Resolve of the Righteous: What to Do Once the Protests are Past
It’s called a narrative frame.
For over two hundred years, the narrative frame of America has been that of men imbued with a sense of manifest destiny, visionaries tired of British subjugation who, borrowing from everyone from the British to the ancient Greeks, forged a system of governance for all men to realize their full potential.
Narrative frames tend to leave out a lot of pertinent information. Simple and clean frames tend to last longer. The frame exists to promote the foundation of control, of maintaining the fragile status quo, or to foment a change from the previous frame.
The attempt to reframe a long held narrative is difficult.
The easiest part is to break down the inconsistencies within the current frame. These founding fathers intentionally prohibited women from having a voice. They were slaveholders so their vision that “all men are created equal” was bullshit. The frame long held is a hypocrisy.
Once the old frame has been shredded, rebuilding a new one is where the hard work comes in. We’ve just spent energy debunking the narrative handed down for generations but without a replacement that can inspire forward momentum, one that foments a hope for the future, the replacement fails.
Full disclosure: I don’t participate in protests. This is not because I don’t believe in many of the causes or do not fully support the idea of protest as a valid form of political expression. I’ve done my fair share of on-the-street, sign-carrying, slogan-yelling protest. And I’ve too often been brutally disappointed in the fact that the less specific the demand, the more pointless it feels. I don’t participate because they often feel like bad theatre with no point.
Perhaps I’m too pragmatic with political stuff these days but “End Racism” and “Abolish the Police” aren’t really solid plans on which to hang a protest designed for change. The country isn’t going to abolish their police forces any more than we’d just get rid of the military. And given that every human being since the beginning of recorded history uses race to create tribal divisions, racism is in our DNA. Might as well have a worldwide protest against thumbs or penises (Oh. Wait. They’ve had the protest against penises...)
Lots of gauzy concepts like acknowledging your privilege without the inevitable follow-up that after you acknowledge it you have to be willing to give it up. In this case, privilege is power and control, and that’s like demanding Jeff Bezos just feel so shitty about himself that he hands his almost trillion dollars to poor people and resigns himself to a minimum wage job in a post office. Sounds good but it simply is never going to happen.
While rewriting the narrative frame needs to be simple and easy to digest by eighth graders, it needs to be feasible or there is no room for hope. It also needs to be free of too much inaccuracy or it, like the Founding Fathers myth, will be taken apart just as quickly.
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Beginning with the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1992, the cracks of the national narrative were seen and heard. It wasn’t the sight of four white police officers cracking the skull of a black man that signaled the fracture. It was that we saw it, raw footage, and the legal system in place refused to punish the true criminals. It was the verdict that set the tinder ablaze.
The quick follow up was the acquittal of OJ Simpson. Again, we saw it play out in real time on our televisions. Almost as if the justice system was trying to take back the injustice of King’s lynch mob in blue, we watched a black man who committed a vicious double murder walk free. Quid pro quo.
Then, like dominos falling, one after the other, in real time and with companion film, we saw Michael Brown killed. And Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. A dozen more. Those rewriting the narrative took to academia, took to framing the country’s story with the murders by police at the fore. This was not about the system’s failing or about the nuts and bolts of true citizen oversight over the various police forces. This wasn’t about culture or class or poverty. This was about race.
While race is certainly an ingredient, the stew is comprised of far more. It is about race. It is also about culture and the tribal need to either assimilate or separate. It’s about class, injustice, and a hard-baked human requirement to find Others to push back against to feel forward momentum.
But we aren’t prepared for complexity. We need simplicity in the narrative. So, like the early authors of Christianity needed to convince the crowd of their need for God, bigotry became the original sin of America. Unlike the concept of Christian original sin, this sin has no Savior whose sacrifice washes us clean of it. The narrative insists that if you’re white, you’re guilty and in perpetuity. It isn’t enough to avoid your biases and racist practice, you have to be anti-racist and even then never free from the debt.
It’s a solid narrative frame. Worked for religion for thousands of years.
Like I said, I’m more pragmatic as I get older. The plan to end racism is passion-inducing but not actually possible. Every person born finds a way to prejudge others based on tribalism. I don’t march in protest because no matter my intent,
if I speak out I’m taking up the room for black voices,
if I am silent, I’m complicit, and
if I ask what organizers think I should do, I’m asking for their emotional labor.
Solid frame. It’s like a maze from which there is never an exit. Like being black in the United States.
My protest sign wouldn’t make for a good chant or be funny enough for a Twitter moment. Given the circumstances of police killing approximately 1,500 people last year (most white but of a vastly unequal proportion of the black community) the pragmatic solution is not to abolish police, fuck police, kill police, or fire all the racist police. My sign would say:
“For George Floyd
Proper Training for Police
Citizen Oversight with Real Authority
Accountability Guaranteed by Special Prosecutors Who Do Not Work with the Accused”
Not very sexy.
That’s the thing about change. Rewriting the narrative frame is a challenge but genuine, on-the-ground, measurable progress is really quite dull. And slow. It is methodical and requires lots of data collection.
The goal isn’t eliminating racism because that’s a fantasy of Tolkien proportions. The goal is to create systems that prevent racists (and angry politicians) from benefiting from their worst efforts. The goal is to make it nearly impossible for a brutal cop to ever be put on the street and, if one manages to squeeze through, holds him or her accountable for the crimes he or she commits while on the job of keeping the peace.
I hope these historic protests give us a new narrative frame. I hope, instead of laced with rage and hurt, it is scented with optimism and inclusion. I have nothing but respect for the Grand Dreamers and every black person out on the streets of cities across the globe are grand and courageous and inspiring.
I also hope that once the narrative has shifted, the people who can focus on legislative change, scientific methods of de-escalation training, experts on how to apply the law justly and effectively for every citizen get to work doing the slow, methodical stuff.
It isn’t a Grand Dream but even a pragmatic dream is worth the effort.
