Victimhood and Perfection: Rosa Parks and Christian Cooper

This piece was originally published on 28/05/20

Diamond Reynolds, Philando Castile’s girlfriend, speaking at a rally after his murder

This week, after the murder of George Floyd, the chilling threat passed down to Christian Cooper, and the militaristic response to the protests and riots in Minneapolis, has felt like the start of a new era in American antiracist struggle. Given the possibility of a renaissance for a social movement that in many ways has shrunk and regressed since the 1960s, all of us need to be careful with how we engage in the discourse of police brutality and white supremacy, lest we inadvertently strengthen it. Praising exemplary black victims for being exemplary reinforces the structures which lead to atrocities against more ordinary victims.

If you search for Rosa Parks’s name, you will be met with a flurry of cliches. Articles like this create a compelling narrative around her — a narrative that is both untrue and harmful. Phrases like “one simple act of courage”, “what Rosa did on that day started a big movement”, and “the great fuse that led to the modern stride toward freedom” — from a leadership website, a worksheet for schoolchildren, and Martin Luther King himself — impose a simplistic historical interpretation about the means by which the civil rights movement came to be successful on the historical facts of her actions: a lone perfect hero can achieve great, and universally beneficial, social change through their individual nonviolent actions and character.

Michelle Alexander explodes this narrative by emphasising a different set of facts about Parks in her influential book The New Jim Crow:

“Civil rights advocates considered and rejected two other black women as plaintiffs when planning a test case challenging segregation practices: Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. Both of them were arrested for refusing to give up their seats on Montgomery’s segregated buses, just months before Rosa Parks refused to budge. Colvin was fifteen years old when she defied segregation laws. Her case attracted national attention, but civil rights advocates declined to use her as a plaintiff because she got pregnant by an older man shortly after her arrest. Advocates worried that her “immoral” conduct would detract from or undermine their efforts to show that blacks were entitled to (and worthy of) equal treatment. Likewise, they decided not to use Mary Louise Smith as a plaintiff because her father was rumored to be an alcoholic. It was understood that, in any effort to challenge racial discrimination, the litigant — and even the litigant’s family — had to be above reproach and free from every negative trait that could be used as a justification for unequal treatment.

Rosa Parks, in this regard, was a dream come true. She was, in the words of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (another key figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott), a “medium-sized, cultured mulatto woman; a civic and religious worker; quiet, unassuming, and pleasant in manner and appearance; dignified and reserved; of high morals and strong character.” No one doubted that Parks was the perfect symbol for the movement to integrate public transportation in Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled in his memoir that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,” largely because “her character was impeccable” and she was “one of the most respected people in the Negro community.”

There are a number of harmful consequences of this kind of historical interpretation, not least the way it emphasises heroic individuals over social movements or economic logic as agents of change, and then mythologises, beatifies, and whitewashes those individuals (we already see this happening to Barack Obama!) such that contemporary figures, who might enact the next wave of change, pale in comparison. However, given the topical, presentist nature of this piece, I’m going to focus on one aspect in particular.

I’m worried that the furore around George Floyd, a defenceless, unarmed, compliant man without a criminal record, and Christian Cooper, a Harvard graduate, Marvel writer, and avid birdwatcher, will fall into the same pattern of thinking which shaped the decisions of the civil rights lawyers back in the 60s. That pattern of thinking constitutes a discourse, a discourse which includes both racists and antiracists, but a discourse which is actually counterproductive to antiracist movements. This is how I see that discourse of victimhood and purity as working.

After an incident of police brutality, the individuals and police forces involved, and their political supporters, look for plausible justifications for their actions. The only possible justification for lethal force is that the officer (or member of the public, in the case of Ahmaud Arbery or Trayvon Martin), felt that they were themselves in danger from the victim. If the victim was armed, that’s a justification too — whether or not it was possible for them to actually use their weapon, as in the case of Philando Castile. The next justification is the victim’s physical appearance, or criminal background, or past drug use. All these features are used by racists to justify violence against black bodies. In response, antiracist (or simply black) voices seek to minimise or avoid those characteristics, engaging with the racists’ attack. And if you’re going to try to mobilise a social movement or bring a court case, you do it around a Rosa Parks or a Christian Cooper, not a Philando Castile, who had both a weapon and a ‘history of traffic violations’. This validates the racist strategy — and that strategy changes the behaviour of officers. Philando Castile wasn’t shot because he had a gun on him — he was shot because Jeronimo Yanez had been exposed to a discourse and a culture in America, and particularly in the police, where African Americans with weapons were immediate threats, where the safest course of action was to shoot them ‘before they shoot you’. As this discourse continues, racists focusing on criminal records and antiracists focusing on brutality only against the totally defenceless (Botham Jean) or the totally impeccable (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), it becomes implicitly accepted that brutality against flawed individuals isn’t that bad. If the victim has a gun, was running from police (Patrick Harmon, Maurice Granton, Anthony Marcel Green), or had a history of drug use, then racists see the perpetrator as justifiable and the antiracists see the victim as indefensible. The history of the victim is centred, rather than the crime of the police.

Gender is crucial to all these incidents, because it’s central to the stereotypes and ideas which make up race in America. I’ve listed a lot of black murders; none of them were women, because it is specifically black men who are seen as violent and dangerous. Philando Castile’s girlfriend survived. Gender matters for white women too. The Cooper incident demonstrated for the age of the camera phone the importance of a particular white femininity — the femininity which shapes the story of Emmett Till, Birth of a Nation, and the Central Park Five: white women’s tears and white women’s victimhood and white women’s fragility gets black men killed. Black women, of course, have their own problems: Rosa Parks was in her own day most famous for being an activist against the assault and exploitation of women, and black women in particular. That the problems faced by black women aren’t directly related to police brutality (but are related to the broader system of mass incarceration, for example), and more generally that black interactions with the police is gendered, should be a clear sign that police brutality isn’t even the problem — it’s a symptom, a symptom of a structure which enmeshes all Americans.

There are two important things to note about the discourse of victimhood and purity: first, both racists and antiracists participate in it — it’s a dialectic. Responsibility for it can’t just be ascribed to evil right-wing media or bigoted ordinary voters. Second, it’s really, really important. The way we talk about police brutality and white supremacy creates the police brutality and white supremacy of the future, and concomitantly the way we talk about that. Perpetuating this kind of attitude towards victims, this focus on their background and behaviour, reinforces the myths which cause racism in police forces and ordinary Americans, and distracts from the systemic changes which have to be made to end that racism. And even more importantly, this is still true when the background and behaviour is perfect, as was Christian Cooper’s.

So if we want to deal in a productive fashion with atrocities like those of the past week, then we need to think carefully about what we say, write and share. That isn’t to say that ‘when they go low, we go high.’ Anger, grief, resignation are all fine — despite the fact that over centuries of American history, from Crooks to Barack Obama’ saying that ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon’ they have not been fine for the victims of white supremacy. But rather than rebutting racist questions about background and circumstance, or praising the character of the victims, we need to think about the structures, the histories, the contexts, and yes, the discourses which produce the brutality and oppression that characterises so much of African-American reality. That means talking about mass incarceration, about voter suppression, about redlining, about sub-prime mortgages, about the legacy of slavery, about bussing, about the NFL, and so much more. Rosa Parks — or, at least, the Rosa Parks of ‘Black History Month’ — can’t save the next George Floyd. But perhaps that most tarnished and yet most radiant of activists, Angela Y. Davis, can.