Talking About the Times Without Talking About the Times
A COMMITTEE OF INVESTIGATORS HAS RULED that we will never know who was behind the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling leak last year. Employing the weakest of measures, including a refusal to put any member of the Supreme Court under oath while questioning, the investigators have failed to determine who exactly leaked the decision to repeal Roe V. Wade to the right-center publication Politico; an act which not only diffused and gauged the backlash in advance of the actual ruling, but also allowed Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to go on the offensive and swear bloody revenge against the (presumably liberal) justice or staffer who did it, taking some of the heat off of them for negating 50 years of precedent to further their misogyny and Catholic fanaticism.
Oh, well. A cool footnote for history when the federal abortion ban goes into effect in 2025.
THE PICTURE TAKER (2023) is a new documentary that just came out on PBS’ independent lens, which explored the life and career of African-American photographer Ernest Withers (1922–2007). A US WW2 army vet who became one of the first black police officers in his native Memphis, TN, he was bounced out of the MPD for collecting protection money from local brothels (something not uncommon on the force at the time, but which he paid the price). He reinvented himself as the city’s premiere photographer of the African-American experience, and over the 50-year career that followed, took between one and two million pictures. He photographed local weddings, family photos, images of Memphis’ robust night life and music scene (with pictures of young Ike & Tina Turner, Elvis, George Clinton, and Isaac Hayes, among others), scenes of abject poverty, serene slice-of-life personal moments, and incidents of profound social and political significance; from the Emmett Till murder trial to the 1968 Memphis Workers Sanitation Strike (and subsequent riot), to Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to the city. He was ubiquitous and trusted, cataloging everything and everyone pertaining to his sphere of African-American culture.
However, his legacy was complicated after his death, when a 2013 FOIA request revealed that Withers spent most of his career serving as a paid FBI informant. Everything he learned, everything he shot, he passed along to his handlers; or at least told them what they wanted to hear. His motives are murky. According to the files, he was enlisted to look for the ‘communist infiltration’ and ‘black militarism’ that might lead the civil rights movement astray (or at least, this is how the FBI sold it to him), though J. Edgar Hoover famously did not draw much of a distinction between criminals, radicals, communists, labor unionists, or non-violent protestors when it came to African-Americans. Sometimes Hoover would even instruct local authorities to simply kill black activists in dubious ‘police raids’.
More forgiving assessments of Withers’ career argue that sum total of his work far outweighs whatever he gave to the FBI, that a black man in the South didn’t have the luxury of telling law enforcement ‘no’ when they came to him with a ‘request’, and that he was simply fleecing the feds to feed his 8 kids and didn’t give them anything of value at all (though he DID tell the FBI when MLK Jr. had checked into the The Lorraine Hotel the day he was shot by the absolutely unassisted lone gunman James Earl Ray). Harsher judgments of Withers hold him to be an opportunist who cared only about himself; a duplicitous sellout who never shook the corrupt cop mentality that once made extra bank shaking down black-owned brothels and businesses. The legacy is complicated.
Of course, he is not the only African-American member of the MPD in the news these days.
THERE IS A SCENE IN THE FILM BOYZ’ N’ THE HOOD (1991) where young Cuba Gooding Jr. and Morris Chestnut are pulled over by two cops- one black and one white- and when Cuba gives even the mildest of protests, the black cop loses his shit and sticks a gun the protagonist’s face, calls him the ‘n-word’ (hard r), demands to know what ‘set’ (gang affiliation) he’s in, and is pretty much a hair’s breadth away from killing him. Even the other cop seems weirded out.
As odd and heavy-handed as the scene might have seemed to white film-goers at the time, it probably wouldn’t have been so outlandish to James Baldwin, as indicated by his 1985 essay, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen”.
Director John Singleton’s scene is a stinging rejoinder, all the way back in 1991, to liberals who believed that we can to solve systemic abuse with diversity hires. Obviously, having a racially and ethnically diverse law enforcement is far preferable to a bunch of homogenous, racist yahoos running police departments, but there is a reason why ‘Blue Lives Matter’ is a rhetorical response to ‘Black Lives Matter’. Becoming a police officer prompts you to transcend your pre-existing racial identity, but the blue race has a distinctly white supremacist viewpoint.
This is, I should very clearly state, not an issue unique to African-Americans. History shows us that time and again, hegemonic powers will use the subaltern to police their own; sometimes playing on the best intentions of the subjugated, only to suck them into the brutal culture that underlines the whole colonial project. From second-generation Latino-Americans guards embroiled in human rights abuses at the Mexican border, to Jewish Kapos in Nazi Germany, to the European empires seeding sectarian divisions in Africa and the Middle East, to the countless informants and spies of every totalitarian regime who will snitch on their neighborhoods and friends for a little bit of favor or reward.
What’s the answer? Fuck if I know. Cruel times make for cruel people, and it’s far too easy to judge the ethics of human behavior from afar. I guess one thought is that all we don’t have to be quite so eager to please our overlords. We don’t have to report every little thing we see our neighbors do to Big Brother, we don’t have to clock quite so much overtime at the bomb factory, and we don’t have to beat an innocent man to death at a traffic stop with our cop buddies just because it’s fun and we thought we’d get away with it.
hyper-violent cops which inspired police departments to organize
squads of corrupt, hyper-violent cops all across America.
