The Lives that Matter in the Prevailing Social Order

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department has ignited nationwide protests against police violence. Within these protests, the movement for black lives (#BlackLivesMatter) plays a central role. Much like the protests themselves, to assert that “Black lives matter” is an act of defiance against our nation’s history of white supremacy and the blatant disregard of black lives by law enforcement. Police violence visited upon black bodies remains a central component of this nation’s unjust law and white supremacist order. One need only reflect on the numerous black people that have had their rights denied, been murdered, beat, and disproportionately incarcerated, to realize that there has been no greater acolyte to white supremacy than law enforcement.

The slogan “Black lives matter” is an ontological, moral, and political exclamation that humanity happens in black. From this point of view, to treat black people as expendable objects that feel no pain and lack reason; to ignore their cries for their children and mothers as their airways are closed and blood flow restricted; or to shoot them multiple times for taking a jog or while sitting in their home, is a crime against humanity. While it might seem odd to need reminding that humanity happens in black, the vociferous criticism of this movement, which takes shape in the counter-slogan “all lives matter,” demonstrates that our nation is unaccustomed to recognizing, and indeed many refuse to acknowledge, humanity in nonwhite terms.

Many who reject “Black lives matter” also assert that “Blue lives [i.e., law enforcement personnel] matter.” This should not come as a surprise. The lives and, more importantly, livelihoods of law enforcement agents owe a great deal to white supremacy. The imbrication and codependency of blue and white lives was laid bare in W. E. B. Du Bois’s important work Black Reconstruction in America (1935). In the second chapter, while examining the material conditions that allowed chattel slavery to flourish in the southern United States, Du Bois juxtaposes Southern slavery to that in the Caribbean. In comparison to Haiti, why didn’t the United States experience more widespread slave rebellions? In “the West Indies,” Du Bois explains, “the power over the slave was held by the whites and carried out by them and such Negroes as they could trust.” In the South, by contrast, “the great planters formed proportionately quite as small a class [as in the Caribbean] but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves.” This additional five million poor whites differentiated slavery in the South by providing the enforcement mechanisms that prevented widespread slave revolt. As Du Bois puts it, slavery was “held stable and intact by the poor white.”

Given that poor white labor was often pitted against slave labor, one might think that impoverished whites would resist lending a hand to the cause of slavery. However, Du Bois reminds us, some whites actually came to benefit from this situation, both economically and socially, as an instrument helping to keep slave rebellion in check. By protecting and serving plantation owners, poor whites acquired jobs and a sense of superiority “as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system.” These support roles bolstered the vanity and esteem of impoverished whites, not to mention their pocketbooks, by associating them and their interests with the slave-master class. This superiority and esteem contributed to the primitive accumulation of value that remains invested in whiteness today—an investment kept alive in appeals to Southern “heritage,” “tradition,” and other dog whistles for white supremacy—as well as in the phrase “all lives matter.”

The value of blue lives remains roughly in the same derivative state today. The importance attached to blue lives is an extension of the pre-existing value ascribed to the prevailing social order, which is predicated on white supremacy. As agents of “the law,” which itself harbors ideological proportions (Du Bois offers the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as example but one can easily add the Black Codes and Jim Crow), blue lives remain committed to keeping wealth and property in the hands of those who have it and protecting it from the hands of those who do not. One need only consider law professor Cheryl I. Harris’s important 1993 essay “Whiteness as Property” together with the protection of private property as one of the central purposes of government in order to discern the role of law enforcement within the racial state.

If, as Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, there are more black people in jail and prisons today than there were slaves during the height of chattel slavery, then law enforcement is the middle term that unites the formal end of slavery with the emergence of a racialized carceral system that preys on people of color. This truth, in so many words, is what the protests we are witnessing today cry out against.

Insofar as blue lives gain value relative to the prevailing social order of white supremacy, then police officers are used in similar fashion as poor whites were during slavery. In arguing this, I am not offering a victim narrative for blue lives. Instead, I seek to critique the social conditions leading to the devaluation of black lives, especially at the hands of law enforcement. If, as the protestors remind us, police violence against blacks is the problem, then philosophers and social theorists must examine why people become cops in the first place. Is it akin to the poverty draft—the claim that poor people enlist in the military because of limited economic opportunities? Are working-class and poor people, white and nonwhite, lured into careers in law enforcement by decent salaries and benefits, augmented by overtime pay? Like the Southern poor white who garnered a sense of self-worth and stock in whiteness by serving in a slave patrol, what psychological propensities (I am tempted to say “pathologies”) incline recruits to a career in law enforcement as it happens in our racialized setting today? What makes an adult want to join the force today, knowing full well how it takes part in the oppression of racialized communities? We need answers to these questions.

