non-intersection of “red” and “blue” tweeters re: Ferguson h/t @smalera
To get to “meta” on Ferguson, and begin to cross the red and blue divide, we might consider @RichLowry’s (Rich Lowry’s) re-tweet of the following defensive reply on his behalf to a tweet by @jbouie (Jamelle Bouie):
https://twitter.com/hboulware/status/537626135576981505
Since the tweet adds nothing to discussion of the underlying matters, but rather refers only to the discussion as a discussion, and since it defends Lowry, the conclusion that Lowry agrees with it seems warranted. Yet the defense is a poor defense, because an inevitable implication of Rich Lowry’s analysis is that both the late Michael Brown and all those rallying, protesting, and rioting on his behalf, and against Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed him, or against the system that failed to indict Wilson, are in the wrong. “Being in the wrong” is not precisely the same as “having it coming,” but might be included within it. The ambiguity provides the opportunity for Bouie to press a political argument that Bouie likely believes is based on deeper truths about Lowry or Lowry’s position – possibly licensing a polemical rather than careful response to Lowry. One might be thought “to have it coming” for a variety of reasons, as one might have a range of different things coming for whatever reasons, but, in Brown’s case, “it” stands for extra-judicial killing or street justice. Bouie’s use of the phrase is a crude and not very subtly prejudicial attempt to situate Lowry’s analysis within a prohibited discourse, a racist or white supremacist discourse in which Brown might “have it coming” for standing up at all or for in any way resisting a racist or white supremacist power structure. This discourse is well-known to have featured a wide range of putative justifications for killing African American men, in short for lynching them, often without regard for any proof or even for a concept of individual guilt or its substantial relevance at all.
Lowry would deny having anything to do with this discourse, or to be anything other than repulsed by it, and, perhaps for that reasons, or because he is from experience hyper-aware of a danger to his reputation, seizes upon or at least accepts his tweep’s counter-generalization. Yet Lowry does clearly seem to believe, in fact encourages us to accept, that Brown was wholly at fault in his own demise, an alternative and potentially overlapping sense of “had it coming.” In declaring the basis of the Ferguson protests fraudulent, and concluding that the evidence exonerates Wilson – “the narrative of a police execution always seemed dubious and now has been exposed as essentially a fraud” – Lowry is putting Brown in the wrong, making him guilty in his own violent death, or, in short, and contrary to the re-tweeted tweet, not just implying but forthrightly asserting that Brown “had it coming” in one clear sense of the phrase. Though Lowry throughout the piece is mainly concerned with those who have taken Brown’s side without, in Lowry’s opinion, examining the facts fairly, Lowry does, in the end, strongly if in a somewhat garbled manner assert his own judgment: that if Brown really had raised his hands and shouted “Don’t shoot!” – as in the Ferguson protestors’ chant – he would have survived. In sum, Lowry does seem to believe that Brown did in fact “have it coming,” though because of what Lowry believes Brown did or was doing, not because, as Bouie seems to imply, because of who or what Brown was.
If Bouie’s statement qualifies as prejudicial and inflammatory, it does not qualify as simply wrong: The implication attributed by Bouie to Lowry’s argument is accurate in one sense, if inaccurate in another, though Bouie may refuse to accept or simply to see the difference. Lowry is, however, unable to concede, or precluded from conceding, that Bouie’s description is accurate at all, if misleadingly put, with, one may suspect, a premeditated intention to indict or at least to provoke. Put plainly, Bouie seems to be calling Lowry a racist who believes that young African American men deserve to be handled with overwhelming and life-threatening or -ending force when they withdraw obedience to or openly defy the rules and institutions of their own oppression (for instance by petty theft, jaywalking, and, perhaps, non-cooperation – “stepping out of line”). Lowry’s denial by way of a friendly tweet seems to accept that the thought of Brown’s responsibility for his own death would have been or is the same thought as the wrong and prohibited thought, though Lowry’s article makes clear that he does not believe the former thought inadmissible at all.
To to assert that the shooting was, as it is said, a “good shooting” is to assert that Brown was in the wrong, and to insist that, further, this particular thought about the death of Michael Brown and the exoneration of Darren Wilson is not in fact a lesser species of that other thought, of justification for pre-emptive repression of African American men, that both red and blue prohibit, but that the blue believes the red thinks, and culpably, whether it knows it does or not. That the blue is relatively uninterested, or at most only secondarily interested, in the question of Brown’s individual complicity in his own slaying, in some important part considers the very notion of its possibility or final relevance prohibitable, is what the red believes about the blue. These symmetrical beliefs as to the simple unacceptability, or effective non-discussability, of each other’s positions may explain why, even where red and blue happen to confront each other, they have so little to say to each other.
