Memory is a thing of convolution and happenstance. The scent of Oud or the taste of dates takes me back to Abu Dhabi. One sip of a Pilsner beer transports me to Berlin, and a bone-chilling wind has me revisit the year I spent in Wisconsin. For me, however—as I suspect for many who make their daily bread with the written word—it is most often something read that starts the fire of remembrance.

A recent Fordham Law Review (2018) article by Reginald Oh is a case in point. Oh ties the legacy of the landmark 1967 Loving vs. Virginia verdict that effectively banned laws prohibiting interracial marriage to contemporary forms of white nationalism. Oh writes,

“Opposition to interracial marriages is opposition to multiracial children based on the fear that the production of multiracial children will lead to the end or ‘genocide’ of a physically distinctive race of white people. At the heart of white backlash toward diversity, multiracialism, and immigration,” he continues, “is a deep-seated anxiety about the destruction of whites as a physically distinct cultural group and the loss of power and privilege such destruction entails.” (p. 2762)

The words above took me back to work I did in the early 2000s, culminating in an article I published in the Journal of Hate Studies in 2005 (“White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics,” 4 (1): 59 – 87). Therein I conceptualized a sector of organized bigotry that focused on (what they saw as) threats to an indivisible biological and cultural “whiteness”—what I call demographic dystopia. At the time I identified opposition to other-than-European immigration as the most significant policy area for white nationalists intent not just on preserving a white racial majority, but in promoting a white ethnostate.

Oh relies on the important, but deeply flawed, work of conservative political scientist Carol Swain (2002), who more-or-less hallucinated a demonstrable uptick in white nationalism being driven by what was even at the time of her study an already decimated policy of affirmative action.[1] Fortunately, Oh also turns to more grounded analysis—such as journalist Donna Minkowitz’s relatively recent piece on white nationalism for The Public Eye (Fall 2017), “Hiding in Plain Sight: An American Renaissance of White Nationalism”—in drawing his conclusions. Specifically, he seems to get it that White Nationalists are at the core of their belief system obsessed with biological purity. Thus for White Nationalists, Oh writes (echoing Minkowitz), “[t]he threat of white genocide not only comes from the ideology of racial integration but from the ideology of gender equality or feminism, especially with respect to reproductive freedom” (p. 2770).

The central obsession of White Nationalism, then, has not much changed since the 1990s when the new group of racist ideological entrepreneurs such as those at American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens made the scene. That is, except concerning the movement’s increasing access to power, highlighted by both the closeness of the Trump administration to White Nationalist (so-called Alt-Right) figures, and even more so by attempts to implement essential elements of the anti-immigrant program. (For more background on the Alt-Right see Spencer Sunshine’s article “Three Pillars of the Alt Right: White Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Misogyny” (December 4, 2017), on the Political Research Associates site.)

In reviewing Oh’s argument about White Nationalism’s ideology of ethnocultural—or probably better said biocultural—purity I was forcibly reminded of the link between this more explicitly racist position and that of the broader anti-immigration movement—a link that Oh does next to nothing to point up.

As I said, memory is a strange thing. What Oh’s reference to “white genocide” brought to mind was a memo written by John Tanton. Tanton is the man most responsible for creating the network of organizations that became the foundation of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement.

Dated October 10, 1986, and known as the WITAN IV memo, this piece of revealing far right ephemera was rescued from oblivion by Devin Burghart and Chuck Tanner at the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR). In an unusually candid moment, Tanton writes, “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, ad do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?” He then goes on to quip: “Can homo contraceptives compete with homo progenitive if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to mover over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”

Even as few individuals have melded White Nationalist ideas to what have now become “mainstream” politics as successfully as Tanton, there are few more succinct expressions of the driving ideology of the racist right than his words above. The point he makes, however, is not just about biological purity—by implication, it’s about women’s rights and reproductive freedom. That includes, as Oh points out, the freedom of choice of intimate partners, bus also the decision to delay, titrate, or avoid having children.

That is, the fears of the White Nationalists may be explicitly racist, but they are not exclusively racial. They have a cultural component that excludes feminists, LGBTQI folk, liberals, leftists, Muslims and Jews from the ranks of “real” whiteness. Like the opposition to immigration, these exclusions allow them to form alliances with the religious right and other nominal conservatives, fomenting resentment against a demonized conspiracy of culture wreckers.

[1] Swain’s new book (with Steve Feazel) has the hyperbolic title Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds (Christian Faith Publishing, 2016). It features a foreword by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQI lobbying group considered to be a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Like so much in this book, it is the contrast between the comic and the tragic, the sacred and the abundantly profane, that penetrates our consciousness like one of the Iraqi EFP’s (Explosively Formed Penetrators) the author describes, or like a sergeant major through BS. Reading works of this type, military memories and the like is part of my job. I have read dozens of them, from the classics to the offbeat and iconoclastic and can say that Johnson has accomplished something special.

There is no lack of literature that takes us inside the world of soldiers at war. From Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel which paints a picture of trench warfare in World War I as sublime to Piers Platt’s Combat and Other Shenanigans which is subtitled Tales of the Absurd from a Deployment to Iraq. Five Wars delivers the quiet pathos of too-wise children’s drawings alongside the frenetic summary of the Bosnian peacekeeping mission with endless repetitions of the “You gotta keep ‘em separated” lyric from the Offspring’s song “Come Out and Play.” It gives us the perennial soldier’s game of dropping the perfect quote from a hit movie into conversation—as in the case of the memorable Staff Sergeant Hudgeons who would invariably end his daily briefing on the insurgents in the area with, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

There is, however, another layer to this book, in my mind the most important. Col. Johnson delves into the aftermath of war. At this point, PTSD has become something akin to a cliche in American culture, all-too-often imagining combat veterans as psychological basket cases. Fred’s story—the story of a retired bird colonel and twenty-eight-year veteran—humanizes the reality of psychological damage. He recounts the siren call of suicide and the useless oblivion of self-medication. He admits to basking in the addictive drug of war and to an obsessive push to physical challenges. Most importantly, he relates the complex ways in which soldierly experience intertwines with memories of beloved friends who never came home and the pain of those who continue to wait for a spouse or parent present in body only.

