Fighting with Each Other in the Age of Confusion

This post isn’t about the death of Sandra Bland so much as the online debate regarding contentious issues and an experience I had on social media last week. How I feel about Sandra Bland’s treatment by Texas police will be obvious, but there are better places to find information and commentary about it. I suggest starting with the police vehicle dashcam video of her arrest.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone magazine has published a piece titled “Sandra Bland Was Murdered,” which states that whatever events unfolded within the Waller County jail, the police’s treatment of Bland caused her death. The article discusses how right-wing media has been curiously restrained in its commentary, as if even the RWNJs have an inkling, and even a sense of shame, that assault, arrest, confinement and death are a bit much for, we are told, failing to signal a lane change:

“It's been interesting following conservative news outlets after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week, holstering the usual gloating backlash of the 'He'd be alive today, if he'd just obeyed the law' variety.”

I ran across the article in a tweet by prominent activist DeRay McKesson. I retweeted it and included a quote from the article that I thought summarized the ridiculous victim-blaming that is common in these cases, a quote that would also fit within the 140-character limit:

“But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive today, if only she'd used her blinker.”

Then something happened. DeRay McKesson retweeted my retweet of his tweet, sending it out to his 189,000 followers, plus anyone else who glanced at his timeline, and my Notifications turned into a steady stream of favorites, retweets and replies that went on for hours. Having only recently approached 2,000 followers, I’m not accustomed to such activity and didn’t know how to react.

The majority of the attention came from people who agreed with the quote and article’s condemnation of the way the police treated Sandra Bland, the system that lets them get away with murder, the politicians and talking heads who work to ensure this system goes unchanged, and the riffraff that constitutes their base. I’m happy to have lent this modest support to those upset by Sandra Bland’s death.

A number of social justice tweeters who replied, however, appeared not to understand the tweet. They apparently didn’t read the linked article, see the quotes around the quote, or notice that the original tweet was from one of their most notable voices. Their comments were unkind, implying or outright stating that I was a racist, an idiot and a troll. They had taken me to be defending the police and blaming the victim by saying that none of this would have happened if Sandra Bland had only used her turn signal. That is the exact opposite, not of what I had said--because I hadn’t added any of my own words to the tweet--but of the article and the quote from it.

The situation was a perfect example of dialogue on social media, in that it was a complete cluster-debacle: a bitter contest of hot air occurring parallel to life offline (I was out shopping with my family), flippant about matters of life and death, arising between strangers whose tone is either casual or vicious, fast-paced and careless, with the most ignorant voices being the loudest, ambiguous to the point of incomprehensibility, with horrible spelling and grammar, hampered by character limits and online lingo, filled with snark and insult, rarely clever, and perhaps worst of all, broken into scattered threads that led nowhere. And it didn’t help my discomfort to realize that the quote, devoid of context, does contain some ambiguity.

That made it all partly my fault.

It was unsettling--after all, I have tweeted, blogged and donated money in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement since August 9, 2014 when Darren Wilson murdered Mike Brown. I felt the need to run damage control, but family matters called. I could have gladly done without social media that day, but I couldn’t take my mind off it: There were all those voices, what felt like masses but in retrospect was only a handful, publicly saying horrible things about me.

I eventually realized I was being given a dose of what many outspoken people on social media experience on a much larger and wickeder scale on a daily basis. The first examples that popped into my head were DeRay McKesson and Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian. Agree or disagree with them, they are prominent individuals who are on a daily basis the targets of vile slander and even death threats. How awful it must be to have that happening all the time--whether due to true disagreement or misunderstanding.

And, of course, the victims of online attack need not be famous. Given all the vitriol on social media, everyone is subjected to it at some point, perhaps frequently, and some people experience real mental trauma because of online attacks. My heart always breaks when I hear a news story about a teenager committing suicide due to bullying by peers on Facebook or other platforms, but now I understand a little better, by extrapolation from my own minor fracas, how intense their pain must have been. There has been a growing number of voices calling for efforts to save the Internet from trolls. Let us hope some measures are implemented that prove to be successful.

