It has been a terrible week. In Louisiana, a black man selling CDs was killed by two white police officers as they sought to arrest him. In Minnesota, a black man pulled over for a traffic stop was killed by a police officer after the man informed the officer that he had a concealed carry permit and was carrying a firearm. Both incidents were recorded on video by third parties, and both shootings appear, as of now, unjustified. A protest took place in Dallas in response to these shootings, and during that protest, a black man killed 5 white police officers. That black man stated that he deliberately targeted white police officers.
As is unfortunately all too common, people have leapt to take sides on this matter. Some are declaring the shootings as further proof of systemic police bias against blacks, some are declaring that there is a war on police being waged by blacks. People are rushing onto social media to declare their positions, to castigate one side or the other, to stand in solidarity with one side or the other, and to advance their own (often predetermined) narratives.
It is the great tragedy of our modern society that none of this will make things better. It’s impossible to have an honest dialogue when people’s demands for dialogue start with their foregone conclusions. It’s also totally understandable in hindsight, born as it is out of a combination of human nature, the hubris of the intelligentsia, and a failure of leadership.
Factual analyses tend to undermine the narratives that portray death-by-cop as a predominantly black problem and that police are bigoted against the black community, but as is painfully obvious, facts matter less than perceptions. To tackle this matter, we have to first understand how perceptions arise and persist.
Human beings are tribal by nature. We tend to congregate with our own, trust our own, defend our own, and give our own greater deference than we do “others.” This is true across races, across ethnicities, across religions, across geographic locales, across professions, and across countless other demographic identifiers. We also tend to look for and to leaders that are “our own,” trusting them more than we trust leaders who are “other.” The power and deference that leaders receive from us comes with a responsibility, but all too often (and, again, thanks to human nature), those leaders subordinate that responsibility to self-interest and personal biases.
Tribalism was a survival mechanism for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but it’s a major source of ills in a society that has evolved far beyond those hunter-gatherer clans (and far faster than human biological instincts have). It’s why we have blacks reflexively siding with black criminals, the police “blue wall of silence,” teachers’ unions that protect the worst among them, religious organizations hiding pedophiles or staying mum about terrorists, Republicans defending bad actors who are Republican, and Democrats defending bad actor who are Democratic.
All this is amplified by the opinion-makers and narrative-writers. It is a cold reality that modern society is driven by identity politics, where the demographic groups accident of birth has placed you in are far more important than your individual beliefs, wants and needs. The extension of this reality is the expectation that you will side with your own even if they do wrong. The tragedy of this reality is expectation that you will blame all members of “other” when one of those “other” does wrong.
When events bring to the fore a “our own” vs “other” couplet like blacks vs police, this tribalistic subordination of individuals to identity groups produces terrible results. The most proximate example is this week’s sequence of events. Based on current information, it appears that both the Louisiana and Minnesota shootings were unjustified. Time and the results of investigations may verify that appearance, or may refute it, or may make things vague. What won’t change is the fact that 5 police officers in Dallas are dead at the hands of a black man whose actions were, by his own statement, motivated by the Louisiana and Minnesota shootings (on top of previous events). Those 5 officers had absolutely nothing to do with either of the police shootings, and those 5 individuals have, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely no connection to the police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. They were killed because they belonged to a group the killer saw as “other.”
What are we, as a society, to do about this tribalism? How do we address the bad effects of identity politics?
The answer is that we need to see each other as individuals, first and foremost. This goes against our base instincts, but our base instincts in times of yore were to bash the heads of other tribes in with rocks. We can overrule destructive instincts, and we do so every day.
Getting to that point, though, isn’t easy. It requires effort both from the top and from the rank-and-file. We as individuals must demand accountability when someone within our tribe does wrong. Yes, that means that, if we instinctually side with police, we must nevertheless demand that a bad action be punished. Yes, that means that, if we are black, we must nevertheless demand that crimes committed by blacks be punished. Yes, that means that, if we are teachers, a bad teacher should not sit in a “rubber room” for years rather than be fired. Yes, that means that, if we are Muslim, we vocally decry those who commit atrocities in the name of our religion. If we are to demand justice and proper treatment from without, we must demand justice from within.
Just as importantly, our leaders must reflect these values and this mindset. Those leaders we expect to bridge identity groups, to lead us all, are the most obligated to look past tribalistic leanings. Tragically, our leaders do the exact opposite. They engage in the most obvious of tribalistic biases, and in doing so they alienate all those “others” who might otherwise hope for someone to lead the way to unity. Rather than work to diminish tribalistic attitudes, they thrive on them, pitting group against group and leveraging “us” vs “other” to advance themselves and their agendas. And we are all the worse for it.
I find myself deeply disheartened by this tribalistic decay of our society. All the lofty promises that were made about moving past our differences were not only hollow, they appear in hindsight to be deliberate misdirections. Every tragedy, every news-grabbing event, seems immediately met with selfish and cynical leveraging to advance agendas that failed to advance in less emotional times. And, every tragedy seems to be used to scold those who don’t agree with our leaders, to cow them via ugly accusations of the worst sort, into submission. Predictably, that scolding has bred resentment instead of creating unity, and contributed to the decay that, I fear, will lead to very bad things.
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