The time I was racist.

[Tailsteak]

Cross-posted from tailsteak.com:

So, for the past few weeks, I've been biting my tongue.

There have been a lot of opinions flying everywhere about Michael Brown's shooting and the situation in Ferguson, Missouri. I certainly have my fair share of opinions. They've all been tumbling around inside of me, struggling to get out, but I have kept a firm lid on them.

I believe that, in matters that are truly important, the only opinions that should matter are those from people with relevant knowledge. I have never been to Ferguson, or even to the state of Missouri. I do not have a law degree or policing experience. I have never been arrested, nor have I ever been part of a protest. I have never been teargassed, I've never been threatened by a man in fatigues, I've never been shot.

Hell, I'm not even black. Not even a little.

So no, I'm not going to go on record about how I think the residents of Ferguson should proceed, I'm not going to go on record about how I think law enforcement for that city should be reorganized, I'm not going to go on record talking about violence or free speech or Race in America. I have no significant experience in any of those fields, so the best thing I can do to facilitate that dialogue is to keep my honky piehole shut.

But then it occurred to me that I do have experience about one thing that is relevant - I'm going to tell a story about the time I, myself, was racist.

And I'm not talking about the little prejudices everyone has to get through the day - I'm talking about a time when I was a full-on hate-filled bigot.

For about half a second.

A few years ago, I was working in a call center, in a department that handles escalations. For those of you who have had the good fortune never to work in a call center, an "escalation" is what happens when a customer asks to speak to a supervisor. In those cases, the customer rarely actually wants to talk to the person that supervises the agent they were just talking to - what they mean by "let me speak to your supervisor" is "send me to someone with more power/experience/intelligence, I do not think that you are doing a good enough job". Virtually every call I took, I was speaking with an angry, frustrated American who was under the impression that the agent they were previously speaking with was, in some way, incompetent.

This was, frequently, correct.

Because, you see, the company for whom we were doing tech support liked to outsource. Most of the tech support agents we worked with were overseas - specifically, in the Philippines. And yes, just as you imagine, this is because those agents could be paid very little, and labour laws were a lot less restrictive, and there was a large pool of people who wanted a job working for an American company. As a result, that call center had a very high turnover rate and a rather... shall we say... accelerated training process... so yes, quite a few of the Filipino agents to whom I would speak would actually be quite incompetent.

My work day would go as follows: sit in cubicle, wait. Hear loud beep. Hear thick Filipino accent apologizing to me and explaining the mistake they had just made. Receive transfer of American customer who is angry or stupid or who has a particularly difficult technical problem (frequently all three). Deal with customer. Repeat for ten hours a day, four days a week.

This was my job - this was my life - for a year.

One day I came home from a long shift at work, and, unbeknownst to me, my wife had been watching Project Runway. And Project Runway, like many reality shows, has international equivalents - Project Runway Canada, Project Runway Australia, Project Runway Korea... and yes, Project Runway Philippines. My wife had downloaded an episode of Project Runway Philippines and was watching it in our living room.

So I unlocked the door, walked into my home, and heard, as if from nowhere, a Filipino accent talking about clothes. And in that moment, in that half-second, my immediate, instinctual, gut reaction was "Oh Christ, what have those idiots done now?".

I had been conditioned, by hours and hours and months and months of Pavlovian training, to associate the Filipino accent with mistakes, idiocy, and unpleasant work being dumped into my lap. I knew, intellectually, that there was nothing negative or stupid inherent to the Filipino race or culture, but I still had that basic, visceral, twitch-reaction to that particular stimulus.

Now, as I said, I've never been a cop. I can't speak about what sort of person chooses to go into law enforcement or what sort of person they become after having been in law enforcement for a while. I do know, however, that a person's job, usually, is one of the main sources of stress and pressure in their life. I do know that, in much the same way that I almost never got calls from customers because everything was working properly and they were happy with their Internet connection, police almost never interact with the public because everything is pleasant and safe. I can only imagine what my work experience would have been like if the angry customers on my phone were actually in front of me, if their problems were matters of life and death, if I had to worry, every day, that they might be hiding a pistol in their waistband.

And I'm not saying the Ferguson cops are all racists. I can't see into their hearts or their minds, that's not my call to make.

All I'm saying is - the police force is 97% white, commuting to Ferguson from their white communities out of town. For their job, they have to break up assaults, watch for thefts, hunt down narcotics, hand out parking and speeding tickets - all of these, profoundly stressful, negative, dangerous interactions - in a community that's 67% black. And they do this, presumably, at least forty hours a week, for years. So no, I'm not saying they're all racists - but, short of strapping them to a chair and electrocuting them while they watch Soul Plane, I can think of no better machine for turning someone into a racist.

