Politics and the Classroom

One of the three white policemen pushed the body of Robert Davis, a 64-year-old retired school teacher, against the brick wall of a building in the French Quarter of New Orleans while the other, grasping his wrists, attempted to put him in handcuffs. In the video, we catch a glimpse of Davis's black face from behind another policeman on horseback before we see the standing police officer repeatedly punch his head, pummeling him, banging his face again and again against the brick wall. The other two quickly get to the task of tackling Davis to the cement ground, using a head lock and grabbing him by the ankles at the same time. With Davis's face to the ground, we're not sure how bad it is until he rolls over and we see his mangled face, blood pouring off onto the sidewalk.

This is not the 1960s, but what I watched last night on the evening news with Brian Williams. In the same hour, I saw weeping women in Pakistan mourning the loss of all of their children in the earthquake, and mudslides burying thousands in Guatemala. And yet none of the heartbreaking news segments kept me up at night, except for the repeated image of Davis's head ramming into brick.

It wasn't just the visceral response of seeing a body tortured that haunted me. It was all of the deep political issues at work, screaming from this moment of brutality, that overwhelmed me.

There was the obvious issue of race. When a black man is being brutally beaten by white police officers in America (for allegedly being intoxicated), this is the word that comes immediately to mind. And yet, interestingly, in today's news, Davis was adamant that the incident was not race–related. "This is one of the things that I want to clear up," he said. "Everybody is thinking this is race–related. I'm black, they're white, okay? The black officer who was on the horse, he could have probably prevented this... I think he sanctioned the efforts of the other officers, you know? So I don't think it in any way is racially motivated." Now of course, the fact that the police officer on the horse was black does nothing to prove that the incident wasn't motivated by racism. What's interesting is that the victim immediately frames the incident along the color line. "Surely the black officer would have felt allegiance to me, surely he would not have sanctioned a racist incident against a fellow African-American." But even leaving the major issue of race aside, the Davis beating is still pregnant with implications.

A few hours before I watched the Davis incident on T.V., I wrote about the question of freedom in the post-war era in my midterm examination for Alan Brinkley's class on America Since 1945. About the deep irony that as our country had the ideal of spreading freedom to oppressed people throughout the globe, we chose to ignore the grotesque violations of civil rights in our own country. We chose willful blindness to the segregation on our buses and in our schools as presidents encouraged resistance against political subjugation. Today we give lip service to the persistent problems of race in this country, yet when the levees broke in New Orleans, the structural problems of race and poverty came crashing in.

Perhaps Davis's beating hit me harder than the earthquake because he and I are both Americans; it's human to feel stronger empathy and allegiance towards those within your nation-we simply can't hold all of that compassion. And yet I fear that this sense of unity is not what's at work. In Samuel Moyn's Historical Origins of Human Rights, I learned about the development of the concept of telescopic philanthropy. The idea is that often we Westerners help those suffering thousands of miles away from us, and not those living right next door. Why this phenomenon persists, of course, is debatable. But I'd venture to guess that one word sums up a possible answer: shame. It is terribly embarrassing to admit that such inappropriate things are going on in our backyards. When these terrible things are getting out of control, we become too scared to look at them. Maybe we were all able to talk, fund-raise, and organize for New Orleans because it's become as distant as Pakistan. Maybe we've abstracted the problems Katrina revealed so that they seem thousands of miles away.

For all of these political and theoretical questions that studying American history and the history of human rights have brought to the forefront, I'm not sure of any of the answers. But here's what I do know: I don't want there to have to be another beating for me to wake up and see this America (An America that didn't at all surprise those living it every day.) And I don't want to study such histories for "their own sake," but rather for the sake of being able to own up to, at the very least, America.