Fight Or Flight

One of the things we perhaps fail to comprehend is that the shooting of POC on the streets means different things to different people.

The author here, Easy G, writes from his perspective as a White American male. An apex creature as it were, in this world in which we live. He too has experienced the unholy fear of being attacked, though not by a police officer.

In this piece, he juxtaposes his attack with the *attack* on persons such as Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles. It's an interesting juxtaposition, one I had not, myself, considered.

Consider for a moment, a whole other perspective.

Read it. Share it.

~Elle~

Protester sign from one of the many anti-police brutality marches
Anytown, USA 2017

Almost two years ago, while my wife and I were walking our dogs, her ex rolled up on us, held a .40 caliber gun to my head, and shot me in the chest and stomach with it. So I can speak to this.

I'm not Black, I haven't spent a lifetime being harassed, bullied, and threatened by cops. But I understand the profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness a person can feel when you're unarmed and have an extremely hostile, volatile person screaming obscenities at you and placing a gun to your head. I understand how instinct suppresses your thoughts and your sensory input.

"Fight or flight" isn't a choice, it's a response. Your vision telescopes, you see only your attacker's face. Your peripheral vision dims and then disappears altogether. Your hearing becomes muted, your attacker's words become unintelligible. "Fight or flight" is a response, not a choice, but with cops you aren't allowed either option.

That people keep their composure with guns pointed at them amazes me. I didn't. I attacked my attacker - not as a calculated choice or as an act of bravery but in a fit of rage. This man with a gun wants to take everything you have and everything you will ever have away from you. Forever. Every memory, every future joy, every relationship, every possession, every good work, every whimsical thought. This rage you feel comes out of nowhere and it's overwhelming. But you can't express it, can't let it show with a flicker in your face or by the quiver in your hand.

The fact that cops consistently shoot people of color who are far more composed and compliant than I was - people who show true courage - is deeply, profoundly frustrating because, among other things, holding a gun in the face of an unarmed person is an act of cowardice, isn't it? Yet time and time again, the brave person dies and the coward gets exonerated.

I can speak to this, yes, but another critical difference, in my situation, is that my shooter was NOT a cop. It was NOT his job to protect me as a citizen, it was NOT his sworn duty to treat me lawfully. Shooting me was NOT, among other things, an act of social betrayal. He owed me nothing. He wasn't sworn to protect or serve. Quite the opposite. Cops, on the other hand, those protect and serve men and women in blue, place innocent, unarmed, compliant Black people in that position of vulnerability and then shoot them anyway. 

It's obscene. It's evil.

The experiments Schrodinger should have done

Erwin Schrödinger, do you know the name? He was a Nobel-winning, Austrian physicist who questioned the commonly held view of what quantum physicists call superposition. The core conundrum of superposition is that subatomic particles exist in multiple states at the same time. Schrödinger's challenge to this view came in the form of a mental puzzle, which is sometimes called a thought experiment, which forced other physicists, including Einstein, to acknowledge that superposition did not seem to hold with observable reality with non-subatomic things, like say cats.

OK, so that’s very heavy and science-y but I need you to stay with me! The actual thought experiment (all thoughts, no actual cats were harmed in the performance of this experiment. No need to call PETA on me. Or him.) helps to make this much easier to comprehend.

Schrödinger’s experiment imagines a cat in a box with a contraption that stands a 50/50 chance of setting off poisonous gas.  (Einstein had a version in which the contraption set off explosives).  Thus, once the experiment is concluded, the cat is either alive or dead, but before opening the box, you, standing on the outside of the box, don't know which is true.

According to the accepted theory of superposition, in that moment, the cat technically, is in both states: dead and alive. Again, according to the theory, it is the act of looking into the box that forces nature's decision, in the language of the video (above) and “collapses the dual reality”. It is quite literally our curiosity that kills the cat. To be perfectly clear, Schrödinger didn't believe this to be true; he devised the thought experiment to show that superposition, at least for visible objects, is absurd.

I lay all of that out to offer this for your consideration: if Schrödinger had done this thought experiment with African Americans instead of cats, his conclusion might have been completely different.    It seems that Black folk involved in dangerous, possibly life-ending encounters with the police are the proof that the dual state does in fact exist for things larger than subatomic particles. Perhaps it doesn’t for cats, but for Black, Native, and Hispanic folk? Oh yeah. That dual state, that superposition, is very real.

People of color live in a perpetual state of dual reality.

