::It does seem wrong to me, though, that the worst form of racist violence is defined so centrally by individual motivations when we know that racist violence works through structures, through complicity, and through the deniability afforded by our obsession with individual motivations.::
To really mangle a quote, "It is nearly impossible for people to see injustice when their well-being requires their denial of its existence."
I KNOW there's a quote where this is said a lot better than I just did! I just can't find it....
This rather perfectly ties into a YouTube series I'm watching, "COPAGANDA" by television critic Skip Intro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhDawfCLHo&list=PL2ac8vr2QyTdlWwd8OQIc1it6bAfMGPPC ). In the series he talks about how television has traditionally lionized the police as "a thin blue line" between decent people (or if we're being honest, Middle-Income White viewers!) and the hordes of (usually not-White and certainly not Middle-Income!) rabble that would burn everything to the ground. Whenever you see Bad Cops, they're always presented as "Bad", as in "outside the normal protective norm of the GOOD police!". Even shows that want to interrogate what being a "Good Cop" means tend to fall back on the tropes of the morally upright/incredibly driven Good Cop versus the corrupt/bigoted/lazy and incompetent Bad Cop who gives the force a bad name.
Contrast that with the cops who used military-grade hardware to remove Occupy Wall Street—a collection of unwashed, smelly, but peaceful protesters who set up a tent city in the Wall Street district as a way to shame Mayor Mike Bloomberg (an outright Billionaire and owner of a media empire as well as a financial, software and data company) and his Capitalist cronies; or the police in Uvalde, TX who courageously, and with no regard for their personal safety in the line of duty...just waited outside Robb Elementary School while eighteen-year old shooter Salvador Ramos proceeded to kill nineteen students and two teachers, while wounding seventeen others, before they finally bothered to go in and shoot him dead. This doesn't even cover the victims shot by police for Existing While Black.
How this ties into your piece, Noah, is that cop shows never see corruption, bigotry, laziness or incompetence as systemic—same as those who, when they throw around the term "genocide", tend to look for one person, or at most a group of persons, responsible rather than the system that made them possible. I think this is important because it shows how deep the desire to blame an individual over a system goes....
I just mean legally, right? Like discrimination is a broad category that takes a lot of forms, but a hate crime is a specific act defined by the perpetrator's state of mind, specifically their "hate-of-mind," and results in a different (harsher) set of penalties -- so isn't "genocide" as defined by international treaty or court a population-level version of "hate crime"?
One interesting thing about legal penalty is that it takes into account both actions and intent: so "attempted murder" is punished more lightly than "murder" just because the would-be murderer failed to pull it off -- the intent was there but the deed wasn't done; on the other hand you have convictions for things like "manslaughter" and "negligent homocide" where the person isn't accused of trying to kill someone, but punished because they did. So the law operates in a weird space between action and intent on these things, right? And Genocide is closest to "hate crime"?
I think so,yes. though there's a question of whether criminal prosecution is the best intervention in discrimination, and/or about whether it's the best frame for thinking about how to combat bigotry, I guess.
Yes, I was going to ask the follow-up question, "whatever criteria we use for 'genocide' what happens once we determine that something qualifies?"
On one hand there are the purely academic uses (tracing different forms of genocide over time, tracking what circumstances make genocide more or less likely).
But if the goal is to prevent or punish genocide the international legal and diplomatic structures have limited power.
I think one reason to think of "genocide" as being like a hate crime (as Amy says) is that is a category for which there is a slightly higher chance of international action.
I think the problem is that it's just extremely unlikely you'll have prosecutions of people in Israel. So then, if you're not using it in a criminal justice context, what is the purpose of the term and the definition? and does a criminal justice focused definition help advance that purpose or not?
That is the question, and I don't have a good answer.
As we're talking about it, however, another thought occurs to me. The shift in talking about discrimination as something that doesn't require intent ("Racism Without Racists"?) has been accompanied by a rhetorical attempt to normalize it conceptually -- to say that we shouldn't think about racism as something horrible and beyond the pale, but as a spectrum of behavior which is common and which, for things on the lower end of the spectrum, we should be able to talk about without too much acrimony.
That summary is, of course, an oversimplification, and you could correctly quibble with everything I wrote, but I do think those two moves are connected, and that it's worth asking whether that's the right model to use for talking about genocide (it might be; I'm still trying to think this through).
Another clear sighted, impartial discussion.
The apartheid and genocide architecture has been in place for 75 years. The cumulation of those efforts are now coming to fruition, so it seems.