If you are a veteran or a family member of a veteran, there will be much here that is familiar, though it is crucial to bear in mind every vet’s story is unique. Near the end of the book, Col. Johnson tells us about the healing power of art in conjunction with a willingness to seek help from therapeutic professionals. On a personal note, I will add that as a beneficiary of the Shakespeare With Veterans program that he created—in collaboration with the wonderful folks at Kentucky Shakespeare—I will add that you have done more than I can say for your fellow vets. Fred, reading your story only confirms for me what I already knew: we are, as human beings, made of stories at the most fundamental level. Thank you.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

West Louisville, like so many similar communities in the United States, is a food and shopping desert, leaving locals with little choice of where to shop. The owners of the Dino’s/Tony’s emporiums take this situation as a license for disrespect, particularly for Black kids. Since the call for the boycott and request for picketers came from the local BLM leadership, I had no qualms about showing up and offering my support. It is a local action that is gratifyingly real. Standing in front of the offending store, holding up a Black Lives Matter sign, chanting “No Respect, No Business,” with other picketers had a visible effect. People who might otherwise have bought gas or snacks, read our fliers and drove off. Unlike the Congressional hooligans who just repealed the ACA, folks in the neighborhood are responsive.

The hardest thing about this sort of picketing is that I get disproportionate credit. Black folk drive by and honk their horns, give me the thumbs up, thank me–a white guy participating in a Black-led protest in a Black neighborhood, just for being there. When this is the hardest thing about an experience–getting too much gratitude for too little effort–well, I’m not going to complain.

I will report what I wish I had said to a thirty-something white guy who pulled up in his SUV, rolled down his window, and responded to my Black Lives Matter sign, saying: “All Lives Matter, Dude.”

I smiled wryly, shaking my head, and waved him on. I wish that I had said what I have so often thought: “When…, then.” That is, “When it is finally true that Black lives matter in America, then it will be possible that all lives really will matter.” Until then, it is demonstrable that they don’t.

The pseudo-universalism that pretends to worry that uncompromising support for Black lives somehow diminishes justice for all would be laughable were it not so mean-spirited. So when I say Black Lives Matter, what I mean is this: If you want justice for all, then come on out and stand up for Black lives.

I’ll make some comments on the analytical and political issues tied up with “populism” below, really no more than some abductive proposals in search of a research agenda, but first a few comments about anti-Semitism in the context of the Trump administration and the contemporary Right.

In the context of American culture and society—set aside the left-right political spectrum—Jews and more specifically an abstract, quasi-mythical Jewishness has long been understood as the suspect, and often fully demonic, alter-ego of Americanness.

Although actual Jews have—obviously!—been the target of anti-Semitism in the United States, to a great extent Jewishness as the alter of Americanness is disembodied, a kind of imaginative nightmare that can be projected onto almost anything perceived or construable as negative, and particularly anti-American. Leonard Zeskind refers to this as a devil theory, rather than just a conspiracy theory. The most salient difference is that a conspiracy theory “explains” what might otherwise be seen as a merely unfortunate event, as the result of some particular criminal and malevolent intent. A devil theory, by contrast, seeks to explain malevolence itself as flowing from some external (usually supernatural, always at least understood as unnatural) intelligence.

(Note that in the post-9/11 period, Radical Islam—here as an equivalent to an abstract Jewishness—is increasingly construed in similar ways. Witness the otherwise bizarre terror of the imposition of “Sharia Law” in some quarters, when the actual Muslim population of the United States is barely one percent. Such fear, however, makes perfect sense in the context of fear of an abstract evil.)

The complicated “racial structure” of the United States has been the primary inflector of the most salient differences between European anti-Semitism and its American counterpart. In the United States, Blacks have historically been the primary “near Other” of American culture and politics. The construction of white supremacy is such that the threat posed by Blacks in the racist imagination and related rhetorics has been from direct violence and miscegenation. The presumed inferiority of Blacks disqualified them from being the metaphysical source of the evils afflicting a presumptively “white” real America. In such an environment, if the Jews did not exist, then something akin to Jewishness (in the anti-Semitic imagination) would still have to be invented. Kevin MacDonald, the current dean of “scholarly” anti-Semitism in the United States, makes this explicit in his writings which view Jews (really, what I am calling “Jewishness”) the master manipulators of history, strategically oriented to the destruction of “whiteness” through diversity, miscegenation, and manufactured racial self-loathing.

Such explicit anti-Semitism, however, is no longer to be taken for granted even on the far right of the American political scene. Even as the overt racism, evidenced in law and rhetoric alike, of the Jim Crow era has largely been replaced by formally color blind forms of structural racism in the last 50 years, so de-Semitised forms of anti-Jewishness have arisen to overwhelm (not replace) the older, cruder forms of anti-Semitism.

There are, of course, differences between “color blind” racism and the rhetorics of de-Semitised anti-Semitism. Color blind racism, for one, is acted out on the bodies of Black folk, largely through the criminal justice system, which has perpetuated a stigmatized under-caste in the post-Jim Crow era. Whereas de-Semitised anti-Semitism does not—for the most part—depend on actual Jews and often finds itself more than happy to be in league with the settler colonialism of Israel.

Elements of the American far right, e.g. of the nebulous designation Alt Right, have managed to successfully colonize a provocateur niche, attacking the non-explicit racism and, in some cases non-explicit anti-Semitism, of the American center and center-right (which has, it should be emphasized, also been adopted by the center left and elements of the left). They add to this these provocations an explicit misogyny. All of this serves the political entrepreneurs of the Alt Right directly, attracting attention to their “outrageousness,” while reinforcing the center as the “reasonable” ones and dragging them toward appeasement with the Alt Right (which is to say with the openly racist right).

Which brings me to the exclusion of certain media outlets from Trump administration news conferences and Trump’s explicit construction of “the media” as “enemies of the American people.”

In my terms this is exactly an example of de-Semitised anti-Semitism. What I mean by this is that the construction “the media”—meaning a selection of what might be called not “mainstream” but “elite” media–is in the underlying American imagination infused with “Jewishness.” It is set apart and antagonistic to the Middle American Everyman by characteristics of intellectualism and universalism that are practically inseparable from “Jewishness,” even though the direct involvement of actual Jews, or indeed the recognition that such traits have been historically connected to Jews, can be obfuscated to the point of incoherence.