[Deepbluediver]

My take on it has 2 parts- first, people have already decided that the cop was wrong, when it's not physically possible that even a fraction of these people where there and eyewitnesses to 100% of the events leading up to the shooting. This needs to be investigated, yes, and investigated well. Even that requires delving into the entire Ferguson police department, then so be it.

And second, it seems like a lot of people who have little or no personal stake in the outcome of this whole debacle, are claiming they want "justice", when in fact they want vengeance. They don't care what they outcome of any investigation, hearing, or trial is, they have already made up their mind. Lots of people have made their opinions on this matter known, but who haven't we heard from (AFAIK)? The police officer who fired the fatal round.

Seems like it's kind of early to condemn anyone before they've had the chance to defend themselves.

[Nepene]

There are four issues as I see it for the police side.

1. He tried to arrest him for Jaywalking. Non crimes shouldn't be used as an excuse to harass youths and black folks.

2. He had a gun. Most people survive without being armed, carrying a gun shouldn't be the norm.

3. He gets a paid holiday for killing someone.

4. He didn't have a body camera, and the police department doesn't care about the opinion of random civilians compared to a cop. They are willfully happy to lie and pretend the victim is robbing stores to protect one of their own.

The cop has no incentive not to kill someone, no one the police department cares about will contradict him, he is armed, and he is harassing people for non crimes. Inevitably, some proportion of such encounters will go foul. The cop rolled a 1 on his intimidate check and decided to end the encounter with six shots.

The police department isn't going to change anything after this willingly. The race riot (since this is presumably happening a lot) put enough pressure on events that politicians started half hearted investigations.

No actual racism was really necessary, could just be hate of youths.

[RyukaTana]

I don't care to argue about the Ferguson thing, because I don't really care at this point. This falls in my 'People are all fucked, hope something wipes us out' pile.

What I do have a thought about is that there's a huge difference between thinking a racist thought and shooting someone. If you cave into the stress of your job easily enough to kill someone, then you better have a much better justification than that. If not, you shouldn't be doing a job where you have a gun and the authority to wield it.

[sethtriggs]

And the best part is that people have been rightly shining a lens on the shitty Sundown Town policing style of Ferguson. I know well the perspective of "let's not rush to judgment, and the cop needs to say his side of things?" The incident report was left blank for the actual shooting. There's no narrative section. On top of this, virtually everything the idiotic city administration and city police chief have said in public has been a gibbering lie.

This speaks volumes. Deepbluediver, I want to impress upon you something. Every single piece of information trotted out to paint Michael Brown as a 'thug' that was 'deserving it' was hastily done, including the inflammatory edit of the store surveillance video. And this was something police commandeered from the store after the shooting. But it didn't work, because even idiots don't think that boosting cheap cigars should warrant a summary execution. Second, the lying liars actually admitted that they weren't even looking for a robbery suspect at the time.

Despite the police department's attempts to help invoke people's confirmation bias of "thugs," almost everyone with a clue has seen through it. There are people that will cling, however, because they have to believe that Michael Brown caused his own death. They have to believe that it can't possibly be true that the corrupt city has been milking the poor residents of the town by trumping up crimes, using them as a revenue source akin to a tick upon a deer. This is part of the framework that allows us as Americans to justify one, two, three, five, even eleven shots to take down black male youth.

Because here's the context here, which everyone can see. In order for the police to not be seen as completely wrong, Michael Brown has to be another storied, superhuman "super thug." Strangely enough, these "super thugs" never seem to be carrying guns when they get shot by police (or wannabe police) for some reason. And for some reason there's always an "attempt to go for the gun." No matter their size, they're always a "super thug."

Amazingly here, even after the police actually confiscated witness video so it would be a he said/she said kind of deal, people saw through it. They saw Darren Wilson walking around just fine in the remaining video, and then the lying liars had to walk back the lie that the cop had an "orbital bone fracture." People desperate to sustain their confirmation bias-fueled idea of young blacks as "superthugs" passed around an unrelated example picture of an orbital bone fracture, in order to suggest that "yeah this super thug youth actually went and punched a COP for no fucking reason." You know what? The idiot left his incident report blank. So what makes any of his supporters (who were not there) more trustworthy than the actual witnesses? I think I have my guesses, judging from the idiot punditry out there in the mainstream media.

