This brings us to the second element. Good laws will not change the situation that police and Blacks find themselves in when the police confront Blacks. Police need to maintain their authority over the people they detain, and Blacks know from direct experience and history that police officers may arrest them without due cause or sometimes gravely harm them while they are in police custody.

Even if the probability of harm is relatively low in absolute terms, it is disproportionately high for Blacks, and the harm itself is so serious that resisting arrest may seem rational.

The options for Blacks when confronted by the police are fight or flight. Both are almost always no-win responses. The police have the overwhelming advantage in numbers and are legally authorized to use superior force, when they deem it necessary. We believe that a good many whites think that the correct response for Blacks is compliance. But such thinking does not value the effects of 150 years of second-class political, legal, economic and social status, preceded by centuries of slavery. Acutely aware of the history of misuse of force by police, some Blacks correctly view compliance as foolish, cowardly or even a high-risk gamble.

It is understandable then that police officers anticipate that the Blacks they detain may be uncooperative. Some Blacks resist. When they do, police perceive them as a serious, even life-threatening danger. For example, police officers on the scene perceived that the taser Rayshard Brooks wrested from an officer was a deadly weapon.

Each side then has reasonable—note we do not say, in any or all cases, justifiable—grounds to distrust the other, to be guided by group stereotyping, and to resort to violence or resistance as their default reaction. Neither side has cause to let their guard down.

The situation Blacks and police officers are in is not unique. The “Stranger Danger” program was devised for elementary school children because children are also at risk and need protection. Consider the parallelism. In what here follows, for ‘strangers’ and ‘children’ substitute respectively ‘Blacks’ and ‘police’ or ‘police’ and ‘Blacks’.  Some strangers are dangerous. Children cannot know which strangers are dangerous. Therefore, we tell them: “You must be afraid of all strangers.” This learned behavior gives children a good chance to avoid or flee from strangers who are predators.

One difference between the two situations is that the police and Blacks each perceive the other as a threat and consequently have a reason to harm or resist the other. The police know that Blacks may resist because of their reasonable fears of unjust treatment; and the Blacks know that police may act violently because of their acquired attitudes about Blacks. Over time each party has more and more reason to act aggressively towards the other. Tension escalates.

Violence begets violence. And so we speak of cycles of violence, for example, vendettas between organized crime families, clan feuds in the Ozarks or Appalachia, factional rivalries between cities and local families adhering to the causes of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in the time of Dante, and the long-enduring blood feuds between families in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

For human beings in the kinds of situations we have been discussing violence is seductive and gratifying. Violence is a ready tool to use in response to social and political problems when voices have gone unheard and injustices unaddressed across generations. When the supreme Achaean (Greek) warrior Achilles was about to embark on an unparalleled killing spree in Homer’s Iliad (Books 19-22) in order to avenge the killing of his closest brother in arms Patroclus, he describes to his goddess mother Thetis how violence affects human beings like a honey-sweet narcotic:

I wish that violent conflict (eris) among gods and among human beings would cease to exist!

And bilious rage, too. It drives even a deep-thinking man to become hard and severe

And, much sweeter than honey, it oozes down into the hearts of men

And swells like smoke in their chests.  (Iliad 18.107-110, trans. Palaima)

Violent acts stick in our minds and hearts. They are hard to dislodge. They create a lasting post-traumatic-stress response.

Police and Blacks are in a self-reinforcing cycle of suspected and anticipated violence. In order to escape the cycle, a change of hearts and minds is necessary.  We illustrate our point by describing two stories, one recent and one from ancient history, that might keep Americans from going to extremes in pursuit of retributive justice when what is also needed is shared truth and reconciliation.

We know that no amount of wishful thinking will change our country’s history of open and often officially or publicly encouraged violence against Blacks. The only comparable oppression in the United States is of native Americans. Two differences between the situations of Blacks and native Americans is that the federal government stole large expanses of land from the Native Americans, and their oppression has been less public because the government intentionally concentrated them on segregated reservations. We recognize that other groups have been targets of prejudice, exclusion, dehumanization and violent acts including murder. But the enslavement and violent prejudice against blacks is unique in scale, length of time, and virulence.

In August 2017, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan still had over thirty-one openly publicized and self-identified chapters in the state of Texas. They were proudly and unabashedly listed on-line as located in Texarkana, New Boston, Simms, Houston, Paris, Atlanta, Commerce, Clarksville, Greenville, Campbell, Beaumont, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Lufkin, DeKalb, Hooks, Huntsville, Maud, Cleveland, Longview, Marshall, Nacogdoches, Tyler, Canton, Austin, Round Rock, Sherman, Mt. Pleasant, San Antonio, Waco, and Houston, as were links to the Ku Klux Klan Realms of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Notoriety from well-publicized white supremacist actions at the University of Virginia in August 2017 led these KKK groups to pull down their Websites from the internet. But their members remain and their shared beliefs have not been disavowed. We invite readers of this essay to look at three books: Michael J. Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (2006); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle : Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890 – 1940 (2011) and the classic work on the subject by James Allen, the late John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack and Hilton Als, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), for selected obscene images of some of the 3,400 public lynchings of Blacks between 1882 and 1950 as recorded by the Tuskegee Institute as of the year 2000. Some of the images originated as picture postcards sent to friends and relatives.

