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Apparently, the reason so many black people are getting murdered by police officers is that black people believe police officers are murdering black people.
At least that’s what Twitter activist, “Gorilla mindset” guru and all-around Internet embarrassment Mike Cernovich seems to suggest in a recent blog post.
A couple of months ago, you may recall, Cernovich suggested that he and his Twitter followers had “manifested” Hillary Clinton’s illness with their minds. Call it the power of negative thinking: by imagining Hillary having coughing fits, they literally gave her pneumonia.
Now Cerno is offering a similar explanation for the police shootings of black men that have roiled the nation over the last several years. As Cerno sees it, black men are “summoning the demon” and bringing murder on themselves by believing the media accounts of black men getting killed by police officers.
You may object that the media only writes about black men getting killed by police officers because, you know, black men are getting killed by police officers. But Cerno apparently lives in a world beyond mere facts.
“I look at issues from a branding and marketing perspective,” Cernovich explains.
Brand value is subjective. Statistics about race and crime matter far less than the subjective feelings people have towards one another.
So forget the actual facts of police officers killing black people. In Cerno’s reality, the key problem is that
[t]he brand of police (and whites) has suffered a lot of damage due to fake news media propaganda.
As a result, he argues, “millions of blacks believe police are out to kill them,” which makes
every interaction [between blacks and police] more toxic for both parties.
In mindset we call this Summoning the Demon. Your subjective beliefs create the very monster your fear.
Hey Rocky, watch me pull a racist police officer with an itchy trigger finger out of my hat!
“Consider this,” Cerno continues,
A black man is pulled over. He believes (rightly or wrongly, as your opinion doesn’t matter for this example) that the police officer poses a threat to his life. The black man is going to be tense. Sensing the driver’s tension, the police officer is going to view the black man as a threat. They will feed off of one another’s energy until something bad happens.
Nothin’ up my sleeve! PRESTO!
The belief manifested the reality.
Really, dude?
Again, I do not live in the world of “absolute truth.” It doesn’t matter if racism in policing is real or not if millions of people believe it’s real.
What about gravity? If millions of people convinced themselves that gravity was fake, would they and all their belongings just float away into the sky?
My personal belief is that police are not actively discriminating against blacks. If millions of other people feel differently, then we have a branding problem.
Mike, maybe gravity is just a “branding problem.” Why not test this proposition by convincing yourself that gravity is an illusion, then walking off the nearest skyscraper?
I’ll just be waiting here for you to report back to me on the results of this experiment.
Somehow I doubt Cerno will try this little trick. Because in his mind some facts — like gravity — actually matter, while other facts — like black people getting shot by cops — are just a “branding problem.”
Cerno’s solution to this little “branding problem?” He thinks the incoming President Trump should “hire Kanye West as sort of a ‘brand ambassador'” who could, I guess, convince black people that police are the friendliest, least racist people on planet earth. Through the magical power of his rapping, I guess.
That’s his actual “solution.”
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
@John,
WOW. That woke me up. Great stuff. How … how does she do ballet to it, though?
Writing: this is unrelated I think to your particular issues, but it’s seriously adorable. Stop-motion film of Shakespeare with writer’s block over the ending of Romeo & Juliet; little stick figures try to help him. Pay close attention to the posters on Will’s walls 🙂
This is a blindingly obvious & mundane suggestion, but have you tried looking into how other writers deal with blocks & problems? I love this article’s coverage; writers discussing all manner of obstacles, like fear of finishing, perfectionism, motivation…
I wish I knew enough French to read your stuff!
@Brony,
Hope you had a good sleep 🙂
The first time I saw your nym, I thought of ‘cenobite’ as in monk or member of a religious order, and I liked the idea of a ‘monk of social justice’. Not quite the same thing as a Clive Barker cenobite!
The different versions of demonic influence are interesting. I remember (though I’ve tried not to) a certain church that my family went to during a particularly fundamentalist phase, where the speaker would pick out random people in the congregation and claim that they were possessed by a demon. The poor people would have to go up to the stage and be exorcised. Children were not exempt.
Now that is intriguing.
@Mish
Re: demons.
First I have to point out that I’m coming from a western perspective on this one. My family was of a very conservative protestant kind and a military kind. I grew up during the last decade of the cold war, I remember the satanic ritual abuse scare that hit the US in the 80s, my families church regularly had creationist, anti-LGBT, and other speakers. My family also banned some pop-culture for reasons that basically included “occult” and “supernatural elements”. There was much othering in my background because social conflict and national conflict was a theme of my upbringing.
The TS-demon link comes from papers like this(1). And other research and historical references that discuss TS in terms of urges to do the opposite of what is socially expected or typical(2). “Demon” in that sense does not perfectly map onto what might get called a demon in other cultures. My experience includes urges and sensations that feel external to me. A need to do something with no apparent source. Given the array of ways that “demon” is used in western culture it’s likely that other things than TS will intersect with it.
There is a decidedly social aspect to it (especially in social dominance/symbolism aspects) and the condition is associated with many patterned language phenomena. The social uses of demon outside of things like TS typically involve blame for actions of people being shifted. The attention can be moved from a group (“It’s not me it’s the demons!) or towards a group (“They are working with demons/used by demons for evil purposes!”).