The cultural logic is very similar to the color blind racism that allows American politicians of virtually all orientations to speak of “criminals” in the abstract, and know (in some cases know without recognizing that they know) that the image their rhetoric evokes in the minds of voters—not to mentions the strategies for law enforcement, the assumptions of prosecutors, and the decisions of judges and juries—are highly racialized. In the years since the infamous “Willy Horton” advertisement that did so much to sink the Dukakis campaign, the equation of Black man equals criminal and criminal equals Black man has become so cemented in the American political imaginary that attempts to dispute it are routinely met with exasperated eye rolls and pedantic explanations.

In the case of de-Semitised anti-Semitism, the connection between ultimate object of defamation (Jews) and represented object is somewhat more abstract than in the Black man equals criminal formula noted above. Where Black men (and Black folk generally) are presumed to be personally liable and individually dangerous—because of a biological (or in some more mainstream versions cultural) essence that predisposes them to criminal pathology—it is not so much Jews that are liable as individuals, but a “Jewishness” which has become indelibly imprinted on certain institutions in the United States, for example, “elite” journalism, higher education (especially social science and the humanities), legal scholarship and practice, civil rights, human right, and civil liberties, and, of course, finance.

It is entirely possible, of course, that hatred and defamation of abstract “Jewishness” can redound back on individual Jews—something that the wave of threats and attacks since the beginning of 2017 makes all too clear. Nor, I hasten to add, is the analysis above meant to describe anti-Semitism as such. Nazi anti-Semitism was thoroughly racialized, targeting a biological essence that inhered in individuals—combining this with a transcendental devil theory. After World War II, at least in the United States, Jews were not so much deracinated, as provisionally whitened. This provisional grant of white privilege, however, did not obliterate the devil theory associated with Jewishness, it just abstracted and institutionalized it, removing the Semitic labeling in mainstream discourse.

What does any of this have to do with populism? I think it probably has a lot to do with it, but it’s going to take some work to sketch in the connections.

First, populism is one of those vexed concepts that is nearly meaningless absent a qualifier. Without very specific definitions, “populism” can mean anything from a demagogic politician cynically pandering to a broad segment of the population—with substantive policies or empty rhetoric—to a broad-based movement for state-supported programs supporting redistribution of resources and the public good.

That is, everything from the Hitler’s appeals to the a Volkish culture and racial superiority to the cross-race alliance of small farmers and workers proposed by Tom Watson in the post-Civil War United States have been classes as “populism.” It is so easy to applaud movements like the latter, which terrified the white elite, and which was the same sort of threat that led to the creation of the cross-class alliance of European settlers that became known as whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy in the pre-Revolutionary period. Between these two extremes we see everything from Julius Caesar’s land reform, providing farmland for both veterans and the urban poor, to FDR’s New Deal programs. Simply put, any analytic category that can encompass Hitler, Caesar, Watson and FDR flirts with incoherence.

And yet–there remains something intriguing, something potentially useful in a category that can bridge the murky abyss that so often separates a popular politics from a pro-population politics.

Part of the problem here is that none of the potential definitions of “populism” as such has anything, analytically, to recommend it over another unless we narrow the criteria. This is because populism as such is not an ideology but a style of politics, or a political aesthetic that pits “populace” against “elites” and appeals to the former for the “good of the state.”

One way out of this definitional conundrum would be to limit the label populism–unmodified by say “pseudo” or “right wing”–to those politics that are at once popular and pro-populace, particularly with respect to the use of state power to redistribute wealth and provide for the public good. In practice, I tend to default to a definition of this kind, but only in a negative sense, referring to the sort of things Trump and company are doing as “pseudo-populism” but withholding the label of populism propper from any contemporary movement.

Part of this is because policies that are truly for the people–meaning “all but the elite” or the “99%”–are rarely popular in the American scene–at least in their inception. (They become popular enough once they kick over into the category of “entitlements.”) Moreover, such policies that focus on the positive use of state power to redistribute not just “opportunity,” but wealth are properly described in ideological terms as some form of socialism (social welfare, democratic socialism, meliorism).

Some may object that a plurality of Americans, often a majority, actually do support many policies that would, de facto, result in the redistribution of wealth so long as they are not labeled with the nefarious, anti-American adjective “socialistic.”

Wait! Perhaps there is a connection to the foregoing discussion of de-Semitised anti-Semitism and color blind racism. Is it possible that actual populist “movements” in the United States have to contend with the irreducible racialization of the classes and demonization of pluralistic forms of analysis that oppose racialization–that are associated with Jewishness?

Well, yeah.

So in the cusp between the end of the Civil War and the counter-Reconstruction or between he end of Jim Crow and the rise of mass incarceration, the United States has seen Reconstruction in the first place and the Poor People’s Movement in the second, but for the most part movements that claim populist credentials–from the Klan of the 1920s to the “Populist Party” of the 1990s–have been negatively framed. That is, they are framed in terms of resentment and refusal against an imagined elite that is using foreign, anti-American others to undermine real Americans. These movements have not (mostly) been fueled or founded by working class folk, but by middle class Americans who fear that “their wealth” will be appropriated to support racial others in the urban centers or in the form of immigrants and refugees.

Working people can be attracted to such movements of resentment when they are told that most of the problems of our society are because of a racial undercaste and that if not for government largess to culturally and racially Other newcomers their own lives would somehow be better. The transparent untruth of such claims–the absolute lack of material benefit associated with the exclusion of immigrants, funding better education, healthcare, and a reasonable safety net for the urban poor–is not particularly relevant, since virtually every contemporary mainstream politician has been making claims of this sort to one degree or another for decades.

Enter Trump. Here we have a politician who, contrary to Democratic Party rhetoric, is not simply the inevitable outcome of recent Republican strategy, but the non-inevitable outcome of a politics of what I am going to call resentment populism that has been fostered by both of the major parties, from Johnson’s War on Poverty that actually set up many of the community surveillance systems that presupposed the pathology of Black culture, through Nixon’s Law and Order rhetoric and on to include Reagan’s War on Drugs, Clinton’s “no Republican is tougher on crime than me,” and Bush and Obama’s continuation of such policies in all of their important particulars.

