Blaming white supremacy for Tire Nichols’ death is perverse

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White supremacy can’t do anything.

It’s supposed to be so pervasive and powerful that it can get black men to sign up to serve as police officers in a majority black city and beat up an arrested black person.

It is to the contemporary left what capital was to Marx, sex to Freud, and gravity to Newton. It is the “head of King Charles” of American public life, an obsessive issue that crops up in debates and contexts where it has no possible relevance.

A CNN opinion piece by former Obama official Van Jones was titled The Police Who Killed Tire Nichols Were Black. But they could still have been driven by racism.

A New York Times article on Memphis told the view, it’s the system and tactics that foster racism and violence, not officers’ specific racial identities.

This argument gets points for novelty but none for plausibility. The Memphis officers who brutalized Tire Nichols may be guilty of many things, incompetence, malice, criminal acts, but white supremacy is unlikely to be one of them.

Presumably, these officers do not hate all of their parents, children, neighbors and colleagues as unworthy and racially inferior people who deserve no protection under our laws.

Nichols was fatally beaten by black Memphis cops. Family of Tire NicholsLearn more about The Post’s coverage of Tire Nichols’ brutal death

Perhaps it is only as police officers that these men become unwitting tools of white supremacy? That doesn’t make any sense either. The Atlantic noted in an article last year that FBI data showed Memphis to be the most violent metropolitan jurisdiction in the United States in 2020. According to The New York Times, Memphis had recorded nearly 350 murders in 2021, while New York City was 13 times larger. about 480.

Of course, these murders disproportionately affect young black men. Isn’t that how a white supremacist would like majority black neighborhoods to live under siege while black men kill other black men? Why would white supremacism want to interfere with this dynamic by deploying police units to try to quell the disorder?

Seven Memphis cops have been relieved of their duties following the fatal beating of Tire Nichols. PA

Indeed, the false consciousness in Memphis must be deep. Cerelyn Davis, the city’s first African-American female police chief, created the recently disbanded special unit implicated in the beating of Nichols. Naturally, she thought it was very important to get the rise in homicides and dangerous reckless driving under control, but unbeknownst to her, she was just serving the man.

The obsession with white supremacy is perverse and insulting on many levels.

This implies that if urban neighborhoods are underpoliced ​​and unsafe that is their natural state, whereas if they are heavily policed ​​to try to make them safer, a worthy project that people of all races tend to supporting is sort of an inherently white initiative.

This suggests that African American, Hispanic, and Asian good cops are dupes, puppets in the grip of dark, nefarious white people who use them to perpetuate white dominance.

And finally, if taken seriously, it would vitiate the agency of the cops involved in the abuse of Tire Nichols. How can they fully take the blame if an ineradicable and inevitable force was ultimately responsible for their behavior?

The explanation of what happened in Memphis is simpler than all that. The police wield considerable authority, and human beings of all races and creeds, at all times and in all places, have a natural tendency to abuse authority unless constrained by institutions, norms and the responsibility.

If you don’t want to believe that the cops in this case were self-hating black men, then their behavior becomes a function of poor training and supervision, abysmal decision-making, anger over the moment, floating cruelty or a combination thereof. things.

The report the cops wrote about the beatings was wildly different from the body camera footage. Ben Crump’s Law

The left elevates race above all other factors that might play into a police encounter gone horribly wrong because racial interpretation allows it to make a broader critique of American society and impose far-reaching political and social changes.

It’s a very useful narrative, which is why he’s reluctant to give it up even on a case involving black cops.

Twitter: @RichLowry

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