Thoughts on the First Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd

Curmie makes no promises, but it may be that he’ll be returning to writing more blog pieces in the future.  He’s teaching a single course this summer, and it not only has no meetings on Fridays, but it ends in late June.  He’s officially retiring effective August 31, although he’ll be teaching a couple of courses as an “adjunct” in the fall, will keep the small cadre of advisees he now has (but add no more), and will supervise a student production of a play he acted in several years before the student director in question was born.  <Sigh.>  I hope to maintain at least my current level of scholarly activity—there’s a book chapter awaiting my revision, two conference presentations for later this summer, and at least two conference papers that I’d like to turn into articles.  And I’ll continue my presidency of a national honor society for another year or two, at least.

But it’s already clear that giving up the multitudinous service activities undertaken for the department, college, and university will free up literally dozens of hours of time; taken in conjunction with the required reduction in teaching load, I’ll definitely be able to devote myself to some other things.  A friend who retired from university teaching some years ago  remains a more active scholar than I’ll ever be; he describes his current life as “less of the same, and without the boring bits.”  I’m hoping for a similar experience.  One of the manifestations of such an eventuality would be at least a weekly blog post.  On y verra, as they say en France.

So, where to begin after such spotty blogging activity for several years?  There are a lot of potential topics vying for attention right now, but what comes first to Curmie’s mind is the anniversary earlier this week of the death of George Floyd.  I approach this topic, curiously enough, in the spirit of moderation. 

Here, it might be valuable to tease out the differences in meaning between two often conflated concepts: vagueness and ambiguity.  The former suggests that there is no clearly identifiable meaning; the latter implies that different, perhaps even opposed, implications might exist simultaneously.  The George Floyd case is vague only in terms of details we don’t yet know and probably never will.  It is ambiguous or even multivalent in virtually everything else.  Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to disentangle the strands.  In Curmie’s world, a B student might have gotten there with 3 B’s, or with 2 A’s and a D, etc.  In the Floyd case, as with that hypothetical B student, what is difficult to find is anything approaching a complete picture.

What we see in most of the “mainstream” press coverage of both the death of Mr. Floyd and its aftermath—the BLM protests, the trial, etc.—is a sort of gasping idolatry of a petty criminal, for that’s what Floyd was.  (Curmie gets it: he wasn’t only that.)  We barely hear about the medical examiner’s report that drug use and an underlying heart condition were contributing causes of Floyd’s death, albeit his ultimate conclusion was that the restraint by police, specifically by Derek Chauvin, was the primary cause.  And the presumed racial motivation of Chauvin’s actions has been taken as given from the outset, without any evidence, let alone proof.

Nor is it possible to deny that some of the literally billions of dollars of damage from riots was caused by those who used BLM as a justification—or perhaps as a cover—for their actions.  (Note: Curmie was seeing the catch-phrase “Black Lives Matter” long before the death of Mr. Floyd, but it didn’t achieve the spotlight until last year.)

So let’s get this straight.  Were Chauvin’s actions appropriate?  No.  Criminal?  Yes.  Murder 1?  Doubtful at best.  Felony murder or Murder 2?  Maybe.  Manslaughter?  In all likelihood.  Was Chauvin a bad cop?  Yes.  Should he have been removed from the police force long before this incident?  Apparently so.  Was the system that kept Chauvin on the job racist?  Somewhere between “perhaps” and “probably.”  Did Floyd’s race have anything to do with Chauvin’s actions?  Maybe, but there has been literally no actual evidence adduced to support that conclusion.  Let me repeat that: none. 

The fact that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black might, of course, be relevant, but it strikes me that this is ultimately a problem one encounters early in a course in formal logic: the fact that A implies B does not mean that B implies A.  That is, all racists are inherently bad cops, but not all bad cops are racists.  (Spare me the “all white people are racist” dogma.  It gets us nowhere.)  And, as Curmie noted in the aftermath, cops across the country, presumably aware of increased scrutiny, responded not by toning down the violence against black people, but evening the score by abusing a few white folks.  The problem is bad cops, and a system that covers up for them; many, but nowhere near all, manifestations of these people’s unfitness involve racism.