This is not to say that there is no difference between the two major parties–I know many of my friends and colleague on the Left object to this formulation, insisting that there is no difference–but that the difference has been played out in the degree to which they overtly tapped the politics of resentment populism.

Trump is the politician who begins to say openly what both Democrats and Republicans have been saying in color blind euphemism for decades: Blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims are responsible for the big bad in your lives. He promises to stop coddling Blacks (that is, kill and incarcerate even more of them), deport the Mexicans (giving working class Americans back their good-paying union jobs), and exclude the Muslims (protecting us from the existential threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.”) The fact that none of this has even the vaguest relationship to reality is utterly besides the point. What is real is the resentment, and Trump has tapped into it more successfully than any American politician since Andrew Jackson.

Now, what I have not mentioned yet is the role of nationalism and militarization in the contemporary resentment populism. Nationalism and populism have usually been closely connected, not ideologically, but because they are both political styles that are relatively plastic and improvisational, thus often compatible. Indeed, the forms of populism, say that of the late MLK or Watson before his cooptation by the Southern white elites, that I (and many if not most of my sympathetic readers) might approve of were never all that “popular,” running aground on the obnoxious rock of white privilege and the cross-class alliance that has always been essential to maintaining it in the United States.

Nationalism, and to an extent militarization, have often served as a kind of social glue that has supplemented white privilege in American political and social life–meaning, of course, the social-political practice and mythology of white America.

Trump’s call to “Make America great again” is on the one hand so easy to criticize, but on the other hand, from the point of view of resentment populism it is precisely its fuzzy unreality that makes it attractive. Trump’s ordinary supporters don’t want to “go back” to an era before say Social Security and Medicare–they want to be guaranteed “good jobs with benefits” the demise of which is blamed on  globalization and immigration. They want their taxes to go to pay for, if anything, improvements to their own communities–rather than being siphoned off to pay for programs to improve the lives of the (Black) urban poor.

The fact that antiquated energy technologies such as coal are never going to make a comeback (short of expensive, environmentally destructive subsidies) does not diminish the anger of miners and processors who have lost work. The reality of the ways in which largely unregulated globalization has contributed to the degradation of American labor provides enough of a grain of truth to provide cover for a profound and systemic (and consistent across regimes) lack of government support for a labor movement that is, in any case, woefully degraded by decades of impossible compromises.

The divide between Producers and Parasites highlighted in the work of Berlet and Lyons in the context of the development of American-style populism remains important in the contemporary context, at least as a salient echo, but there is no contemporary movement that really addresses this division in a popular way. Occupy made an attempt, but in spite of my sympathy and admiration for what they were able to accomplish, it is Trump with his politics of open resentment populism who is now president, and various flavors of Republicans, who mostly espouse similar but less open forms of resentment populism, who control both houses of Congress as well as most state legislatures.

The most open question of the Trump adminstration is to what extent it will combine aggressive militarization–including pursuit of opportunistic wars–with domestic resentment populism. Such wars, properly couched, almost always provide at least a short term nationalist boost to a regime. This certainly worked in G. W. Bush’s favor when the 9/11 attacks effectively pressed the reset button on his lack-luster administration. Of course there is plenty of room for continuing and expanding militarization at home and all-too-bloody near war abroad, but I think that the optimistic predictions of a more isolationist America under Trump were always wishful thinking. As much as I want to be proved wrong, I anticipate (if not quite predict) expanded overseas belligerence and will not be surprised if it is on a massive scale. This in turn will provide more political cover for the aggressive expansion of  militarization at home and the free reign of resentment populism.

I’ll be very, very happy to be shown to be a doom-saying and myopic Cassandra.

The Trump-Russia connection is best understood as political theater–or better, theater of the absurd transmogrified into reality television. Make no mistake, it is having real impacts, but it matters mostly because people are paying attention to it.

Does President Trump have dealings with potentially shady Russians? Who knows? It certainly isn’t impossible. It’s probably not even implausible. But how much does it matter, even in the worst case scenario, of say Trump owing vast amounts of money to unscrupulous Russian oligarchs who also have highly embarrassing blackmail material on him?

In this “worst case scenario” what would the Russians want him to do? In the Cold War days, the fear was that compromised politicians might push for unilateral disarmament was common enough and used to disparage left-leaning or ever-so-slightly dovish candidates. But Trump is pushing for a build-up of military capacity, particularly in the category of prestige weaponry oriented to Great Power warfare. Otherwise, so far as anyone can tell, he is continuing Obama (and Bush) administration military policies with respect to the wars and “high explosive interventions” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan.

On the home front, Trump’s incipient policies–the “Muslim ban,” the continuation of the promise to “build the wall,” the pushing to replace Obama-care with a watered down version of Obama-care, and the pointless shadow-boxing with the “intelligence” community–have certainly embarrassed the United States. But does anyone seriously think that Russian mobsters-cum-psyops specialists are ordering Trump to pander to racism and xenophobia? Does anyone think that he wouldn’t be a walking disaster of a President if Russia didn’t exist?

Or maybe it’s the Russians who are ordering Trump to vomit incoherent hysteria on his Twitter account? Sort of in the mode of a celluloid hypnotist ordering his entranced volunteer to stand on one leg and cluck like a chicken. Yes, this seems likely.

Of course, the reason some folks are so keen to explore the “Russia connection” is that they believe that, unlike the racism, pseudo-populism, and xenophobia that got him elected, they might be able to “get rid of Trump” if there is any there, there. Then we can have a “rational” regime led by Mike “evolution is a theory” Pence and dominated by Paul “I never met a scheme to help billionaires I didn’t like” Ryan. We could refocus our foreign policy on a land war with Iran. Yes, that sounds like such a vast improvement. After all, neither Pence nor Ryan is liable to pick fights with Saturday Night Live on social media. Thank goodness we can get rid of that threat!

