Some Slides about the Walter Mosley Novel Last Week

Black Betty is helping us analyze noir culture's third source, "legacies of slavery."  Here's some material from lecture.  Mosley details element of a noir society.   A segregationist police force, the LAPD, is fairly straightforward.

Mosley also focuses on the active agency of folks within the Black community.  There's Easy Rawlins's old friend Mouse, the enforcer / destroyer who is also occasionally a savoir in moments of danger.

And there's the real estate dream of Black-owned retail for the Black community, doubled-crossed.

Mosley grew up in central LA and was there before, during, and after the Watts "riots" / rebellion in 1965.  Black Betty appeared in 1994, and he was either writing it or its immediate predecessor during the Rodney King uprising in 1992.  He is well-aware of the history of police-community relations, and as far as I can tell, in agreement with the argument of the next slides, taken from Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1991), that the 1990s escalation of gang violence resulted in part from law enforcement's suppression of gangs that were political.

Another context for Mosley is Blaxsploitation film, whose golden age was 1970-75.  Most of the films featured whites preying on a Black community that was weakened by traitors within--sometimes Black politicians spouting Black nationalist rhetoric.   A hero or heroine comes forward to confront the predators and drive them back, at least temporarily.  Here are two.

 

We'll see next time, when we watch the end of Coffy, that it these films generally assume force can only be beaten with force.  Easy Rawlins doesn't agree.  Force from below almost always loses to force from above.  It is weaker and badly funded.  Hence Easy's stress on alliances and of course detection-- along with his floundering community development scheme.

 On Thursday we ended with a discussion of Betty Eady.  I argued that she's a complex, multisided character who is both beaten down and free--and free, mostly threateningly, through her sexuality.  Here are the passages:

We'll look at chapter 33 carefully.  I'll go on to argue that Black Betty offers a strong ending if not a happy ending, and in strength there's hope.

Slavery and Voting

One of our course's 6 causes of "noir culture" is the legacies of slavery.  Here's one example--Black voting rights--from deep in the heart of Texas. My first teaching job was in Texas (at Rice University in Houston), and I try to keep tabs on the place.  In my experience, Texans were the most hospitable and partying bunch of Americans I've ever lived with.  The politics? another story.

Can This Course Help Explain Why Police Killings of Black Men Keep Happening?

As the course was getting started, two more police killings sparked national attention and protest.  On September 16, Terence Crutcher was killed after his car broke down outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The officer responsible, Betty Shelby, has been charged with first degree manslaughter. Four days later, Keith Scott was killed in Charlotte, NC, as he got out of his SUV in an apartment parking lot (a mourner is pictured at left).  As of today, no one has been charged.

Scott's wife released a harrowing video she made as the incident occurred.  After coming under quite a bit of pressure, the Charlotte police department released some of their video footage.  Today, the London Daily Mail tabloid ran a story claiming that Scott was a gun-carrying former convict whose wife had filed a temporary restraining order against him last year.  And so it goes.  Terence Crutcher was clearly unarmed, and Keith Scott appears to be unarmed, at least to me, though the video released so far has not settled the issue.  The New York Times ran a piece collecting some of the videos of the shootings that have put the issue of police killings on the national agenda.  Rakeyia Scott's video is like the one made by Philandro Castile's girlfriend outside St. Paul, Minnesota last July as he lay dying.

The "causes of noir" that I mentioned on Thursday refer to historical, cultural and social factors that create conditions in which actions like the killing of black males becomes more rather than less likely.  While discussion of individual cases often focuses on direct causality (whodunit and why), the course analyzes indirect causality as well.  This is when background or contextual forces shape events, often invisibly and beneath the surface.  We'll see whether by mid-way through the course we can shed light on the indirect causes of the killings that are increasingly being called an "American epidemic."

Causes of Noir #4: Ferguson MO Grand Jury Verdict (UPDATE 1 12/9; UPDATE2 12/17)

I'm going to focus in lecture today on Birdman, men who kill, and psycho- patho- logy, so will post some text and links here to keep myself in check during lecture itself.

A key example of one of our issues came to a head last night when a St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson (above) on any of five counts in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO last summer.  Grand juries do not need evidence sufficient to convict, but only enough to bring the case to trial. The grand jury did not indict him even for involuntary manslaughter, so the result is an exoneration of the officer's conduct in the shooting.

The New York Times has a useful timeline.

The grand jury transcripts have been posted. This is an unusual move, and you can experience the Rashomon effect of contradictory interpretations for yourself.

Much current coverage has featured the protests. See for example local St. Louis coverage. One report suggested that most of the damage was to black-owned businesses along Ferguson's main shopping street, while the vaunted National Guard forces were protecting public buildings including the police department. A  St. Louis friend of mine wrote last night that "Ferguson is lost."

A thorough account of the testimony that won over the jury is here (Michael Brown charged and threatened him, and allegedly made him "feels like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan".

There are defenses of the grand jury verdict. One example is "Justice Was Served in Ferguson."

 We've been calling our fourth cause of noir culture "legacies of slavery," and have discussed levels of inequality that enable unilateral conduct and the ongoing radicalization of that conduct.   The Ferguson killing brought together some traditional practices:

• policing style perceived as unjust and discriminatory ("overpolicing")
• a white person killing a black person in the name of self-defense
• trial by grand jury rather than by (public, adversarial) jury
• non-punishment of the white person for killing the black person

We've talked about how in a noir world justice does not contain violence with the truth, and here we have a kind of case study.

I'll talk about "suicide by police" in the next couple of lectures. Is there an undertone of this motive in the transcripts?  (This of course puts all the more pressure on police NOT to cooperate by pulling the trigger.)

Comments pro and con are welcome.

UPDATED 12/9: The Hands Up Don't Shoot movement has been supplemented, in the wake of the non-indictment of the officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island with an (illegal) choke hold), with the I Can't Breath movement.  Protests continued over this past weekend, including protests in Berkeley.

Some useful commentary in the past 2 weeks:

"Why It's Impossible to Indict a Cop" The Nation Magazine (a legal overview)
"Why We Won't Wait,"  UCLA History Professor Robin D.G. Kelley on civil rights precedents and anger
"Ferguson Grand Jury Evidence Reveals Mistakes, Holes in Investigations," Huffington Post analysis of grand jury proceeding (11/25)
"Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid," Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic on the limits of Obama's moderate race position.
"Protesters Take to the Streets of Berkeley" Berkeleyside (12/7).  good images
"Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999-2014" Gawker 12/7.  a truly disturbing "yearbook" with short descriptions of the circumstances of death attached to the photos.

UPDATE 2: many commentators on the Ferguson case noted that when the grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren Warren, it must have taken as truth the claim that Michael Brown charged Officer Warren like a football player, with his head down.  It appeared that only one witness made this claim--"Witness 40""-- which was contradicted by all other witnesses.   The plot thickened: on December 15th, the website Smoking Gun revealed that Witness 40 is Sandra McElroy, a woman with a history of racism, mental illness, and check fraud who may not actually have been on the scene.  The story, along with McElroy's confirmation that she was witness 40, is here.