Clarissa's Blog

Complex issues tend to annoy and bore people. So they come up with easy, schematic, comfortable narratives and try to massage reality into these simple and accessible patterns. Any aspect of reality that can’t be fit into the easy scheme is excised and ignored.

Look what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow it morphed into the easy narrative of opposition to police brutality. Of course, in order to make it a story of police brutality, we need to dismiss Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride. They don’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck them, I guess.

The narrative of police brutality needs further sacrifices. The horrible living conditions in East St Louis, West Baltimore, etc are being excised from the story. When I write about the horrifying death toll in St Louis, everybody is bored and downvotes the story. Effective segregation doesn’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck it, too. All of the people who donated money to the killer of Michael Brown are similarly neatly deleted from the narrative because they don’t fit. Dylann Roof doesn’t fit in either, and neither do those who believe the same things he does.

The narrative of police brutality is very convenient because it’s all about a limited number of “bad apples” whom we can all joyfully despise without ever needing to do anything. A story of a deeply racist society becomes substituted with the narrative of a few flawed individuals. This is akin to treating a pimple on the nose of a man who has AIDS. Sure enough, the pimple is probably a symptom of Kaposi sarcoma but it can’t be cured without addressing the underlying condition.

I’m a foreigner, so I don’t need to play the weird games around racial relations that people around here so love. Yesterday on the news I saw a bunch of comfortable white folks eagerly massage the story of Sandra Bland, a depressed, unstable woman devastated by a recent loss of her baby, into the convenient narrative of police brutality that lets them off the hook.

These regular oohings and aahings about evil police are a comfortable, easy way of letting off steam and never really change anything. “It’s them, not me, they are the evil racist ones, and I’m all good, warm, and fuzzy.” Of course, everything stays exactly the same but that’s the whole purpose of the narrative.