They are simultaneously guilty (& not) [Walter Scott];
They are simultaneously compliant (& not) [Mike Brown];
They are simultaneously threatening (& not) [Terrence Crutcher];
They are simultaneously fitting the description (& not) [Philando Castile];

They are simultaneously adult (& not) [Tamir Rice];

They are simultaneously victim (& not) [Charleena Lyles].

There is another important difference.  Schrödinger's cats have a 50% survival rate, but Schrödinger's POC end up dead a whole lot more often.

Additionally, the revised thought experiment confirms that it is the observation (by the police) that causes Schrödinger's POC to die.  A siren, a flashing blue light, a badge, a gun, and the observation of a POC, and Schrödinger might deserve another Nobel Prize.  Which like justice for Schrödinger's POC, must be awarded posthumously.

Which brings us to the trials………

If we extend the Schrödinger metaphor to the trials of those charged with unlawfully killing POC in routine police encounters, we find that the probabilities that ought to apply simply do not.   Perhaps, once the dual reality of the alive and dead POC collapses, bringing the officers to court further “collapses [any semblance of a] dual reality”?

With cats and poison gas (or explosives), the laws of probability apply. With Schrödinger’s Police Trials, as with Schrödinger’s POC? Not so much. When we look at the trials, probabilities go entirely out the window. Malefactors get acquitted a whole lot more than 50% of the time.

When it comes to the trials, this ain’t much of an experiment. There is no duality, there is only reality. We don't have to get to the end of the experiment to know the outcome. There don’t seem to be two possible outcomes. Probability of acquittal seems to be 1 (which if you remember from high school math, means 100% certainty). All the time, 1. Sure thing. The glove never fits. The jury generally acquits. And in the rare event that it doesn't, sentences are commuted, or charges are completely vacated. So ~1.

When it comes to POC and police trials, there is no dual reality. There is death for POC and acquittal for the POB (people of blue).

Wouldja just look at us! We are busting science wide open! POC outchere proving superposition and shit.

*shrugs*

A New Notoriety?

An open letter to the no-longer-quite-so-notorious RBG

Dear Justice Ginsburg:

My disappointment couldn't be greater. I thought you were a champion of my rights, but I see now that perhaps I gave you more credit than you deserved. When you suggested (who am I kidding, you did not merely 'suggest', you were pretty clear) that the protest of Kaepernick and others in support of Black life was dumb and disrespectful, I found myself utterly disappointed.

I appreciate every opinion you have written and the overall effect of your work on the bench, but I have to say that your referring to Colin Kaepernick's protest as arrogant and stupid really shook me for a moment. Fortunately, my distress was only momentary.

I keep finding myself having to re-learn that in this society the label liberal doesn't necessarily translate to passionately committed to equality. The great epiphany your utterances forced upon me is this: equality for you is a matter of law whereas for me, it is a matter of existence.

There is no part of my existence that isn't challenged by continuing efforts to erode the notion - at this point it really is only a notion - of equality in these United States. My economic life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My professional life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My access to health care, education, environmental justice? All, shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. Reading most of our country's history, as I know you have, one cannot but acknowledge that the journey to equality has long been a helluva challenge for the majority. Pick an era when people of color made the tiniest step forward, then take a look at the era subsequent, and the effort to erase or reverse that step is certain to be found. The truth is out there.

It is in this that we differ.  For you it seems 'equality' is this thing you talk about Monday to Friday, from nine o'clock in the am until five o'clock pm. For me, equality is the journey of every one of the 86,400 seconds of every blessed day. There is no moment when my 'equality' or my 'freedom' can be readily accessed without the possibility of challenge. This is why Kaep kneels.

While you are free to dismiss (and then return a few days later chastened) the protests born of Black folks' reality, that is a privilege to which I do not have access. While you are free to not even know what the protest is about and yet, ignorant of the details, know with an alarming degree of certainty that it is dismissible, that is a privilege I do not have. This is why Kaep kneels. 

You are, of course, absolutely entitled to your opinion on Kaepernick, just as I am entitled to my opinion of your opinion. That's what freedom is.

However, freedom begins to end, and something else begins, when your opinion coupled with your relative power, has the capacity to negatively impact my access to basic safety. When your opinion + your power have the capacity to ennoble the unlawful (and often deadly) actions of police officers, vigilantes, right wing zealots, and various internet trolls against people like me. That is not freedom. Well, to be certain, in that situation, you continue to enjoy freedom, but it is a version of freedom that undermines and negates mine. 

Herein lies another thing that differentiates between us.

For you, the SCOTUS serves to solidify the law; to establish clear, hard lines that must not be crossed. Yet, don't those lines get crossed anyway? Don't people get executed who shouldn't? Don’t people spend decades in jail who oughtn’t? Don't bad things happen to good people (and sometimes to bad ones as well)?