So, were the protests legitimate?  Yes, in the sense that the widely viewed video seemed to tell us everything we needed to know (although it now appears that perhaps it didn’t).  Yes, in the sense that racism certainly exists in this country and police forces are particularly rife with it.  Yes, in the sense that protests are nearly always legitimate, using that term to mean legally, morally, and ethically responsible.  No, in the sense that this was not the event that should be the watershed moment.  (Had it been the killing of Breonna Taylor or the death of Sandra Bland, Curmie would be more on board.)  No, in the sense that not all of the protests were non-violent.  Which leads us to…

Was a good deal of the violence and property damage resulting from protests that turned into riots perpetrated by BLM activists, or at least by those claiming that affiliation with no denials by BLM leaders?  Yes.  Was a good deal of that violence and property damage perpetrated by white racists seeking to undermine the credibility of the BLM movement, or simply by violence-prone assholes using BLM as an excuse?  Yes.  Was a good deal of the violence in particular initiated by the toxic masculinity, arrogance, and irresponsibility of police forces… and in at least isolated cases, by federally-funded mercenaries?  Yes.

So, is the introspection precipitated by the reaction to the Chauvin/Floyd case a good thing?  Yes, in that honest self-evaluation is an inherent positive.  Yes, to the extent that it brought about in unprecedented ways an examination of the power structures in American society and the extent to which that hegemony is exclusionary along racial lines.  No, in that what started as a positive desire to recognize and celebrate diversity has morphed into witch hunts, quotas, and frankly Stalinistic thought control. 

Lest you think Curmie is exaggerating the last point, allow me to direct your attention you to “socialist realism,” a policy which required Russian artists not merely to avoid saying or doing anything critical of the USSR or the Communist Party, but to actively advocate for those entities.  How is that different from universities which now base hiring and promotion/tenure decisions to a large degree not on proven abilities as a teacher or researcher, but on demonstrated, active, commitment to the Great Gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

At the very least, faculty are expected to participate in “workshops” on these issues.  Curmie has endured dozens of variations on this theme on many topics over the years.  There are two constants: there is never any useful information, only opinion masquerading as fact; and Curmie always leaves far more angry than enlightened... and actively resistant to the propaganda he's just withstood.  (Side note: many of the voluntary programs have, in fact, proved valuable.  I did a weekend-long workshop in Rape Crisis Intervention 30-ish years ago, for example.  I've only used it twice in the ensuing time... but I’ve used it twice in the ensuing time.)

Thirty years ago, Curmie got into trouble for saying that whereas there is much to be gained by applying a feminist lens to texts, not all feminist arguments are good arguments.  The cause du jour has changed, but the expectation of ideological compliance has not.  Alas.

Concentrating for a moment on the professional world Curmie inhabits: this enforced singularity of vision runs through universities and professional organizations alike.  Case in point: there’s an organization Curmie has belonged to for decades.  The committee structure has always worked like this: committee chairs are elected by the membership, subcommittee chairs are appointed by the chairs, and committee members… wait for it… simply volunteer to serve; no one is turned away.  Anyone willing to work is given a task.  But it turns out that a couple of committees have an “under-representation of people of color”… so white people, some of whom have specific expertise, are now being denied access to those committees on which POC folks have expressed no interest, and the organization is denied access to their skills, in the name of “diversity.”  We have to make those percentages work out, after all.

Of course, other power structures—state legislatures, boards of trustees, and the like—are reacting in precisely the opposite way: forbidding discussion of race-sensitive issues and attempting to enforce their own monomaniacal vision, in which American exceptionalism is to be taken as a given, but curricula must otherwise be “apolitical.”  One group wants Critical Race Theory to be mandatory; another wants it completely expunged.  The idea that it might be available, possibly required in certain specific disciplines in the sense of knowing its tenets, but with no expectation of having to agree with its conclusions: this doesn’t seem to be acceptable to the ideologues on either extreme… and it appears at first glance that virtually everyone indeed positions themselves at those opposing poles.  Curmie doubts this is actually true, but those positioned at both extremes demand absolute fidelity.

All of this messiness, this swirl of competing ideologies, this series of simultaneously “yes” and “no” responses, never seems to all come into focus at the same time in the same commenter.  On the one hand, we have the majority of the center-left news agencies and Democratic pols applauding George Floyd as some sort of messianic hero, the noble if accidental progenitor of Racial Justice, the Second Coming of MLK.  On the other side, we have the rightwing press and the GOP condemning all things BLM-related, labeling anyone remotely affiliated with the movement as thuggish, communist (!), anti-American, and probably responsible for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.  OK, maybe not that last one, but give them time.