Also read the story of what is commonly known as the “Waco horror,” the chaining, parading, knifing, beating, castrating, hanging, and ‘barbecuing’ of Jesse Washington on May 15, 1916, before an estimated crowd of 10,000, including the chief of police and the mayor, in the Waco town square. A photographer attended to get images for postcards. A retired white history professor at Baylor who grew up in Waco recalls the “selective forgetting” perpetrated in white schools in the 1960s: “I went K through 12 and never heard a word about such an incident happening. We would spend all our time talking about the tornado but never a word about Jesse Washington.” Local black families did not forget the incident.

Popular opinion in the US has come to accept that police officers too often use excessive force in arresting Blacks. A majority supports mass demonstrations against “a broader pattern of excessive violence towards African Americans.” Even if the police reform bill passed by the House of Representatives unexpectedly were to become law, race-related violence will persist. Legislation will not change the feelings and experiences that condition how police officers and Blacks act when they face to face with each other. The progress toward racial justice of the 1960s inspired faith that progress would continue until equality was achieved. However, progress slowed in the next decades, and conspicuous racist acts and attitudes during the last four years have shattered any reasonable belief that achieving racial harmony was a national priority. The central problem is how to put to rest the anger and suspicion of both parties and the natural desire for retributive justice of those who have suffered for many generations.

Americans are beset by the kind of simmering and tenacious violent factionalism that has plagued human societies from the time of the first case study (427 BCE) by the Greek historian Thucydides (Thucydides 3.69-85) down to and beyond the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998.

In 458 BCE, when political factionalism and assassination were tearing apart the social fabric of Athens, the Greek playwright Aeschylus, a veteran of the Athenian equivalent of our D-Day, presented to the Athenians his trilogy, the Oresteia. In it, he dramatized the effects of factional violence that was carried down generation after generation between rival family branches of the royal dynasts in the great kingdom of Mycenae during its mythical prehistory. The abominable killing, mayhem, even cannibalism continued through three generations and would have gone further. The great king Agamemnon killed his own daughter Iphigenia. Her mother and his wife Clytemnestra therefore killed him. Their son Orestes therefore killed her, his own mother. All this was triggered by Orestes’ grandfather Atreus killing the children of his own brother Thyestes and serving them to him for supper. In the final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, lust for justice and vengeance ends only through divine intervention of the goddess Athena. Unfortunately, no deus ex machina will save us in 2020. But the peaceful resolution in the Oresteia can provide a template and it is a template with a recent historical parallel.

Under racial apartheid, the equivalent in South Africa of American Jim Crow laws, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, not for doing violence, but for inciting workers to strike. Ultimately, he committed himself to supporting neither white domination nor black domination. He saw that aiming for retributive justice that would ostensibly right past wrongs would not work. The only permanent solution would depend on people changing their entire ways of thinking. Only after enduring his long imprisonment was he “able to achieve the most difficult task in life, and that is changing yourself.”

These are courageous, wise and sincere words by someone who had every good reason to seek just vengeance. Instead he made haste slowly and surely and in the end for the good of Blacks and whites.

As we have pointed out, Blacks and police, and their supporters, in our country are at a critical impasse. Each side has reasonable grounds to distrust the other, to be guided by group stereotyping, and to resort to violence or resistance as their automatic default. Neither side has cause to let their guard down.

There is no quick or simple solution. Our question is how to begin? We look to the example of Nelson Mandela.

Three first steps towards a solution are for each side:

1. to acknowledge their contribution to the problem;

2. to imagine what it is like to be the people on the other side; and then

3. to move forward with empathy.

This is easier said than done when incidents of violence against blacks resonate within the truly deplorable history of race-based violence and prejudice in our country that we have sampled above. Tinkering with police ethical and procedural guidelines will only alleviate the symptoms—an accomplishment that no caring citizen would belittle. But changes in police practices will not put the long-term disease into remission, much rather cure it.

The historical realities surrounding race in our country cannot be undone. Never will enough justice be meted out to the satisfaction of either side. No amount of reparations can compensate for past evils, large and small. We do not need more martyrs or more violence.

We need to embrace the spirit of Nelson Mandela and at the same time keep in the forefront of our thinking and our feelings two truths: (1) Black lives are lived out in a shameful historical context that still persists in our society; and (2) Black lives do not only matter when the life of a Black adult or child is taken by police. And Blacks, too, may strive to follow in the footsteps of Mandela, whether heading to the mountaintop or the promised land.

The future matters much more than the past.

July 24, 2020