In your SCOTUS-world, justice requires that I first be harmed. That is justice to you. It ain’t no justice to me, however. I’m not surprised that you’re OK with this version of American justice though, since you’re not the one being shot at, brutalized, or worse, killed.

We would prefer not to be harmed at all. This is why Kaep kneels.

We would prefer a system that seeks to prevent our injury, rather than one that offers a Band-Aid for our bullet wounds. Your comfort with reactive justice works for you because that is the privilege that your position and race afford you. My commitment though, must be to pre-emptive justice; proactive justice; justice at the initial point of contact with the system, rather than at the end. 

After 400 years of America’s reactive approach to ‘justice’, people of color have cottoned on to the fact that the time for a proactively just system is now. This is why Kaep kneels.  This is why others now join him: because there is no effective redress for the fatal harms the system so giddily metes out.

It matters not what your opinion is on the case of Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Jeremy Mardis, or the hundreds of other men, women, and children slaughtered by police, because they’ve all gone to glory, and there is still no treatment for that. There’s no assessment you and your sister and brother justices can offer that will bring redress. And so we kneel.

It matters not the results of your ex post facto review of the case of X or Y prisoner held on Death Row for a crime he/she did not commit. Those days, weeks, months, years are lost. Forever. We seek justice first. We seek a system wherein equality is the basis, the starting point, not a result insisted upon by a judge and which – like the SCOTUS school desegregation order of 1954 – can be flouted by the powerful.

The courts' eventual adjudication of innocence for the dead or the falsely accused/incarcerated serves no purpose other than to give the system and those who hold privilege within it a reason to feel good; such adjudication is but an opportunity for the society to pretend it is evolving. The reality is that those who were harmed in the first place remain eternally harmed.

This form of redress is a Pyrrhic victory of the meanest sort. SCOTUS justice, with all due respect, is a Sponge Bob Square Pants Band-Aid on a gaping, festering sore. The financial, social and emotional consequences of having been fatally wronged can never be fixed. There can be no ‘justice’ after the fact. This is why Kaepernick kneels.

It would have cost you nothing but the discomfort of shrugging off your privilege, to acknowledge any of these truths. Thank you for showing me that even that shrug is a bridge too far.

Until now, I have presumed that your decisions meant that you actually cared about the people about whom you were deciding. Your recent interview tells me that that was a mistaken assumption on my part. My bad. I won't do it again. 

Regards,

Me

Kaepernick: Miss me with that

PSA

I see folk complaining about Colin Kaepernick's actions. Let me be real clear: polite protest ain't win nothing for the Negro (or any person of color) in this country yet. Look at how the Native Americans are still fighting to have the land respected. Today. Right this minute. Cuz 500 years of begging ain't quite enough. And look at how many of us sit quietly by, drinking the clean water that their actions are seeking to protect WHILE DOING NOT A DAMB THING IN SUPPORT OF THEM. We are, as usual, quite content to drink the clean water; celebrate the Civil Rights Act and the Marriage Equality laws but to actually get up off our duffs and DO? To put anything, never mind everything, on the line to secure those rights? Hell naw! But we want to tell Kaepernick that he's disrespectful? Yeah, miss me with that.

Until people of all colors start offending sensibilities, ain't nothing gonna change. White supremacy is quite content to steal your land, your labor, your woman, your man, your children, your life and expect you to clean up the blood and guts they leave behind. It has ever been thus. Y'all can miss me with the "That's so disrespectful" BS. Miss me with that entirely.

Nothing changes until enough enraged people stand up and say "No more!". Kaepernick sat down to stand up for what he believed in. Martin, Bayard Rustin et al, did the same. Rosa sat to stand up for what she believed. Men and women walked miles during the Montgomery Bus Boycott for what they believed. Folk sat at lunch counters to stand up for what they believed. Thousands marched on Washington for what they believed. And now you wanna tell me about respect? Look! Miss me with the whole respect thing. 

When Black men wore suits and Black women wore gloves and stockings, the dogs were still set upon them. Respect? It is well past time for this 'respect' business to become a two way street. We have been respecting and respecting and "Yessir"-ing and "No ma'am"-ing forever. The way I see it, as soon as I see some of that respect traffic rolling in my general direction, we can return to a system based on mutual respect but the whole, "I respect you and you piss on me and tell me it's rain"? Nuh uh! When y'all ready to bring the respect train, I'm ready. Until then, I'm sitting so I can stand. 

As you were.