The Sign Said that "Complacency=Violence"

Sign #4: “Complacency=Violence”

                Spent some time considering this one.  At first glance, I was not convinced.  Turns out, that lack of conviction testifies to the power of complacency.  If it is not my truth, it is not truth.  But this is not about “my” truth.  This is accepting a greater truth, of a greater reality.  To accept it, my first step was to break it down from the whole into manageable parts. 

To start with the easiest, defining the commitment of violence.  In the case of this protest within BLM, it was the police officer pinning and killing George Floyd.  It continues a trend that goes back through the history of lynching, back through the slave history of our nation, the public execution of a colored person by whites.  That is the violence, where is the complacency? 

Was it the officers who were present but did nothing?

                To my mind, they were far more than complacent, they were complicit.  They carry the same guilt as Mr. Floyd’s murderer because they knew exactly what was going on and they did nothing to stop it.  They are no different from public gatherings at a lynching, where the people ‘of the community’ are as complicit as any person who laid hands on their fellow human being to end their life.  Because they don’t believe the black life matters.

                You know who else is not complacent?  Those who self-identify with the white supremacy movement.  Anyone who conforms to the tenets of white supremacy, that the ‘other races’ are inferior, that ‘they’ must be kept in their place, that ‘we’ are above them, they…we?...are complicit in what happened.

                The complacent are whites who self-identify as not being part of the white supremacy movement, who self-identify as not being racist, or at least ‘overtly’ racist, people who ‘feel bad’ when ‘things like this’ happen.  These are people who would “never” do anything like this themselves, and certainly would not condone it in others, yet people who will do nothing to change the world in which violence like this goes on.

                Now we come to the centerpiece of this sign.  “Complacency=Violence”.  It is easy to make the case that “Complicity=Violence”, but this?  There is an intensely persuasive cultural narrative that tells whites such an equivalency is just not possible.  It is that narrative that must be understood to be pierced.

                Because its like Kevlar, bullet proof material.  You know where its strength comes from?  Layers and layers of tightly woven fabric.  Not one or two or three layers are sufficient to stop a bullet, but pile up enough layers and the bullet, its power disrupted and dispersed by each successive layer, will eventually lose its effectiveness.

                We live in a nation where the cultural narrative is a layered barrier between the daily norm of interracial violence and the complacency of the self-identified non-racist white majority.  Here are a half dozen representative layers I have identified in my own interaction with the cultural narrative.

                Layer One is the Ideal of Equality.  As Jefferson put it, “All men are created equal.”  In the cultural narrative, this is romanticized that ‘men’ transcends race, gender, or anything that divides humanity.  Thus ‘racial division’ is, by this definition, a fallacy.

                Layer Two is the Presumption of Democracy.  We presume a peaceful process of debate and discussion, of concession, consensus, and binding agreement.  We express our opinion at the ballot box, at the public forum, in our freedom of speech and the press.  We fancy ourselves to be ‘civilized’.  Thus, each episode of violence we see in the media becomes, by this definition, an aberration.  And it is amazing how many aberrations we can absorb.   

                Layer Three is the Sieve of History.  A certain spin is put on events that are carefully selected.  So, the Civil War becomes Lincoln’s deliberate battle, on behalf of the whites, to end slavery in this country.  The definitive event is the Emancipation Proclamation.  That Lincoln’s view of slavery was far more ambivalent over time, that this Proclamation was as much an economic weapon in the North’s ‘total war’ against the South, that the Civil War is far more complicated in the history of our nation, those details are filtered out.  Instead, a narrowly defined interpretation of history is offered.

                Layer Four is the American twist on the Presupposition of Colonialism.  This is the presupposition of white superiority over the rest of the world, demonstrated as Europe colonized it “all”.  What is the twist?  America broke the notion of European ‘colonial’ superiority with our spin on “liberty” but never questioned the presupposition of white superiority.  Thus “Liberty” still masks that presupposition.

                Layer Five is the Legacy of the Great Fear.  The Great Fear in the antebellum south was the slave uprising.  Slaves on farms and plantations vastly outnumbered the local white populations and by the very nature of their tortured existence, were a threat, especially to the white women and children who were viewed as particularly vulnerable.  In 1791, this fear was realized just offshore with the slave uprising in Haiti, and the resultant slaughter of the whites.  The response was a culture of brutal repression and violent authoritarianism.  We carry the legacy of the Great Fear, its psychological vestiges in every moment that we walk past a young black man and feel anxiety. 

                Layer Six is the Response to the Great Fear.  Behind the Ideal of Equality, beneath the Presumption of Democracy, while the culture of brutal repression and violent authoritarianism have changed by degree, it has not gone away.  But the white community, those not complicit in the violence, we don’t see it.  We have colored friends, minority friends, but they ‘go with the flow’ of this cultural narrative that ‘all are equal’.  Do we have any idea how much trust is necessary for a person of color to share the stories of the reality of their experiences with white supremacy with someone who is white? 

                Layer Seven…Eight…Nine…how many more?  What else weaves into the Kevlar of the cultural narrative that puts blinders on the white majority so we do NOT see the reality of this nation’s racial underbelly?  We hide in the reinforced ignorance of our self-identification as not white supremacist.  The result is our living in a utopian view of the world that overlooks every ‘aberration’ to the Presumption of Democracy in the violence committed against people of color.  That’s why complacency =violence, because we refuse to do the work to penetrate through the ‘kevlar’ of the cultural narrative.

                That’s why I said that at first glance, I wasn’t convinced of the truth of this sign.  That is not because I did not know it to be true.  It is because I felt the shame of how long I have been a part of that complacency.  For that, I must ask forgiveness, drop the blinders, and speak the truth.

Peter Hofstra