None of this is to say that Trump isn’t a douche bag. It isn’t even to say that alleged connections to Russia shouldn’t be investigated, because, yeah, Putin is also a douche bag and if we have to be ruled by douche bags, it should probably be ones we are responsible for. But, here is the final bit of irony: if it can be definitively proved that Trump has been “compromised” by the Russians, it will likely as not be through recordings of telephone conversations. In a sense, filtered through the gobbledygook of Trump speak, he is likely correct that his phones were “tapped.” Not (probably) by the FBI, but by the NSA–which I remind everyone routinely records the conversations of Americans with foreign intelligence targets.

Score one potential point for the Tweeter in Trump.

A bill has been introduced in the Kentucky House of Representatives to add law enforcement and other safety workers as a category in the state’s hate crimes statute. Given that 75 police officers were killed nationally by intentional gunfire or vehicular assault in 2016 it’s a little strange for many people to hear someone say that this bill should not become law (https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2016).

In other words, white people are as protected from “anti-white” crimes as Black folk are protected from anti-Black crimes. Similarly, with other included categories: Christians are as protected as Muslims, Jews and other religious minorities; straight folks are as protected as LGBTQ folks. And so on.

Hate crimes laws are in this sense fundamentally different from historic redress laws, e.g. affirmative action policies and minority set-asides, that by definition must specify some class of persons to privilege in order to remedy historic–and persisting–discrimination. Hate crimes, by contrast, apply as add-ons to criminal law, usually affording the possibility of enhanced penalties to classes of crimes that can be proven to be motivated by bias. Thus under the equal protection clause and basic principles of the universality of the law, hate crimes can be charged against anyone committing a “racially motivated” crime (for example), regardless of the respective racial categories of the perpetrator and the victim.

What this means, with respect to Kentucky’s proposed law (HB 14/CI [BR 75]) which seeks to amend the state’s hate crimes statute (KRS 532.031)…

…to include offenses committed against an individual because of the individual’s actual or perceived employment as a city, county, state, or federal peace officer, member of an organized fire department, emergency medical services personnel…

…is that these particular category fractions– fractions of the general category “occupations”–are to be afforded a special categorical status not afforded to other occupations. And this exactly violates the same constitutional principle that led to the drafting of hate crimes laws to protect against violations motivated by any specific racial (religious, national original, sexual orientation) bias, rather than naming particular classes of victims or perpetrators.

Note that the construction of the equal protection provision in hate crimes statutes is particular and does not necessarily apply to other sorts of laws that could protect specific occupational categories for some reason other than bias. In fact, Kentucky, like a plurality of states, already has enhanced penalties for crimes of various sorts when committed against law enforcement and other categories of public employees. Such provisions afford a higher level of protection than hate crimes laws in that they do not require establishing a bias motivation (which in practice can be extraordinarily difficult). Thus if you assault a police officer, particularly one acting in the line of duty, the crime can automatically be treated as different than assaulting another citizen, regardless of why you assaulted them.

Secondly, the inclusion of law enforcement personnel in hate crimes statutes is not only unlikely to pass constitutional muster but may undermine existing hate crimes laws. How? You have to start from the underlying premise that such laws were passed specifically to acknowledge the bloody history of lynching, particularly the lynching of Black folk in the aftermath of the Civil War and continuing through the Jim Crow era. Such attacks, even in demographically slight numbers, terrorize entire groups. Hate crimes laws were meant to address the vulnerability of a definable population to bias-motivated crimes, acknowledging that such attacks tend to discourage people from exercising their civil rights and otherwise participating fully in civil society. Indeed, such has often been the very purpose of such crimes!

Police officers, far from being a politically vulnerable group, regularly and legally go armed. They have close working relationships with the prosecutors who are the arbiters of who is and is not charged with a crime. Police–of any group of people–exercise the closest thing to de facto sovereignty with respect to the law. An attack on a police officer is vanishingly unlikely to prevent other officers from exercising their rights to assemble, vote, serve on a jury and so on. If anything, such attacks lead to an increasingly embattled culture.

Further, while there is an increasing us/them divide between police and civilians–similar in many ways to the civilian/military divide–law enforcement are widely lauded as “heroes” in popular culture and by the highest political authorities. Hate crimes laws have as their moral basis an attempt–little utilized and of debatable efficacy–to deter crimes that would in another context be called terrorism. By including a privileged, state-linked, legally-armed group within the same legal mechanism it disrupts that moral logic. At the same time, the extremely weak constitutional case for including police in hate crimes laws threatens the legal basis of such laws entirely.

Third, since violence against law enforcement is already included in non-motive based enhanced sentencing in Kentucky, to include them in hate crimes provisions–a weaker protection by any measure since it requires proof of motivation which is extremely difficult to obtain–is not only redundant, it is redundant in a way that smacks of the worst kind of politicking. At best, support for such legislation demonstrates a misguided desire to be positioned on the side of heroes, standing with the “thin blue line” that supposedly protects us from a war of all against all. At worst, and the timing of the latest spate of such laws is telling, there is a desire to be seen as standing against the Movement for Black Lives. The pervasive racist interpretation of that movement that suggests it involves agitation against anyone who is not Black.

In practical terms, “Blue Lives Matter” statutes do nothing to protect police officers–and I don’t mean that as a rhetorical exaggeration. Sponsoring or signing on to such measures is a kind of “law and order” statement for state legislators. Meanwhile, pensions and healthcare benefits for police and other public employees are being cut, and many jobs in corrections are privatized and pushed in the direction of minimum wage casual labor. The kind of in-depth training in community relations, conflict resolution, and cultural understanding that would actually make policing work less dangerous is neglected, denigrated, and axed for budgetary and ideological reasons.

Effectiveness, apparently, is a low priority.

I have spoken to enough rank-and-file police officers to know that they do not see or feel their position to be privileged. They often feel like they are under siege by politicians, in the media, and by civilians in general who simply do not and cannot understand the difficulties of the job. As a military veteran who studies veterans, the attitude is familiar and to a certain extent justified. But as with military veterans, the appropriate response to tensions with the civilian world is not to exacerbate them and attempt to buy off our “protectors” (whether in blue or green) with hero narratives and celebration, but to train them appropriately and foster a culture of responsibility–which to be fair does exist in many units, depending on the values promoted by the leadership. We must also provide them with fair compensation, and most of all define a mission which brutalizes neither the officers nor the communities they are supposed to serve.