At the moment, universities are more interested in pandering to leftwing claptrap than to rightwing claptrap.  That will probably change, especially in state institutions in red states, before long.  But the glorious concept of the university as the testing ground for opposing ideas, as the site where disputants recognize in each other the desire to seek the truth, as the vigilant guardian of intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression: this vision, the one Curmie believed in when he started out in the profession 40-odd years ago… this noble cause lies in the ICU, gasping for what may soon be its last breath.  

Do black lives matter?  Indubitably.  What about Black Lives Matter?  Sort of.  Any full-throated endorsement or condemnation will forever leave Curmie saying, “yeah, but…”

Thoughts on Statue-Toppling

The recent BLM-associated protests spawned a lot of commentary, and a lot of internet memes. One of the more interesting was the one you see here: “A example of white privilege. You keep saying ‘it’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop.’ Try saying ‘It’s horrible that property is being destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop.’ Priorities. Make sense?” (Curmie cleaned up the punctuation a little.)

What’s really happening here is an exercise in rhetorical strategy: if X and Y are both true but seem at some level to be in opposition, then the speaker or writer inevitably prioritizes the one mentioned last. “X but Y” means we should pay particular attention to Y, although X is also true.  (“X although Y” works in the other direction.) Curmie was thinking about this in the light of the recent spate of statue-topplings across the country and indeed around the world.

Let’s start with a couple of general principles.

1. Statues are commemorative, and carry the implication that the person being portrayed is worthy of honor for a particular action or (very occasionally) for the entirety of a life well lived.
2. Statues are also public art, and ought to be afforded some limited status (and stature) on that basis.
3. We can know history without statues. (There are lots of memes about that one, too... see below.) Still, they can serve as useful reminders of our past.
4. Some but not all of the violence and destruction of the last few weeks was perpetrated by BLM protestors. Some was attributable to opportunists who just got a thrill out of destruction, some to white supremacists seeking to discredit the BLM movement.
5. Anyone who rejoiced at the toppling of statues to Lenin or Saddam Hussein cannot now argue that the destruction of monuments to the past is inherently wrong.
6. No mortal who has ever lived is or was perfect. If you, Gentle Reader, choose to believe that, say, Jesus never sinned, you are within your rights to do so. But surely you must acknowledge the manifold sins committed in his name, even against believers who, for example, chose to worship Him in a different way than the perpetrator.

This last point is what brings us back to a consideration of rhetoric. Which is more important: that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves or that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and served two successful terms as President of the United States? that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a serial adulterer or that he was the standard-bearer for the non-violent civil rights movement? that Winston Churchill was an entitled racist asshole, or that he led his country through the perils of World War II against someone far worse? Can you imagine the horrors that would have ensued had Britain been led during WWII by a different entitled racist asshole, someone with no more competence than Boris Johnson, or [shudder] Donald Trump?

Importantly, we commemorate the achievements of these men (and the women similarly honored, too, of course), not their failures. If we think of the great baseball player Hank Aaron, who hit more home runs than any other non-steroid-enhanced player in major league baseball history and still holds the record—even against the juicers—for total bases and RBIs, we don’t feel compelled to talk about the fact that he struck out over 600 times more than he homered. Similarly, we don’t forget that George Washington owned slaves, or that Ben Franklin had syphilis… but that’s not what the statue is about.

And now we’re at the important part. Curmie reverts to his high school and undergrad debate team days: the presumption rests with the negative, or with the status quo. In other words, if the rationale for tearing a statue down and the rationale for keeping it are equally persuasive, it stays (but a new one wouldn’t be erected in similar circumstances). The argument to remove (by force or otherwise) a statue must then clearly outweigh the argument to let it stand. For this to happen, the subject’s transgressions must be foregrounded to the extent that even significant accomplishments pale by comparison, or that the accomplishments were used as a means of doing ill (or thinking one can get away with anything): think Bill Cosby or Kevin Spacey.

Of course, one could argue that some achievements are of such paramount importance that virtually no iniquity could be sufficient to remove a commemoration: perhaps the William Shakespeares and Marie Curies of the world would qualify (although putting even George Washington in that category would be controversial, as evidenced by recent events). But such instances are very rare, indeed. Similarly, there are a handful of easy calls in the other direction: the deposed dictator, for example… or, a memorial to the Confederacy, with two statues of soldiers. Because treason isn’t really that cool anymore. Or, across the pond, the Belgian King Leopold II, whose genocide in the Congo may be the worst in human history.

