Everyone's Life Matters

Probably like a lot of people, following the murder of George Floyd, I have been researching campaigns to end police brutality both in America and Britain, or call for justice for victims of police violence, such as this one.

In the unlikely event that you haven’t been reading the news (or, more likely, that you have seen so many news reports about riots that the original reason for the riots became obscured), Mr Floyd was an American man who was arrested for allegedly using counterfeit money.  Derek Chauvin, the policeman arresting him, decided, after he was already handcuffed, to force him face-down on the pavement and kneel on his neck until he died of suffocation, and to keep on kneeling on his neck even as emergency medical workers tried to revive him.  Two other officers held Mr Floyd down while this was going on, and a fourth stopped onlookers from intervening.

Mr Floyd was black, Mr Chauvin is white, and the murder was, as many protesters around the world have noticed, symptomatic of the way that many white people (especially in America) behave towards black people.  However, I would say that it is also symptomatic of the way that many police (especially in America) behave towards members of the public.

CampaignZero, an organisation which aims to reform the American police force, offers suggested reforms such as ‘restrict officers from using deadly force unless all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted,’ with the worrying implication that the police do not already do this.  American police recruits spend seven times as much time learning how to shoot as learning how to calm situations down so that they won’t have to shoot people.

We can’t write off the problem either of racism or of police brutality, or for that matter racist police brutality, as a purely American one, of course.  We all remember the case of Jean Charles deMenezes, the Brazilian man who was shot in 2005 by London police because they thought he looked like the terrorist Osman Hussain.  (Look at the photos on their respective Wikipedia articles - do you think they look remotely alike, beyond being non-white?)

Considering the appalling level of racist violence, it sounds very petty of me to complain that I find the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ irritating.  But it is one of these statements that:

1.                  Is so self-evidently true that it should be too obvious to need stating

2.                  Has to be re-iterated because, apparently, some people don’t see it as obvious

3.                  Can be counter-productive if it implies that people’s lives matter for the wrong reason.

You may argue that I feel this way simply because I’m white, and therefore don’t need to worry about it.  But my first encounter with statements like these referred to groups that I did belong to.  On a car journey when I was a child, I remember my younger brother reading out incredulously the sticker in the rear window of the car in front: ‘“Violence against women and children is a crime.”  Well, duh, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?  Violence against anyone is a crime!’

My mother agreed with him that yes, obviously it was, but the problem was that so many people assumed that it wasn’t: that domestic violence where a man beat his wife or parents beat their children was just part of their private life and outsiders shouldn’t interfere.

My mother was right, of course.  But so was my brother.  Singling out specific groups of the population as ‘mattering’ can accidentally imply that other groups matter less – for example, in the case of domestic violence, that this is less of a crime if the victim is a man.  I would feel more comfortable if people were spreading the message that everyone’s life matters, and that violence against anyone is a crime.

Schools have a legal duty to teach children that it is illegal to discriminate against or bully anyone on grounds of race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, or gender reassignment.  However, sometimes giving schoolchildren a list of ‘protected characteristics’ can give the impression that bullying someone for a reason not on this list (for example, being a fan of the wrong football team, or dressing differently) is a less serious offence.  So a far more important plank of every school’s anti-bullying policy has to be teaching children that bullying anyone, for any reason, is always wrong.

Sometimes I wonder whether schools would be more effective in preaching the message of diversity if, in addition to educational books about racism and homophobia, they used fantasy and science fiction to get the message across more obliquely.  I recommend Diana Wynne Jones’ Witch Week (prejudice against witches), Power of Three (a world with three humanoid races, each of whom regard themselves as the only ‘real people’), Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (exploitation of people with four arms), and the City Watchbooks by Terry Pratchett (multi-species police force including dwarves [as in fantasy race, rather than short humans], trolls, the undead, golems, and gnomes).

My friend Walt Ogrod has recently been freed after twenty-eight years in prison, twenty-three of them on Death Row, for a murder he did not commit.  After a particularly horrible murder of a child, the police had felt that they needed to gain a reputation for solving crimes by getting someone convicted.  They picked Walt for no obvious reason except that he was a neighbour into whose house the child might have wandered, and that he seemed a bit odd (Walt is autistic).

Walt’s case is, horribly, not at all unusual.  Typically, detectives target naïve young people, often people with a mental illness or a learning disability.  Many victims of coerced false confessions are members of ethnic minorities.  Walt happens to be white.  But this does not make his imprisonment any more or less unjust than if he happened to be black.

Social inequality works in all kinds of nasty ways.  For example, a study in America found that black and Hispanic Americans are far more likely than white Americans to be exposed to air pollution (and therefore suffer damage to their health), despite producing far less of this pollution.  But this wouldn’t mean that it’s any less unjust when applied to working-class white people. 

Pollution is unjust.  Poverty is unjust.  Police violence and coerced confessions are unjust.  Domestic violence is unjust.  All these things are true irrespective of the colour, gender, or sexual orientation of the people facing injustice.

Spread the word: people’s lives matter.