Please take this message away: Blues Lives Matter laws are politically motivated grandstanding of dubious constitutionality. They are a very thinly veiled attack on the Movement For Black Lives that is grounded in a willful misrepresentation of that movement that can only be described as both racist and perverse. I urge you to call or write your state representative if you live in Kentucky and tell them to go on the record as being opposed to this retrograde bill. 

Find your legislator here: http://www.lrc.ky.gov/Find%20Your%20Legislator/Find%20Your%20Legislator.html

Some years ago I published an article in the Journal of Hate Studies (Vol. 4, Pp. 59-87) titled “White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics” (2005). In it I presented an argument focusing on the ways in which changing demographics in the United States are reshaping cultural and political self-understanding in the “white, middle-American” population and the ways in which various flavors of ideologically committed white nationalists are exploiting these changes.

The argument in “White Nationalism Revisited” turned around an understanding of post-Jim Crow white nationalism as different than old-fashioned white supremacy. As civil rights lawyer Dan Canon observed in a recent SALON article: “There are some who rightly criticize the term ‘white nationalist’ as too forgiving” there are, nonetheless, important differences at the level of tactical politics between the old and new forms of bigotry that changing the label cannot address.

Canon writes,

“The brash Klansman still cannot go out in the sunlight, but the nationalist is a day-walker. A Northern fox. An incrementalist. The nationalist is not equivalent to a white supremacist per se, because you don’t have to accept racial supremacy for their theories to sound good. The whites and the non-whites just need to stay on their own turf.”

It is important, however, to understand that at its base, white nationalism as such embraces the idea of race as both a biological essence that determines not just who your people are, but to differential abilities such as intelligence, creativity, initiative, morality and self-control. Thus in the white nationalist political imaginary, it is not just that all people have some innate preference for those “like them” and animus for the “different” understood in racialized terms, they actively believe in the relative superiority of “white” over other “races.” As political scientist Carol Swain wrote in her important (if flawed) book The New White Nationalism in America (2002), the core of white nationalism thinking can be summarized as follows:

“The main reason black people today are plagued by such high incidence of criminal violence, out-of-wedlock births, poor school performance, and AIDS is rooted in their differential genetic endowment. The process of human evolution, as it has adapted to different ecological circumstances, has produced, they contend, a distinct racial hierarchy in terms of innate intelligence, the ability to delay gratification, to control emotions, and to plan for the future.” (p. 18)

As such the primary difference between the new white nationalists and Jim Crow-style white supremacy is not in attitudes toward race as such but in the politics constructed around race. Jim Crow used racial differences in ways that replaced the direct exploitation of slavery with various forms of social control that stigmatized all blacks (not just those living in Jim Crow states) and preserved white privilege and blacks as exploitable labor. The Civil Rights Movement and the legal reforms enacted in its wake ushered in a new era of “color blind” modes of social control that have increasingly constructed black folk as dispensable, socially useful only as surplus labor, and largely replaced by more recent, mostly brown immigrants. The new white nationalists do not want to return to the status quo ante, but to protect white genetic heritage through deportation, immigration reform (“defending the borders”), pro-white natalism, and further marginalization of black and native populations through criminalization. (See Leonard Zeskind’s magisterial history of white nationalism, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, 2009, for a detailed account.)

As argued by Michelle Alexander in her essential work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), all three modes of racialized social control—slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration—have salient features in common. For example, all three serve to justify “a legal, social and economic boundary between ‘us’ and ’them’” (p. 18). But they also have significant differences, “Most significantly, the fact that mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the function of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor” (p 18).

The move from exploitation to warehousing has not been incidental. It has been in response to both agitation and organizing of black folk and other people of color, leading to the demise of the previous system of racialized social control, and the changing character of politics and capitalism in the United States. In the age of “globalization,” the nature of exploitation itself has changed. Globalization means the exportability of capital (e.g. the “outsourcing” of manufacturing) and the “importability” of hyper-exploitable labor both documented and undocumented, supplemented as in the post-Reconstruction era by prison labor. Additionally, the ongoing processes of automation have changed the moral basis of politics in the U.S.

Keep in mind that moral politics and pragmatic politics are always potentially (though not necessarily) at odds. A plurality of white Americans has long recognized that African American and Native American subjects have been historically oppressed, exploited, expropriated and otherwise treated in ways somewhere between the unconscionable and the unforgivable. However, the recognition that such treatment is ongoing and a willingness to do something about it has been tied to circumstances that have both minimized threats to white privilege and guaranteed that white accommodation would not prove to be too expensive to particularly privileged classes. Thus, for example, school integration would have little impact on white families willing and able to send their children to private schools while simultaneously allowing feel-good sentiments about what “we” are doing.

The fundamental economic shifts glossed as neoliberalism—that is, the globalization of capital and labor, automation, and the covering philosophy of market infallibility—have had an erosive impact on white privilege, generating resentment in the white working and middle-classes. This resentment has been exploited by a wide range of political actors ostensibly focused on “race neutral” or “color blind” categories like “big government,” “law and order,” “the threat of terrorism,” the “legal status” of immigrants or the “unamerican” beliefs of refugees.

The hinge of all of these forms of “color-blind racism” falls between size-of-government complaints on the one hand and use of the repressive state on the other. Taken together they form a kind of pseudo-libertarian politics of starving government of funds to spend on the public good—health, education, welfare, environmental protection, infrastructure—while feeding the military/security/incarceration state an endless all-you-can-eat buffet.

There is nothing explicitly “white nationalist” about a shift of spending from the public good to the military, police and prisons, except as the burden of such policies falls disproportionately on people of color. From the white nationalist point-of-view, such proportioning is exactly the point. The policies themselves open a common ground between doctrinaire white nationalists and those who eschew the label, no matter that the “war on drugs,” “war on terror,” and the unnamed “war on the undeserving” are always described as post-racial.

The explicitly color-blind justifications for objectively racist policies and their consequences do not, of course, absolve anyone of bigotry. What such justifications do is allow white Americans to vote against public good spending in the name of “tax revolt” and “small government” even while supporting increasingly draconian and racist-in-effect policing, surveillance, drug enforcement, and incarceration. The key to understanding this phenomenon is that the “tax revolt” element—beginning with California’s 1978 Proposition 13 which ushered in comprehensive property tax limitations—emerged in lock-step with immigration-driven demographic changes and residential desegregation. White voters who had been willing to support public good spending, however reluctantly, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration Act of 1965, started voting to limit and reduce taxes that went to support local services in their wake.

