Exceptional Brutality
by David J. Leonard and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan
Like many, we have been outraged by recent episodes of police violence at UC Berkeley and UC Davis in recent weeks. The sight of police officers brutalizing men and women with batons and pepper spray is antithetical to justice. Yet, we have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the public discourse, one that has given an inordinate amount of attention to these instances, treating them as unique and exceptional rather than indicative of systemic state-sanctioned violence. The overall tone of shock works from an idea that police violence should not happen on American college campuses. But in the absence of a similar level of outrage resulting from police violence in urban communities throughout the United States we are left wondering about the dangers in this exceptional discourse. For example, in her otherwise powerful call for leadership, Cathy Davidson asks, “How could this be happening at Davis—and at other campuses too? Why are students who are peaceably protesting being treated like criminals?” Rather than asking how could this happen at college campuses, shouldn’t we be asking how could this happen anywhere? How can any person be subjected to repression, violence, and instruments of dehumanization? A discourse that imagines police violence, whether bully-club justice or pepper spray, as proper when dealing with criminals rather than students gives us pause because of its inability to advance justice for all.
Similarly Bob Ostertag, in “Militarization Of Campus Police,” furthers the denunciation of the violence at UC Davis through the systematic juxtaposition of students from real-criminals.
And regulations prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. Any prison guard who used pepper spray on a seated prisoner would face immediate disciplinary review for the use of excessive force. Even in the case of a prison riot in which inmates use extreme violence, once a prisoner sits down he or she is not considered to be an imminent threat. And if prison guards go into a situation where the use of pepper spray is considered likely, they are required to have medical personnel nearby to treat the victims of the chemical agent.
Apparently, in the state of California felons incarcerated for violent crimes have rights that students at public universities do not.
Beyond the establishment of a binary that situates students in an oppositional relationship to felons, the logic here leads one to conclude that students are subjected to more state violence than those subjected to incarceration within the Prison Industrial Complex. Worse yet, if anyone should be subjected to pepper stray, it should be felons who within the national imagination are both undesirable and dangerous, unworthy and suspect. In yet another layer of news media irony, these recent displays of brutal and inhumane police force reaffirm the reluctance of black, brown, and poor folk to enter into the Occupy movement in the first place. The specter of police brutality haunts poor, black, and brown communities. Students’ experiences – with this commonly experienced interface between citizens and those charged with protecting citizens – garner lead-story status while daily victims struggle to find any modicum of public support, or media coverage, much less - justice.
The sentiment of exceptionalism is not limited to the public reaction to police violence at UC Davis. It was equally evident in the wake of police brutally attacking members of Occupy Berkeley as part of their efforts to disperse the group and remove tents. Prompting widespread condemnation from the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, from various national commentators including Stephen Colbert, the police violence against Berkeley students elicited a disproportionate level of attention. In our estimation, the attention and the rhetorical tone reflects the presumed exceptionalism of these instances and the presumed innocence and humanity reserved for students.
We wonder also how these peaceful demonstrations – violently policed – compare to those violent ‘demonstrations’ moderately policed at Penn State University. Somehow students violently demonstrating in support of a football program in an academic institution that is allegedly complicit in the rape and sexual abuse of children, warrant greater consideration than students peaceably demonstrating in solidarity with OWS and in support of their own challenges with the rising costs of college tuition. Something simply is not right here. The police acting on behalf of the state/institution is now commonplace praxis in the 21st century. But the synthesis of these recent actions with certain ideological positions and the media’s depiction and coverage of these events paints a sinister portrait of police institutions. KRS ONE’s critical question,– “Who Protects Us from You?” – directed at the boys in blue circa 1989 – remains eerily unanswered.
The media coverage and the outrage, while warranted, illustrates how police violence against students – middle-class and overwhelmingly white – prompts outrage while eliciting accountability, whereas the daily violence against the poor, against communities of color, often goes unnoticed and unchecked. “Not to diminish what happened at UC Davis, but it's worth considering what happens in poor neighborhoods and prisons, far from the cameras. I'm not saying that to diminish this video in anyway,” writes Ta-Nishi Coates in “The Cops we deserve.” “But I'd like people to see this as part of a broad systemic attitude we've adopted as a country toward law enforcement. There's a direct line from this officer invoking his privilege to brutalize these students, and an officer invoking his privilege to detain Henry Louis Gates for sassing him.”
In treating violence on college campuses, and that directed at student protestors as exceptional and therefore deserving national attention, the conversation inadvertently normalizes and erases the much more commonplace violence experienced by black and brown youth in communities throughout the United States. Worse yet, the emphasis on the students as undeserving in comparison to those “real criminals” advances a Jim Crow system of justice where the systemic level of state violence besieging America’s poor and communities of color is rendered as justifiable. “Bridging communities is difficult, writes Erinn Carter. Yet “Connecting the day-to-day struggles of communities of color to the immediate violence of police brutality is something that groups must do if they are going to garner the support of the community.” What happened at Davis and Berkeley is what happens in communities across America, where black and brown youth, where America’s poor, are subjected to the power of the state, a militarized police that holds in check those populations that are deemed surplus, undesirable, and suspect in the national imagination.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackManand blogs @ No Tsuris.
James Braxton Peterson is director of Africana Studies and associate professor of English, Lehigh University. Peterson’s academic work focuses on Africana studies, narrative, graphic novels, and hip-hop culture. He is the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC, an association of hip-hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban, and youth cultures. Peterson is a regular contributor to The Root.com and he has appeared on Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, and various local television networks as an expert on hip-hop culture, popular culture, urban youth, and politics.
