(Albuquerque, NM) After Newtown, President Obama “direct[ed] the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education to launch a National Dialogue on Mental Health.” This presidential directive led, in turn, to “community conversations,” including a big meeting here in Albuquerque on Saturday. I am here because I serve on the board of Everyday Democracy, which helped to organize the Albuquerque deliberation.
Note that the whole effort began in response to the Newtown shooting, but the focus shifted—for understandable, if debatable reasons—from guns to mental illness. Now, several months later, it is very hard to talk about gun violence without thinking about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. And the president has called for a national dialogue on race.
These shifts of topic raise a general and urgent question about framing, or, in blunter terms, What should we talk about?
For instance, if you are concerned about the Trayvon Martin killing, it may be because you despise anti-black racism and oppose “stand your ground” laws. If you are still thinking about the Newtown murders today, you probably want to regulate or ban assault weapons. On the other hand, if you oppose gun control and think (as most white Americans say they do) that anti-black racism is overemphasized, then you may want to change the focus away from Trayvon Martin and away from Newtown. You may find urban crime a more congenial topic, because the accused are disproportionately Black, and gun control has been used locally without seeming to work. See, for example, Pat Buchanan.
Incidentally, people like Buchanan have helped to make the Martin case a major news story by talking about how “the media” is overplaying it. Within their own circles, they want to talk about the Zimmerman trial, which reinforces their views about race and guns. (It allows them to remind everyone that men who look like them can act as the law.) The debate about whether we should be talking about the Trayvon Martin case actually increases attention to the case and serves the interest of the hard right as well as civil rights groups.
As a participant in political debates, you are entitled to try to shift the focus. Each framing pushes the conversation in certain directions instead of others. So it is not intrinsically wrong to say, in response to the Trayvon Martin case, “Let’s talk about the 500 murders committed in Chicago last year.”
In fact, I also want to talk about urban crime, including the crimes committed by young Black men, which produce many victims and also partially explain why nearly 1 million African American men are incarcerated today. Not only Pat Buchanan but also the NAACP want people to know that African Americans are disproportionately convicted of crimes.
So what is the right conversation for us to be having in this situation? I would say we need to be able to talk both about urban violent crime–in which Black people are disproportionately perpetrators and victims–and racially motivated violence against African Americans. One of those topics must not be eclipsed or trivialized by invoking the other one. If the phrase “comparisons are odious” means anything, its wisdom emerges in cases like this. It would be true but odious to say that almost as many German gentiles died in WWII as Jews died in the Holocaust. It’s not that the German lives were valueless and we shouldn’t care, but the comparison trivializes. Likewise, a person who cared about all these victims would not casually juxtapose 500 homicides in Chicago against 27 in Newtown and one in Sanford, FL.
Although no one should try to eclipse one topic with the other, they may be related in various important ways. For instance, maybe we teach most Americans (Black as well as White) to think that Black people’s lives are cheap. Then Zimmerman’s decision to shoot had something in common with decisions that are taken nearly every day in cities like Chicago. It is also true that many people are sincerely afraid of crime, and their fear is legitimately part of the conversation.
One place where both police (or vigilante) violence against Black people and crime committed by Black people are extensively and continually discussed is within the African American community itself. At “Frontiers of Democracy,” Peter Pihos gave a great historical talk about Chicago around 1970, when crime was rising rapidly and mass incarceration was just around the corner. He focused on several African American leaders who very explicitly opposed both “genocide” (by the white government) and “suicide” (by the Black community) and connected them to each other. That was an important moment, but similar discourse has been constant and vibrant. After all, compared to the national population, African Americans are disproportionately represented in urban police forces, corrections departments, and among the citizens who call the police and sometimes complain about slow and inadequate responses. So this is a subgroup of Americans on both sides of the prison industry and well aware of that.
A right-wing trope holds that we don’t pay enough attention to crimes committed by Black people because that discussion would violate political correctness. We may indeed not talk very well about race and racism, but our actions speak loudly. We spend about $27 billion a year simply incarcerating African Americans,* to say nothing of the costs of policing and the judicial process. Michigan, whose great city is bankrupt, spends one fifth of its general fund on prisons. California spends more on prisons than on its once-vaunted system of public higher education. The relative silence on this topic in venues like the US Congress is indeed problematic, but we can’t let that silence be filled by the kind of words one sees on open comment forums about the Zimmerman trial. It must be a conversation about how to treasure and protect all human lives.
*I extrapolate from the total cost of prisons ($68 billion) and the proportion of all prisoners who are Black (roughly 40%).