The “tax revolt” movement, like the more explicitly anti-immigration movements and efforts that would follow, has often been described as grounded in “bread and butter” economics—volnerable people voting against “taking money out of their pockets” or policies that “took their jobs.” Careful analysis of exit polls in relevant elections (c.f. Hood and Morris 2000; Alvarez and Butterfield 2000; Newton 2000) indicates that the determinant voting blocks are not the economically vulnerable, but large segments of the white middle-class. This block tends to vote against its tax dollars going to support racial and ethnic others–other than through the dubious “support” of police and prisons. I call this heterogeneous tax refusal or perceived heterogeneous exploitation.

Here I would emphasize that heterogeneous tax refusal and the “law and order” movement that fueled the Republican “Southern Strategy” (and the Democratic “me too” pandering around crime and drugs) grew up together. The creation of a mass incarceration state aimed primarily at African-Americans and the demographic shifts which resulted from Asian and Latin American immigration and engendered heterogeneous tax revolt were woven together in a new politics that while never dominated by ideologically transparent white nationalists, has nonetheless been congenial to, and influenced by, them. The rhetoric of both heterogeneous tax refusal and law and order converge around issues of white identity and what it means to be a “real American” living in a real American community—which is to say it converges around what I call theft of collective identity.

The politics of “identity theft” at the collective level are by no means confined to parts of the country that have experienced demographic transitions and have become or are well on their way to becoming multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. A kind of “moral panic” similar in kind—not coincidentally—to that found around racialized drug-law enforcement, can be seen in towns like St. Cloud, Minnesota. An influx of North African refugees has led to an anti-refugee backlash and large crowds gathering to be “informed” by professional fear-mongers who warn that Muslims are on the verge of taking over the country and imposing Sharia law. (For example, http://www.startribune.com/st-cloud-comes-to-grips-with-clashes-between-immigrants-longtime-locals/367079471/#1). As outlandish as such claims may seem, it is important to understand that they can still form the background noise of white “Middle American” politics both as pandered to by the center and as acted out on the bodies and freedoms of immigrants and refugees.

In the context of the evolving politics described above, the so-called alt-right, as the latest vehicle of white nationalism, cannot be dismissed as a distraction or reduced to the potentially out-sized influence of an individual like Trump-advisor Stephen Bannon. The logics of heterogeneous tax refusal and the racialized surveillance/carceral state provide a free-flowing pipeline for de facto white nationalist politics to shape “mainstream” policy and place a misogynistic, narcissistic bully in the White House. The basic shape of this state, reinforced by Supreme Court decisions (e.g. Florida v. Bostick and McCleskey v. Kemp) which have made it virtually impossible to challenge either the arbitrariness or racialized impacts of policing and prosecution, is now firmly in place. Add to this a legally and technologically unprecedented post-9/11 security apparatus that is almost impossible to hold accountable and the argument that “things can’t get much worse” dissolves in a bath of acid. The current reality of racial oppression, economic precariousness, unfolding ecological catastrophe, and worldwide militaristic hubris is catastrophic; but only those lacking in imagination will claim it can’t plausibly get worse under a demagogue who has repeatedly appealed to the core policy goals of white nationalism.

Now on to the current, post-election 2016 situation. First, I want to emphasize just how much electoral math navel gazing is a waste of time. The fine-grained statistical analysis is almost certain to reveal that a variety of factors led to the Trump victory. These doubtless will include implicit misogyny on the part of Democratic voters who stayed home as well as explicit misogyny on the part of the “lock her up” crowd. It will also include a surge of “white middle America” voting by those enthusiastic about a guy who says he is going to put a stop to heterogeneous exploitation and collective identity theft. Suppression of votes (particularly in communities of color), and a generalized disenfranchisement of the population centers will also be factors. Blaming women, people of color, or people who voted for a third party candidate is worse than useless—it is counterproductive.

The current question is not why did Clinton lose—in the election math sense—but what do we do now?

The United States has placed a heavily militarized, surveillance/incarceration state apparatus unprecedented in the history of humanity at least partially in the hands of a demonstrated bully and braggart with no moral compass who is beholden to white nationalists. In my view, we need to build the broadest possible Popular Front-style resistance even understanding that the liberals who may join with us have not suddenly become ready to give up the drone, bomb, stop-and-frisk, incarcerate, frack, speculate and surveillance state they have helped to build. They are anti-Trump. We need that. We need every form of local, state and regional organizing that might hold the line against what is all-too-likely to come.

Citations and Bibliography

Regarding what I am calling heterogeneous tax refusal (or in places heterogeneous exploitation), the special issue of Social Science Quarterly (Vol. 81, March 2000) devoted to California’s anti-immigration Proposition 187 is particularly useful, especially the following articles:

M. V. Hood and Irwin Morris, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime? Racial/Ethnic Context and the Anglo Vote on Proposition 187.”

R. Michael Alvarez and Tara L. Butterfield, “The Resurgence of Nativism in California? The Case of Proposition 187 and Illegal Immigration.”

Lina Y. Newton, “Why Some Latinos Supported Proposition 187: Testing Economic Threat and Cultural Identity Hypotheses.”

The best source on the history of white nationalism is Leonard Zeskind’s book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009). Look for related updates and commentary via the home pages of the Institute for Education and Research on Human Rights (http://www.irehr.org) and Political Research Associates (http://www.politicalresearch.org/#).

Michelle Alexander’s crucial work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010) has been referred to as “the bible” of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter and is the essential work to understand racialized social control and mass incarceration. Complicating expanding Alexander’s work is Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Background reading dealing with issues facing the Black community in the U.S. including but beyond policing and incarceration can be found via the Black Lives Matter Syllabus Project (https://anthropoliteia.net/category/pedagogy/black-lives-matter-syllabus-project/ and Sociologists For Justice Ferguson Syllabus (https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus/). And, of course, the best place to start is the homepage of the Movement for Black Lives which includes its policy recommendations (https://policy.m4bl.org).

