From UC Davis to UC Riverside, Global Outrage to Conspiracy of Silence
The events of November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, bear the mark of a certain kind of American racial-political spectacle. An eruption of police violence on that afternoon—what most have named an act of “police brutality”—catalyzed a national and international response, focused on the vulnerable bodies of young white people engaged in an act of civil disobedience. (With due respect to the people of color who were also in the line of fire at Davis, my contention is that their bodies were not the ones with which the national and international response was primarily concerned, nor was their vulnerability centrally responsible for inciting this global outrage in the first place.) The political outcry was primarily fueled by the viral circulation of cell phone, Facebook, and YouTube videos depicting riot-geared police officers dousing the UC Davis Occupiers with caustic yellowish fluid (a widely published still image of which appears here as fig. 1 [editor's note: the above picture]). As this scene becomes momentarily enshrined in the political narratives of the U.S. Left as a reference point for exposing the repressive tendencies of a state (and university system) in crisis, it seems that the spectacle of UC Davis has been isolated from the historical context that has enabled it.
As a point of vital contrast, it is worth remarking that two months after the UC Davis pepper spray incident, on January 19, 2012, a far more massive and militarized display of police force/violence occurred at my home campus of UC Riverside, in which students were actually shot with “less than lethal” police pellets during protests of the UC Regents meeting. In the case of the Riverside campus, UC police were mobilized from every UC campus other than Davis and Merced, and were supplemented by officers from the City of Riverside Police Department and Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Police helicopters periodically circled over the protest, and officers took what seemed to be sniper positions at strategic high points on campus buildings. The climate was thick with police presence, and the pageantry of political intimidation manifested a massive show of force against the students, faculty, staff, and ordinary people who populated crowd. This police demonstration starkly contrasted with the protest’s well-disciplined adherence to tactics of “nonviolence.” (By way of definition, I do not consider loud chants, intense and vitriolic rhetorics of protest, militant refusal to disperse an alleged “unlawful assembly” or sit-down blockades to constitute “violence”; further, even if one wishes to perform the academic gymnastics of labeling such activities as forms of discursive, symbolic, existential, and/or immanent violence, they are certainly not of a kind remotely comparable to the aforementioned marshaling of legitimated state violence.) For reasons I attempt to explain, we should not be surprised that UC Riverside’s scene of police repression—images of which are also easily accessible via e-mail listservs, YouTube videos, Facebook photos, and the like—has not attracted remotely the kind of attention and righteous reaction as the incident at UC Davis.
Rather than stagnate in the discourse of righteous outrage that is almost reflexively spurred by such events, it may be more useful to pose some hard questions: for example, is it possible that the entwined narratives of moral affront and institutional (university/police) accountability surrounding UC Davis and select other police spectacles—and which may largely exclude police violence in other places—are part of a broader, commonsense conspiracy of silence regarding the where/when/why (and not merely the how) of state violence, and racist state violence, writ large?
Beyond “Police Brutality”
We should be clear: the UC Davis police used caustic “nonlethal” spray on those student protestors because they could. The institutional entitlement to use such police force, however ill-advised it may seem in hindsight, is neither incidental nor ad hoc—it is systemic, legally supported, and absolutely normal. As we pass the twentieth anniversary of the acquittal of five Los Angeles Police Department officers in the street torture of Rodney King, it is urgent to once again examine how police violence shapes our everyday realities in different and contradictory ways.
(A note on the prevailing language: police brutality has become a vastly misused term. While the phrase intends to communicate a sharp criticism of state power that has presumably violated its own self-defined laws and regulations, it is often used to refer to violent police practices that are utterly, ritually sanctioned by law.)
The public response to the display of police violence at UC Davis has been predictably characterized by a combination of righteous outrage and institutional shaming, accompanied by somewhat more muted and unconvincing—though equally predictable—defenses of the UC Davis police department and chancellor. Two facts are not in question: first, the campus deployed an armed police force to squash a conventional act of civil disobedience that was, in the recent historical scheme of things, quite institutionally polite and undisruptive; second, that same armed police force was authorized to use nonlethal weapons on nonviolent student protestors. (We must also remember that the spraying of such chemicals has been widely known to cause death and permanent disability in many instances.)
What does remain in question, however, is how and why these facts are being translated into a liberal-progressive political reaction that seems to naturalize—that takes for granted and/or completely obscures—the fundamentally racial and racist structure of U.S. policing, an apparatus that finds its modern roots in slave patrols, U.S. colonial military outfits (in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere), Texas Rangers (killers of Apaches, Cherokees, and Comanches), and white citizens’ militias throughout the post–Civil War era North and South. In other words, is it possible that much of the critical response to the scene at UC Davis is actually condoning racist police violence rather than challenging it, and if so, what is enabling such critically minded people to do so?