I'm going there. This whole context for Ferguson and the way policing is handled there is straight out of the Jim Crow playbook. This is exactly the kind of abuse of authority that I suspect caused my grandfather to flee the South. But it's never gone away. It's just underground. We can safely sit behind our computers and say these people getting railroaded in the system "did it to themselves." People being usuriously assessed huge fees they'll never pay for minor moving violations, speed traps, harassment of citizens, it's all part of the playbook.

I'm also going to say this; there is no race riot. That's another scare phrase. The only people actually rioting are the police. They're the ones tossing tear gas into crowds, injuring people and actually shooting them. They're even taking the evidence of shots away. Other corrupt agencies starring such characters as Officer GoFuckYourself have joined in to try to crack some heads or gin up violence. Meanwhile it's the protestors that are corralling the actual crooks, like the opportunistic looters. You'd think these police officers would actually want to bust some crooks instead of people exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceably assemble.

Darren Wilson actually shot the golden goose. Without the national spotlight to this, we would've never realized how many nasty little fiefdoms there are like this, that rely upon sustained racial discrimination and abuse of power to milk people for money. The rock has been turned over and the abusive creatures that used the shadows to do their dirt are scrambling and flailing for cover.

Wilson is actually smart too; he's keeping his mouth shut because he knows he fucked up and he only needs to speak through a lawyer.

-Seth

On edit: By the way, as everyone is saying Michael Brown stole the cigars (and the full video of the store seems to throw doubt on that), then that makes Dorian Johnson (his companion) an accessory to the crime doesn't it? Why is Dorian Johnson not in jail? I haven't heard of him being arrested or...anything! Every time I've heard of someone doing dirt with friends along, the friends get taken in as accomplices!

[Nepene]

Darren Wilson actually shot the golden goose. Without the national spotlight to this, we would've never realized how many nasty little fiefdoms there are like this, that rely upon sustained racial discrimination and abuse of power to milk people for money. The rock has been turned over and the abusive creatures that used the shadows to do their dirt are scrambling and flailing for cover.

People are always hopeful that the police murdering people will cause some sort of social change.

More likely is that in two months it will be found that the policeman was slightly aggressive, he gets a month off without pay. Since he has already done that he can go back on the streets to start cracking heads. Maybe he'll be transfered to another department and promoted. Responsible politicians will call for calm and do nothing.

Maybe it would do something if a photogenic white girl got killed, but I doubt the community at large cares that much about Michael Brown's death.

[crayzz]

The only people actually rioting are the police.

Thats not entirely true. There have been "riots" from civilians. I put "riot" in quotes since any time numbers are actually mentioned, they are low: a paltry percent of the total numbers. Interestingly, there were much greater riots when a repeat child rapist was removed from his position as a university football coach,* with far less focus on "those thuggish white people."

Darren Wilson actually shot the golden goose.

Nepene's right, unfortunately. I forget the actual number, but police in the US kill someone about every 28 hours, and many of those are disgusting abuses of power, disproportionally aimed at poor and black people (those sets, of course, disproportionally overlap).

*not to mention sports riots in general

—

I am racist against Filipino people. Filipino men, specifically. I think they look like sex offenders. No, I don't know why.

[MysticWav]

The cop has no incentive not to kill someone

How about the fact that he's likely not a sociopath?

[Nepene]

The cop has no incentive not to kill someone

How about the fact that he's likely not a sociopath?

Killing someone doesn't require sociopathy or mental illness, it just requires categorizing the world into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, something any normal mentally healthy person can do. The vast majority of murderers are not mentally ill.

[RyukaTana]

The cop has no incentive not to kill someone

How about the fact that he's likely not a sociopath?

Killing someone doesn't require sociopathy or mental illness, it just requires categorizing the world into the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, something any normal mentally healthy person can do. The vast majority of murderers are not mentally ill.

Despite the exaggerated and inflammatory way MysticWav put it, he's right to say it's disingenuous to suggest that there's 'no incentive not to kill someone'. This is coming from someone who doesn't inherently value human life, either. I meet people every day that I'd consider perfectly acceptable to kill, and hell, Michael Brown might well fall on that list, but I wouldn't know, I don't know him. I'm pretty damn sure Darren Wilson didn't either.

However, there's plenty of incentive not to just kill people. Maintaining a standard of ethical behavior is a very good incentive not to kill people. I understand what you meant by your argument, but to say he has 'no incentive' is just untrue.