A good general background on the centuries-long war of European settler colonials against the Native Peoples of North America is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon 2014). A variety of resources related to the current efforts by water protectors at Standing Rock are at via the#StandingRockSyllabus, a project of NYC Stands With Standing Rock, which has assembled more than a thousand pages of reading. (https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/).

A general introduction to the topic of demographic change, slightly dated now but still valuable, is Dale Maharidge’s The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism, and America’s Future (Vintage, 1999). Note that there are scholars and opinion leaders who see the demographic shifts described by Maharidge, sometimes referred to as “the browning of America” as not being anywhere near as dramatic a change as some might think. The problem with such “sensible” assessments, grounding in projections of interracial marriage and the presumption of a general de-emphasis on race as a “thing” in politics is that it takes into account neither the underlying biological determinism of white nationalism nor the fears of identity theft and heterogeneous exploitation of “ordinary” whites. Find a related discussion on the Racism Review website, (http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2015/08/31/the-coming-white-minority-brazilianization-or-south-africanization-of-u-s/).

As of yet, there is nothing like the Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter syllabi dealing specifically with issues of immigration and refugees in the United States. The collection The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Brunner-Routledge, 2005), edited by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Carola Suarez-Orozco, and Desiree Baolian Qin is a reasonable place to start. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.nnirr.org/drupal/) is a resource for activists.

I am not someone who ignores the news. Quite the contrary. But as someone who typically gets his news from selective reading, guided by my highly curated twitter feed and specialist sensibilities while avoiding anything that reeks of “breaking news”, the constant schadenfreude of MSNBC-FOX-CNN is nauseating.

And yet, after the police killings of two black men in two days—Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana—followed by the killing of five police officers in Dallas by a sniper at a peaceful protest rally, I’ve been watching too much of it, hearing too much of it, to the point where I am afraid.

Let me be clear: I support Black Lives Matter and related movements unequivocally.

Let me be clear: I don’t support targeted killing of police (or anyone else) by snipers, bombs, drones, robots, tasers, beatings or neglect.

Let me be clear: Protest, even raucous, confrontational protest that engages and channels the righteous anger of a community is not the same thing as killing, shooting, targeting. It is protected political activity and a precious right.

I am overwhelmed by the courageous, poised testimony live-streamed by Diamond Reynolds while her boyfriend, Philando Castile, was shot and killed by a police office after being pulled over for a broken taillight and then informing the office (as he was legally obligated to do) that he was carrying a concealed handgun (for which he had a permit). (Trigger warning: You can read an abbreviated account here http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/harvard-psychologist-explains-how-diamond-reynolds-stayed-calm-and-livestreamed).

As the officer shot Castile multiple times, and he was dying in the car next to her, Reynolds livestreamed the aftermath, her daughter in the backseat, remaining calm and taking care of not only herself and her daughter but in effect the police officer as well—a police officer who is audibly losing it on the recording. She literally makes the recording while the officer is menacing her with his sidearm, freaking out, and failing to render emergency aid to the man he had just shot.

The Washingon Post interviewed Jim Hopper from Harvard, an expert on trauma, who explained that Reynold’s calm as she livecast while assuring the officer that she will keep her hands where he could see them was an “understandable” response to a horrific situation, in which parts of the brain—presumably the parts responsible for panic—shut down.

Yes, that’s obviously within the range of the possible or it wouldn’t have happened. Both panic and almost uncanny calm can be seen in the aftermath, or even in the midst, of trauma. I won’t speak to Hopper’s work—I’m not familiar with it—but the Post’s use of his scientific commentary serves to take an extraordinary act and present it as something ordinary. There may be good reason for this. Maybe for the sake of some clueless person who might interpret her response as unfeeling or callous—a person both lacking in imagination and who didn’t listen to the entire recording. Maybe just because newspapers have to print something.

Fear is complicated. People are complicated. They react in all sorts of unpredictable ways to situations that become all the more unpredictable in interaction with other people who are also unpredictable. Training is intended to make people more capable of reacting to crisis situations predictably—without panic. It doesn’t always work.

Black men in particular (and among others) have long(!) had reason to fear the worst from any encounter with the police. The technology-facilitated revelation of this reality to a wider population has created a stir, raising incredulity first, then anger, and now growing frustration. The killing of cops in Dallas will raise fear in a wider circle. Specifically fear of increasing reactionary violence from increasingly heavily armed and militarized police forces.

Here is some out of context data:

Number of police officers killed by intentional civilian gunfire in 2015: 39
Number of civilians killed by police gunfire in 2015: 990
Number of police officers killed by intentional civilian gunfire in 2016 to date: 22
Number of civilians killed by police gunfire in 2016 to date: 509

(Statistics for police deaths from the Officer Down Memorial Page; for civilians killed by police by the Washington Post.)

It’s worthwhile to look at the fine grain of the Post data (click on the little figures that represent each and every incident). For the 2015 data, 730 are classified as “Attack in progress.” No doubt many of these, I haven’t run a case-by-case analysis, might be described as responses to civilian driven violence in direct protection of the public or self-defense. But far too many of them are akin to this:

“David Wheat Jr., a 22-year-old white man armed with a knife, was shot on July 18, 2015, in an apartment building in Fort Collins, Colo. Two Fort Collins police officers, called to find an intoxicated and suicidal man, shot Wheat 11 times when he refused to drop a kitchen steak knife.”

Or this:

“Richard Perkins, a 39-year-old black man with a toy weapon, was shot on Nov. 15, 2015, in a gas station in Oakland, Calif. Oakland police were towing vehicles after a car show. Perkins approached officers and pointed a realistic-looking toy gun at them.”

Or this:

“Tyrone Bass, a 21-year-old black man armed with an unknown weapon, was shot on Sept. 15, 2015, on a street in Chalmette, La. Bass struggled with a St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s deputy and struck the deputy on the head. A second officer shot and killed Bass.”

Situations where patience, training in crisis de-escalation and non-violence, calling for back-up, avoiding unnecessary confrontations and so on could (in hindsight and without knowing the details) have meant one less killing.

Black Lives Matter. Stop the Killing!

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