IBT asks Who Is Kyle Bassinga? Missing Atlanta Man Found Hanging From Tree in Cobb County Park
There’s an epidemic of young African-American men being lynched across the south, and another, intimately related one of police denying it. One conventional response would be to speculate about whether police are knowingly, deliberately lying and covering up or, instead, their purported “caution” is an impersonal manifestation of structural racism. I reject that kind of framing, because I don’t think the subjective state of those who contribute to oppression is matters very much. There are all kinds of reasons for that:
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focus: we should center the victim’s state not the perp’s
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method: we can’t know someone’s mens rea
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process: outcomes outweigh techniques
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appeal: there’s always another forum that’ll hew to convention
But the one that matters most is consequence: a regime that focuses on mens rea creates incentives to not “know.” That feedback loop contributes heavily to the endless rivers of passive “mistakes were made” language, all the smarmy “I wasd only kidding” pseudo-denials, the trollish bad-faith appropriations of progressive language, and so on.
When it comes to criminality, the spaces of subjectivity are heavily weighted toward those whose crimes mesh neatly with the structural and systemic violence of the state and para-state. That’s why we should disregard it.
That may sound abstract but, I assure you, it’s very concrete. Why? Because it demands that we treat the failures of the police, whether passively negligent or deliberately malfeasant, as crimes as grave as what they claim to investigate. And that, my friends, is a Big Fucking Deal.