George Lipsitz: The Eminem of Afro. American Studies
In a recent episode of their podcast The Tightrope, Tricia Rose and Cornel West interview legendary race scholar George Lipsitz. Near the interview’s end, West calls Lipsitz the “Eminem of Afro. American Studies.”
I conclude this post with two extended quotations from Lipsitz’s essay “From Plessy to Ferguson” that demonstrate why he deserves this loving moniker.
Quotation One:
The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, and the callous and cruel official responses to it repeat what by now has come to be a familiar pattern of events. Like Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tanisha Anderson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Amadou Diallo, and countless others, Michael Brown was an unarmed black person killed by a police officer sworn to protect and serve the public. In each of these cases, authorities moved quickly to hide evidence and exonerate the killers. Media outlets rushed to blame the victim and smear his or her reputation. Protestors were dismissed as people playing the race card.
We can be saddened or angered by this process, but we should not be surprised. In our society, white vanity is more highly valued than black humanity. Residential segregation orders urban geography. It promotes opportunity hoarding and asset accumulation for whites while confining aggrieved communities of color to impoverished, under-resourced, and criminogenic neighborhoods. This system subsidizes whites, offering them unfair gains and unjust enrichments while saddling communities of color with artificial, arbitrary, and irrational obstacles to asset accumulation. Yet whites view themselves as innocent and unaccountable for a system that is rigged in their behalf. They attribute the social skewing of opportunities and life chances along racial lines to the allegedly deficient character and behavior of blacks. Neighborhoods created by white flight become suffused with white fright, and that fear is used to justify the taking of black lives.
Phobic fantasies of demonized monstrous black criminality stand at the center of the national political imaginary. They fuel a seemingly insatiable sadism ever in search of a story, relentlessly blaming and shaming people for their own oppression and dismissing the testimony of the aggrieved even before they speak. White officers who kill black “suspects” need only invoke fear as a motivation for the killing and they will be let off. The officers become seen as the injured victims in these incidents, not the people they kill. The actually innocent victims, however, are judged to have been always already guilty. Proclamations of white innocence and imagined incidents of white injury combine to create a whiteness protection program that elevates the comfort and illusions of whites over the constitutional and human rights of people of color.
In this way, the racial order of the United States requires us to live with evil and then to lie about it, to deny even the existence of systemic and structural injustice, to identify with the oppressors and to blame the oppressed….
Quotation Two:
The conditions that led to Michael Brown’s killing were already in place long before the bullets from Officer Darren Wilson’s gun entered Michael Brown’s body, long before Ferguson police officers let the teenager’s body lie in the street unattended and unclaimed for four hours, long before the police chain of command allowed Officer Wilson to go into hiding without being questioned or having to file a comprehensive written report explaining the shooting, long before Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson released a video to the press in an effort to smear the reputation of the deceased and long before the chief lied that he was required to release the video because of a Freedom of Information Act request when in fact none had been filed, long before Ferguson and county police officers attacked demonstrators and reporters, long before the county prosecutor turned the grand jury process into an exercise in exculpating Officer Wilson and mounting a public relations campaign on his behalf by repeatedly leaking secret testimony, long before the prosecutor allowed a racist bipolar convicted felon to appear before the grand jury as a witness in support Officer Wilson’s version of events (even though she had not been present at the shooting and in fact witnessed nothing), long before the prosecutorial team instructed the grand jury to decide Wilson’s culpability on the basis of a statute they knew had been declared unconstitutional, long before white people with no real factual knowledge about the incident claimed to have collected more than $500,000 from sympathizers for a fund for Officer Wilson (who had been charged with no crime and made no appeal for assistance for a legal defense fund), long before St. Louis County police officers at the demonstrations protesting Michael Brown’s shooting wore wristbands that read “I am Darren Wilson,” and long before military grade equipment was used as part of a show of force designed to silence the media and drive protestors from the streets.
