The State Violence Apologia Machine

We have this structured and almost procedural cycle of protest violence in the United States a lot. It goes like this:

1. Grievances bubble up en masse, and people then organize en masse as per their constitutional right.
2. Pundits, academics and journalists fixate on noise levels, space taken up, and/or property damage. The property damage is a big one, since it gets the most attention in video and photojournalism. Occasionally there will also be focus on rocks, water bottles or other objects thrown at police.
3. Politicians interpret the actions in point two as violence, and deploy law enforcement in response. The law enforcement action is uniformly violent, almost always harmful to journalist reporting on the spot, and liberally use force and chemical weapons.
4. The police and armed forces get even more money for chemical weapons, riot gear and tanks.

This waxing poetic about peaceful protest and propriety has been the absolute baseline for politicians, in part because they do not want political fallout from endorsing property damage or bottles thrown at police. As much as Bernie Sanders will be fiery and unapologetic about fighting for the working class, the working class of immigrants require a certain set of tactics, or he will pull his punches.

What Sanders and many of America's intellectual and political elites miss is that the categorization of violence is never up to the American people. That power of categorization rests almost exclusively on the state, with media sometimes aiding in that classification by choosing how to edit, publish and analyze what is going on in the country.

How does the state categorize and determine what is violence? It can do so when police are sent out in riot gear to confront people, arming them with the same weapons and protective gear resembling soldiers going to hot wars. The state can label protestors or dissidents as foreign-backed, dangerous, ideologically extremist or other character traits that justify violence against said protestors. Under Trump specifically, labeling of dissidents that have held green cards or valid visas have made their presence into the United States a security problem, cutting the legitimacy of their residency out from under their feet.

The apologia machine skips over the justification of violence by the state. After all, nobody likes to sound like they want to make America less safe by the standards that its government has set. Nobody in the halls of power wants to badmouth police officers working because it's been a political poison. Nobody working in media wants to get into hot water with legal because they annoy an executive or a key political source.

I understand that if you put your name on the internet or other public spaces that you don't want to be posting instructions on insurrection or what have you. I also understand that there is never pressure for police officers to stand down, to put away rubber bullets and to not use tear gas on children, families, clergy or reporters. Not during the Black Lives Matter protests of the 2010s, nor 2020. There is no pressure for police and ICE to choose nonviolence now. As a result, those armed and armored-up law enforcement agents will continue to choose violence.

Peace is not a decision unilaterally made, but a commitment. When it is not honored by the state, when the state reclassifies undesirable actions into violence and when the state makes certain political demands violent by default, we have a problem of commitment. Not by the people, mind you, but by the state.

I'd like to leave you, readers, with a video interview of the late Faith Ringgold explaining her painting, Die. It depicts a graphic scene from the 1960s civil rights movement and the violence enacted on Black people. Please use discretion.

These children gravitate towards each other. They're trying to help each other. They are the innocent victims here. The fights have a lot to do with race and class. It was to make sure that certain people on the bottom don't get to the top. This was going on then. It's happening now.