Indeed, the only unquestionably outrageous vandalism Curmie has seen is that of a statue to Hans Christian Heg in Madison, Wisconsin. Heg was an abolitionist and a Civil War hero on the Union side. A less appropriate choice of target for protesters concerned with racial justice would be difficult to imagine. Curmie finds it hard to argue with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s claim that “There is a lot of ignorance out there of what people are really fighting for.” It would certainly do the protestors’ cause a lot of good to disassociate from the imbeciles.

One step, but only a step, closer to sanity was the toppling of a statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco. Grant’s legacy is complex, even self-contradictory. He was a slave-owner himself (briefly, of a man he freed three years before the Emancipation Proclamation), but he is known to history primarily as the commander of the Union army that successfully defeated the slave-owning Confederacy. As President, he sought to crush the Ku Klux Klan, but also orchestrated an illegal war against the Lakota. He believed in the intrinsic superiority of the all things white and Christian, but his post-Presidential visit to Meiji era Japan is thought by many theatre historians (including Curmie) to have been instrumental in the preservation of Nō theatre, which he was the first American ever to witness: this despite the fact that Grant was anything but a patron of the arts. He was, in short, worthy of both praise and scorn—more of both, perhaps, than most of us, but in perhaps about the same ratio. We must recognize the positives even as we remain cognizant of the negatives.

Gregory Downs, a historian specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, nicely summarizes Grant’s legacy in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. His first paragraph is probably his most important: “The toppling of Ulysses Grant’s statue in Golden Gate Park on Friday night reminds us that we need an engaged, passionate debate about Grant’s legacy, but we cannot depend upon the whims of a dictatorial mob to deepen our understanding of our nation’s troubling history.”

And so it goes through many of the statue defacings, topplings, and other vandalisms. Christopher Columbus? Sure, I guess. Francis Scott Key? OK, maybe. Miguel de Cervantes? Huh? As Steve Rubenstein and Rachel Swan write, understatedly, in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Politics seemed incidental to much of the damage.” True, that.

Edward Colston needed a bath.

Abroad, there was the widely-publicized tearing down of a statue of Edward Colston. True, he was a major philanthropist. But exactly how did he get the money for that largesse? The trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yep. Throw the S.O.B. into the river. The statue was subsequently recovered, but Historic England, the non-governmental agency charged with the responsibility for the statue's upkeep, seems in no rush to have the statue restored to its former location:

Whilst we do not condone the unauthorised removal of a listed structure, we recognise and understand the emotion and the hurt that public historical commemoration can generate and we encourage Bristol City Council to engage in a city wide conversation about the future of the statue. We are here to offer guidance and support but believe the decision is best made at a local level – we do not believe it must be reinstated.

A couple years back, Curmie was writing about the “Confederate” flag, and mentioned in passing the statue of Oliver Cromwell near the Houses of Parliament in London:

Let’s face it: Cromwell doesn’t have a lot to recommend him as a British hero, unless of course you’re so violently anti-Catholic that you’ll forgive him for his attacks on the Anglican Church, the Irish, the theatre, the celebration of Christmas, and the very concept of a constitutional monarchy. But there is no denying Cromwell was the most important single figure in England in the 1640s and ‘50s. Should there be a statue to him? Yeah, I think so… if only so I can hiss at it.

Curmie is re-thinking that position. To be important is not the same as being admirable. And Cromwell (hissssssss) did a lot more bad than good. Curmie can still hiss at his memory; he doesn't need to see the guy. 

British historian David Olusoga notes that “Statues are about adoration. They’re about saying ‘this man was a great man who did great things.’” He argues that the forcible removal of the Colston statue “should never have happened because this statue should have been taken down and it should have been a great collective day for Britain and Bristol when the statue was peacefully taken down and put in a museum which is where, after all, we remember history properly.” There really is a difference between putting such a statue in a place where everyone, including the descendants of the people he brutalized, must see it, and putting it in a museum, where it can be preserved and contextualized… and, if necessary, avoided.

In an editorial piece in The Guardian a couple of days later, Olusoga was referring specifically to the toppling of the Colston statue, but was ultimately writing about the entire phenomenon in saying that “this was not an attack on history. This is history. It is one of those rare historic moments whose arrival means things can never go back to how they were.” He’s right… or, at least, Curmie hopes so.