To change this dynamic, law enforcement agencies must move away from policing communities to building community—an abandonment of domination for a democratic sharing of power. But the inertia of the prevailing social order and its investments in black criminality makes this shift difficult. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois notes that as vagabond or thief, a “negro” threatened society. Whites tolerated this threat, however, because it reinforced the patronizing dimensions of slavery. As “an educated property owner, successful mechanic, or even professional man,” a free black person contradicted and undermined the institution of slavery. Such an individual was proof that slavery rested on a noble lie. Underscoring the importance of black lives by shouting “Black lives matter” is an affirmation of humanity that runs counter to the narrative and value hierarchy of the unjust prevailing social order—not to mention the enforcement system that it depends upon.

To be fair, we must not place the full burden of racial injustice upon blue lives. As Plato identified in The Republic, justice at the macro or political level manifests in the justice of individuals, the micro level. The same is true of injustice. If our polis and the work of its guardians are built upon racist foundations, we will also see that racism manifest in the actions of its individuals. One telling example is the intentional sublimation of any talk of lives mattering away from a particular referent (in this case “black”) by substituting a generic “all.” When has someone ever uttered “all lives matter” in a non-reactionary way? Is it not always a response to the attempt to underscore the value of black lives? By striving to undermine a claim for basic recognition and minimal levels of respect, does this not make “all lives matter” a not-so-silent accomplice in our society’s current value hierarchy?

Many people object to the movement for black lives because it expresses value for black people in a way that is not contingent upon and does not first pay homage to white life (this is not to say it devalues white life!). Even the phrase “Black lives matter, too,” I argue, betrays the central premise of this movement since it renders the value of black lives an afterthought or addendum. The radicalness of “Black lives matter” is that it transcends the economy of value that has undergirded race relations in the United States.

By “economy of value,” I mean a system operating according to a zero-sum game, a situation where the elevation of some requires the denigration of others. For instance, while some might respond to this blog post by saying that police violence has also targeted Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, once the preservation of the prevailing power dynamic required their incorporation into the category “white”—as Khalil Gibran Muhammad outlines in his 2011 essay “Where Did All the White Criminals Go?”—these groups too were able to climb the social ladder on the backs of black people. This is to say, while many people are comfortable talking about social value abstractly, it has never been anything but concrete. The history of citizenship law and immigration policy, racial segregation and Jim Crow, racial covenant clauses on deeds of homeownership, disparities in terms of salary and wage earnings, employment rates and opportunities, health care and general wellbeing, access to nutritious food and education, disproportionate incarceration rates, life expectancy, and more, all speak to the value historically invested in white lives. Value that required the exclusion and domination of others.  

For those who have been taught to see race from within this particular value system, “Black lives matter” cannot be interpreted as anything other than a threat to the status quo. They cannot see race without a racial hierarchy that favors white lives. Enamored by the “all” and cognizant of the economy of value that has given shape to our nation’s moral arc, those who refuse to say “Black lives matter” know that value is meaningless when it lacks a particular referent. Their logic then becomes, “If I [whiteness] cannot have it, then nobody can.” “All lives matter” cannot be excised from white racial normativity, the type of which mistakes itself for all of humanity.

Race relations in the United States did not have to unfold in a zero-sum manner—indeed, I often challenge my students to imagine race in a different way. Is it possible to see race outside the optics of white supremacy? I also ask them to imagine policing and law enforcement divorced from its investments in black criminality (not to mention Latinx illegality—but that is a whole other issue). Given the historical modalities through which it has taken place, could policing without racism occur in the United States? Perhaps most important of all, as the increasingly desperate responses to the George Floyd protests make clear, might militarized police violence be the wake-up call many (sadly not all) whites need in order to see that this system predicated on the devaluation of black lives will quickly turn on them too if they choose to unite their interests to the wellbeing of black people? Perhaps the structure that should be burned down next is the corrupt social one that gives value and takes it away in order to keep itself alive.

Photo: George Floyd protests in Washington DC’s Lafayette Square on May 30, 2020 (Rosa Pineda, via Wikimedia Commons)

Grant J. Silva

Grant J. Silva is associate professor of philosophy at Marquette University. You can find him on Twitter @elprofesorsilva.