::It does seem wrong to me, though, that the worst form of racist violence is defined so centrally by individual motivations when we know that racist violence works through structures, through complicity, and through the deniability afforded by our obsession with individual motivations.::
To really mangle a quote, "It is nearly impossible for people to see injustice when their well-being requires their denial of its existence."
I KNOW there's a quote where this is said a lot better than I just did! I just can't find it....
This rather perfectly ties into a YouTube series I'm watching, "COPAGANDA" by television critic Skip Intro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhDawfCLHo&list=PL2ac8vr2QyTdlWwd8OQIc1it6bAfMGPPC ). In the series he talks about how television has traditionally lionized the police as "a thin blue line" between decent people (or if we're being honest, Middle-Income White viewers!) and the hordes of (usually not-White and certainly not Middle-Income!) rabble that would burn everything to the ground. Whenever you see Bad Cops, they're always presented as "Bad", as in "outside the normal protective norm of the GOOD police!". Even shows that want to interrogate what being a "Good Cop" means tend to fall back on the tropes of the morally upright/incredibly driven Good Cop versus the corrupt/bigoted/lazy and incompetent Bad Cop who gives the force a bad name.
Contrast that with the cops who used military-grade hardware to remove Occupy Wall Street—a collection of unwashed, smelly, but peaceful protesters who set up a tent city in the Wall Street district as a way to shame Mayor Mike Bloomberg (an outright Billionaire and owner of a media empire as well as a financial, software and data company) and his Capitalist cronies; or the police in Uvalde, TX who courageously, and with no regard for their personal safety in the line of duty...just waited outside Robb Elementary School while eighteen-year old shooter Salvador Ramos proceeded to kill nineteen students and two teachers, while wounding seventeen others, before they finally bothered to go in and shoot him dead. This doesn't even cover the victims shot by police for Existing While Black.
How this ties into your piece, Noah, is that cop shows never see corruption, bigotry, laziness or incompetence as systemic—same as those who, when they throw around the term "genocide", tend to look for one person, or at most a group of persons, responsible rather than the system that made them possible. I think this is important because it shows how deep the desire to blame an individual over a system goes....
Wouldn’t genocide be more analogous to “hate crime” than to “discrimination”?
I think hate crimes are also a form of discrimination?
I just mean legally, right? Like discrimination is a broad category that takes a lot of forms, but a hate crime is a specific act defined by the perpetrator's state of mind, specifically their "hate-of-mind," and results in a different (harsher) set of penalties -- so isn't "genocide" as defined by international treaty or court a population-level version of "hate crime"?
One interesting thing about legal penalty is that it takes into account both actions and intent: so "attempted murder" is punished more lightly than "murder" just because the would-be murderer failed to pull it off -- the intent was there but the deed wasn't done; on the other hand you have convictions for things like "manslaughter" and "negligent homocide" where the person isn't accused of trying to kill someone, but punished because they did. So the law operates in a weird space between action and intent on these things, right? And Genocide is closest to "hate crime"?
I think so,yes. though there's a question of whether criminal prosecution is the best intervention in discrimination, and/or about whether it's the best frame for thinking about how to combat bigotry, I guess.
Yes, I was going to ask the follow-up question, "whatever criteria we use for 'genocide' what happens once we determine that something qualifies?"
On one hand there are the purely academic uses (tracing different forms of genocide over time, tracking what circumstances make genocide more or less likely).
But if the goal is to prevent or punish genocide the international legal and diplomatic structures have limited power.
I think one reason to think of "genocide" as being like a hate crime (as Amy says) is that is a category for which there is a slightly higher chance of international action.
I think the problem is that it's just extremely unlikely you'll have prosecutions of people in Israel. So then, if you're not using it in a criminal justice context, what is the purpose of the term and the definition? and does a criminal justice focused definition help advance that purpose or not?
That is the question, and I don't have a good answer.
As we're talking about it, however, another thought occurs to me. The shift in talking about discrimination as something that doesn't require intent ("Racism Without Racists"?) has been accompanied by a rhetorical attempt to normalize it conceptually -- to say that we shouldn't think about racism as something horrible and beyond the pale, but as a spectrum of behavior which is common and which, for things on the lower end of the spectrum, we should be able to talk about without too much acrimony.
That summary is, of course, an oversimplification, and you could correctly quibble with everything I wrote, but I do think those two moves are connected, and that it's worth asking whether that's the right model to use for talking about genocide (it might be; I'm still trying to think this through).
brilliant. And much to think about. Thank you again.