Asphyxiation, or, Sickness Unto Death
- By Jim Hicks
You know the call, so here I’ll simply turn it to task:
“Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!” “Can we get a jury?” “Hell no!”
After these long years of hate, and after this, our nation’s latest failed Reconstruction, what else could we expect? Justice? Democracy? Some measure of public institutions we can believe in? The long arc indeed. . .
Perhaps because the nightmare of history I spend my time thinking about is as much outside our borders as in, a comment heard at a lecture by Samantha Power years ago has lately been rattling through my head. As the headlines keep piling on: Ferguson, Cleveland, Staten Island; no end, apparently, to these so-called exceptional situations. And yet what, after all, is the common or garden level of state violence directed at . . . well, all of you who ain’t no old white guy like me?
When Power came to Mt. Holyoke College, not too many years ago, she (who wasn’t yet in power) wondered why we insistently call them civil rights only in referring to matters within our own borders, when on the rest of the planet we’ve declared the very same list human rights. (As Adam Sitze just reminded me, Malcolm X made a similar argument back in the ‘60s—we should hope Sam keeps stealing from genius.) Civil rather than human. . . Then do we someways believe, here in the US, that such issues are political, rather than fundamental, existential, nothing less than ontological? Do we then mean to suggest that the effect of some momentary insanity of ballot-box stuffing—like, say, the last election—should or could legally empower the state to enact yet further crimes against the humanity of our own citizens? Been there, done that.
Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch will clearly continue to survey the wreckage in the weeks and months to come. I have a book to recommend to them. It’s written by an expert in what, elsewhere on the planet, has come to be called “transitional justice.” Back in 2000, Priscilla Hayner published a study she called Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity—the first, and, so far as I know, still the best comparative analysis of truth commissions. Hayner examined twenty-one separate commissions (with a total of forty in the second edition), giving extended commentaries on two in South America, two in Central America, and, of course, South Africa (that commission people tend to think of when they’re lucky enough not to have their own history in front of them).
“Does truth lead to reconciliation?” Hayner asks. The question is tougher than you think. She continues, “This is perhaps the most oft-repeated notion in the territory of truth-seeking . . . Yet it is easy to imagine that the opposite might sometimes also be true, or, more important, that reconciliation, as hazy a concept as that can be, may be more affected by other factors . . . For example, true reconciliation might depend on a clear end to the threat of further violence; a reparations program for those injured; attention to structural inequalities and the basic material needs of victimized communities; the existence of natural linkages in society that bring formerly opposing parties together, or, most simply (although often overlooked), the simple passage of time.”
There is a terrible irony in the fact Eric Garner’s homicide came at the hands of an officer of the law named Pantaleo, a variant of Pantalone, that central character in the grand Italian theatrical tradition of commedia dell’arte. And, worse yet, the second officer given desk duty after this horrorshow sports the moniker Justin Damico . . . No self-respecting fiction editor or writing workshop would ever let you call your characters that.
Unlike his Venetian namesake, Pantaleo—much like Damico, another member of Staten Island’s large Italian American community—is neither a rich merchant nor a member of the ruling class. They’re both just lackeys. A friend of mine who teaches Italian at the SUNY’s Staten Island campus often jokes that his students are nearly all poliziotti and shampooiste (police and hairdressers). Unlike the historians David Roediger and Jennifer Guglielmo, however, the denizens of Staten Island are unlikely to understand fully the fragility of at least some forms of race-based social hierarchy in the US, or to recall that Italians themselves haven’t been all that white for all that long.
In his Higher Ground, Craig Werner comments that, “For African American performance to work, the performer must receive a response, be it the rallying cry of the community around the political leader calling them to action, the punctuated cries of “Yes, Lord” and “Tell it” greeting Mahalia Jackson and James Brown, or the classic soul samples of twenty-first century hip-hop. Drawing on the experience and insights of the entire community, call and response forms the living, breathing core of African American politics.”
This nation, if it still dares to claim its name, must today organize a federal, truth-seeking, sanctions-and-reparations-wielding commission to investigate its legalized monopoly of violence and the racist abuses of power it continues to sanction daily. The thought that body cameras might do anything positive at all is laughable on one level and sinister on another. Citizen review boards, where activists are engaged in police brutality investigations—another of Adam’s suggestions—would be a more democratic (instead of surveillance state) answer.
If there is no response to the call, then these United States must surely again become what they were until the final decades of the nineteenth century (before we fought what, in the North at least, we still most often call the Civil War); namely, a plural, not a singular, noun.
Assuming we aren’t that already.
