have been avoided if Wolf just replied to @Jennyjinx with “yes, of course”, without the statement about the benefit of the doubt.
But more basically, she did qualify her original statement. She said ” we do have our first death in the US caused by police violence”. It’s that qualification that is the problem, I think. If it was really a matter of economy, why was it there? Most likely, it was there because Wolf had the recent violence in Syria or Egypt on her mind, and she was trying to draw a parallel there. But it did create the unfortunate impression of negating all the history, in a way that just “we do have our first death cause by police violence” does not.
I have nothing against Wolf – I’ve had very little exposure to her so far. I just feel like she handled this badly. She is a public figure, and one that has clear detractors waiting in the wings, and as such, she should be more careful with her words, not less.
But to be frank here, I’m not that happy with my own participation in this thread, as I feel like by debating this here I’m ending up entrenching myself in a position I wasn’t that invested in to begin with. I feel Wolf screwed up – both in her original tweet and in her response. I also feel that Phil’s linguistic argument in @18 and @20 is silly. Honestly, I’m far more interested in the linguistic side of this discussion than the political one, but I don’t think that this blog is the right place for that.
I think it’s silly too. Correct, but definitely silly.
The only other thing that I have to say is that I think that you’re .