My response to the attacks was generally to favorite and retweet them, and to reply simply that the article and quote are critical of the police, not Sandra Bland. I detest bickering, so I played it flat in tone. I doubt any of you will be surprised when I add that I never received a simple, “Sorry, I misunderstood.” When it came to those who appeared to actually believe Sandra Bland was responsible for her own death, I ignored them, as I did those whose replies were literally nonsense. This, too, is a regularly occurring phenomenon online.

And I’m not complaining about what happened to me, because while this post’s focus is what I found to be an illustrative example of public debate in our time, the more important issue is the way the police harass, assault and kill the populace with immunity. Of all the ways Brian Encinia could have handled that traffic stop, he chose an extremely disturbing one that ultimately resulted in the loss of a woman who, as the video below shows, was a beautiful soul:

 

 

Previous related posts:

Why It’s Difficult to Talk About the Killing of Police Officers
When Is an Unarmed Teen Not Unarmed?
Don’t Look Away from Mike Brown
Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

 

Why It's Difficult to Talk About the Killing of Police Officers

When Ismaayil Brinsley shot to death two New York City police officers, the public conversation immediately merged with the debate about police killings because Brinsley had been upset over Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the NYPD. The debate has dominated my thoughts, but I’ve found it difficult to say anything.

The most obvious thing one might express is sorrow over the deaths of Officers Wenjian Liu and Raphael Ramos and sympathy for their families, but there are two problems with this. The first is that it may sound hollow, like those who always said about Trayvon Martin, “It’s too bad when any life is lost, but drugs, riots, low pants, blah, blah, blah.” These people reduce the dead human being to a preface to what they really care about, which is blaming the victim, denigrating his defenders and defending the murderer. I wouldn’t want to do the same to Liu and Ramos because their lives are no mere preface to whatever narratives I have adopted as a supporter of the protesters.

The other problem is that any statement of sympathy for the NYPD, however obvious or morally just, inevitably plays into the hands of those who have been waiting for their chance to shut down the protest movement. They have had no qualms about using Liu’s and Ramos’s deaths to further attack the Black Lives Matter movement by blaming the protestors for encouraging Brinsley’s actions and by calling for a suspension of the protests. They know very well that once a protest movement dissolves, it rarely comes back anytime soon.

And, of course, one might fight back by saying that Brinsley didn’t represent the protestors: He was a violent man with a criminal record who was disturbed enough to also shoot his ex-girlfriend and leave her to die immediately prior to his ambush on the police. Even claims that recent protests somehow pushed him over the edge are so tenuous that video of protesters chanting “Kill a cop!” had to be faked. But when the debate has been framed as protesters-vs.-police, anything less than police worship can sound like sympathy for the murderer.

Which is exactly what the protests are against.

Even broad statements to the effect that All Lives Matter are no good because they strengthen the appearance that the two putative sides--the police and aggrieved communities--are equal, when they are anything but. Brinsley’s actions were illegal, the police acted to stop him, and police departments have policies for helping the families of fallen officers. By contrast, the system turned its back on Eric Garner’s family and let the killers walk. Teenager Mike Brown’s killer walked. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s killers are on administrative leave. The police dismissed the shooting of Akai Gurley as an accident. John Crawford’s killers walked. News came out this week that Jordan Baker’s killer will walk. And this will continue until--if you care--you despair of it.

But how volubly am I willing to press these points when right now the families of two police officers are grieving their own loss amid a media swirl?

Thus, I’ve found it difficult to say anything about the Brinsley killings. The situation is a perfect example of how speech is imperfect and performative. You intend to say one thing but come across or are received differently. You say one thing, but your words have a different effect, even a contradictory one. Aware of that, the best I can do is offer this post analyzing the complications and hope such a contribution isn’t entirely without value.