06/08/2020
GW Philosophy Department Statement on Political Unrest
Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter, and yet one would not know from the fact that Black people experience poverty in the U.S. at twice the rate that white people do, or that they have died of COVID-19 at three times the rate that white people have, or that disparities in education lead to Black people experiencing the lowest rates of completion for four-year college degrees, that they matter to America.
Black Lives Matter, and yet for the eight minutes and forty-six seconds that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his blue-uniformed knee into the throat of George Floyd—as Floyd gasped for air, pleaded that he could not breathe, cried for his mother, and finally, fell silent—you might have been forgiven for wondering whether Black lives really matter to this country at all.
But Black Lives Matter.
We are a philosophical community. We are committed to freedom of thought and expression. We utterly reject racism, sexism, ableism, and all other forms of oppression and prejudice. We denounce our government’s use of violence to terrorize, punish, and silence those fighting for democracy and the right to be heard—a right which we discuss and embody in our classrooms but that in the final instance can only be defended in the street. And so we stand with protesters and we say, “Black Lives Matter.”
President Trump has decried what he calls the “angry mob” that has taken to cities and towns all across this country and across the world. He urges us to distinguish that “angry mob” from so-called other “peaceful protesters,” and to condemn the expressions of rage and pain that are forcing their way into our national discourse and refusing to be quieted. We refuse. Where there is no justice, there can be no real peace.
For too long, the masses—with whom we are in solidarity, and of whom we are a part—have been shut out of political life, sidelined, brutalized, and oppressed. The anger we see pouring out into the streets is triggered by a specific, recent manifestation of a longstanding, historical violation of basic principles of justice. The murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department is but one instance of the institutional racism that has plagued the United States and its colonial precursors for four hundred years.
That even as the cameras are rolling, agents of the state openly engage in such flagrant violations of basic principles of decency, raises the sickening and horrifying question: What do they do in the dark? There is a lamentable tendency among the white residents of the United States to assume that such practices are rare in the present day, that they are mostly historical relics of antebellum times, or perhaps relegated to the years before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But state brutality against people of color pervades our culture not as isolated exceptions, but as the rule. As philosophers, we have a duty to help bring this pervasive, institutionalized brutality out into the open, and to struggle against it.
That people have a right to a democratic say in how they are governed is a widely-shared fundamental premise of political philosophy. The alternative is government by arbitrary, non-rational, brute force, and this is anathema to the very concept of political philosophy. By unleashing upon the populace militarized police, border guards, correctional officers, and other official state agents to commit unprovoked acts of brutality, the current U.S. Presidential administration carries out a violent, frontal assault on this basic principle that forms the foundation of any philosophical approach to organizing a polity. The Trump administration is self-consciously and deliberately choosing arbitrary, brute force as its governing principle. If there is anything that we as philosophers must resist with all of our might, it is this.
We believe in true democracy—political power to all who today are silenced and oppressed—and we are in the struggle to win it. We stand up with people around the world and we say, “Black Lives Matter.” We wholeheartedly support this popular movement as the only force capable of making that statement not only an abstract ethical truth, but a concrete reality.
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