I think that it has to do with the fact that we are networked biological computers and the system for transmitting social information involves attention focusing, shifting, symbolic connections and maps of our very bodies and emotional states.
Re: vulnerabilities.
I’m still mulling it over.
The system has rules. It deals with positive and negative feelings and associated transformations in person or symbolic form. I’ve seen it in simplified form in the behavior of children. When adult negative social attention is focused on a young child they can try to shift the attention by starting a conflict with a peer physically or verbally to move it from them to a wider set of people. I’ve seen them mock or hit each other and try to get to the authority figure first and claim the victim did what the aggressor did. And I’ve seen adult versions like #notallmen that basically tries to shift perspective and social attention from people acting badly, and #alllivesmatter. I’ve seen it in the paranoid projection of bigots expecting a race war that they then use in a self-fulfilling prophecy to justify social violations and arms accumulation.
There has to be a way to “monkey-wrench” it, subvert it, flip the transitions and polarities in an efficient manner. Or at least refine the workings to do it well with some morals and ethics with respect to reality and other concerns. It’s like how one person’s humor can be a weapon to another person.
(1)
(2)
@sunnysombrera
Yay! That’s been my mantra too, for as long as I can remember. When in doubt, I refer back to it.
My parents were right-wing fundamentalists, but the concept of the Golden Rule was (seemingly) almost impossible for my father to grasp and (seemingly) sometimes challenging for my mother to grasp.
And yet for a Christian, what could be more conservative? Jesus said it –and he referenced Jewish law and the Jewish teachers who came before him:
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets (Matthew 7:12).
@Sinkable John
That’s awful!
I’m so sorry that happened to you, and I hope you’ve come to some sense of peace about this incident.
@Mish
I have no idea.
I think she hasn’t internalized yet that there are supposed to be “proper” kinds of dance for different kinds of music. So she just does it. Probably a good example of “it’s supposed to be impossible, but she doesn’t know that, so nothing’s stopping her”.
At any rate, I’m taking her with me the next time I see these guys in concerts. Plus they’re awfully nice and they make sure it’s absolutely safe for even the youngest kids, even with all the drugs and beer going around. It’s a pretty unique environment.
Now, (sorry if you already knew that) Bella Ciao is a partisan song that was written and sung by Italian anti-facists during the civil war in the 1940s, and has since been sung in various languages by anti-fascists and internationalists.
And this band is, in part, former Bérurier Noir members – the band that redefined the punk movement in France and gave it that strong activist slant. They’re the reason why we have so many “old punks” who are active in voluntary work organizing concerts and solidarity events. Now they do breton punk and still tour the country, making all their stops in the communities and spaces that they helped create. Ehh to be fair, that’s the kind of environment I was in before that whole ostracism thing… which is kind of ironic I guess.
We’ve got a wonderful thing going here thanks to these guys, and I think my niece is aware of that to a certain extent. It doesn’t hurt that half her family, including her aunt (who’s also her godmother), her mother, and her uncle (who’s also her godfather, and oh hey that’s me) come from that very environment.
Okay I’m done rambling.
@Kat
Thank you 🙂
I can’t complain about the aftermath, though. It was 4am, and my friend and I were very drunk when it happened, walking and trying to make our way home to sleep after a concert. It was all kinda hazy and we only fully realized what the fuck had happened after we got home to safety. It was definitely our worst experience of police abuse but all in all it wasn’t that much worse than what we’d come to expect. We also got pretty lucky that they couldn’t read Yiddish – it’s probably not a great idea to go anywhere near a cop when there’s a huge Daloy politsey on your shirt…
Even if there was the tiniest grain of truth to Cer-nitwit’s* nonsensical “observations”, the obvious solution would be to hire more black cops.
Black cops would be less likely to be racist to black civilians, so the civvies will be less tense around the cops and the cops won’t feel threatened. Problem solved.
Unless there’s something I’m missing and this is easier said than done.
*Yeah, that’s what I’ve decided to call him.
@FreddyMurray
Well, pretty much, yeah.
Not too sure about America but if France is any indication, it’s not that simple. There’s a whole lotta peer pressure going on in there, doubly so on cops who are also minorities.
@Sinkable John
I had no idea that Breton punk was even a thing, this is excellent.
@FreddyMurray
The short answer is yes, you are, and yes, it is. The long answer is a whole bunch of books and scholarly articles on exactly that topic. Most of which I haven’t in fact read, so understand that the following is a really superficial look at the matter.
The first problem with simply hiring more PoCs as police is that existing police forces range from really fucking racist to actual branches of the Klan. ‘Hostile work environment’ does not begin to cover it. This also means that it’s going to be very rare that black officers end up in positions where they can set policy in any fashion.
The second problem, although this relates to the first, is that, basically, members of oppressed groups have to work twice as hard for half the recognition, and in the context of U.S. policing ‘working hard’ means ‘arresting a lot of PoCs’. And I’m sure you can see the problem from there.
I genuinely do not believe that police reform is at all possible in any meaningful sense without literally disbanding every law enforcement agency in the country and rebuilding from the ground up.
C.S. Friedman explored this much better than these guys in her ‘Coldfire Trilogy’. Of course, we do not actually live on a planet that manifests our nightmares back at us.