In America, the Rich Get Immunity. The Rest of Us Get "Law and Order"

By David Sirota, Jacobin

05 June 20

America is a country that eagerly hands out get-out-of-jail-free cards to the rich and powerful, and rubber bullets, tear gas, and jail sentences to the rest. The protesters on the street this weekend were trying to change that.

ne of the crown jewels of the Constitution is the Fourteenth Amendment — which promises that there will be “equal protection” for all people under our laws. And yet we all know this is a farce. In America, we routinely offer legal immunity to the rich and powerful, while giving the iron fist to everyone else. It is an ugly dichotomy we don’t talk much about — but it has been on display during this past week of protests roiling cities across the country.

Take the events that transpired in New York. There, the government deployed law enforcement to conduct mass arrests of protesters, and also to run them over and violently attack them in the name of “law and order.” At the same time, the government granted health care executives legal immunity for their profit-maximizing decisions that may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of people in nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.

In Washington, it’s the same thing. We have a president who tweets about “law and order” literally at the same time his party is pushing a proposal that would shield corporate executives and prevent them from being held liable for endangering their workers during the COVID-19 emergency.

Those new liability protections would be in addition to the de facto immunity he’s already giving his corporate friends: indeed, at a time when the Trump administration has dramatically increased immigration prosecutions, it has driven prosecutions of white-collar and environmental crimes to historic lows. That was an extension of trends that started under Obama, who increased immigration deportations and cracked down on whistleblowers while reducing white-collar prosecutions.

The result of all this was summarized by former labor secretary Robert Reich: “More peaceful protesters and journalists have been jailed in the past week than all the bankers who were jailed for fraud during the financial collapse.”

Police Get “Qualified Immunity,” Trump Shuts Down Anti-Brutality Initiative, States Pass Anti-Protest Laws

Not surprisingly, this dichotomy extends to the realm of criminal justice and civil liberties. Our legal system now grants “qualified immunity” to police officers and public officials when they violate Americans’ constitutional rights.

As law enforcement brutality has been getting worse in recent years, Trump shut down the Justice Department’s initiative to scrutinize local police conduct — and then he made it even easier for local police departments to obtain excess military weaponry. He did this at the very same time research has shown a link between police violence and the increased use of the Pentagon program that provides arms to local law enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in at least six states have offered legislation in recent years to protect people who run over protesters — a move that was all too common this weekend. Some of the measures had support from local police unions and associations.

For everyone else, it has been the opposite of immunity — Republican politicians who so often pretend to be defenders of liberty are now offering dissenters new “tough on crime” bills to try to criminalize protest.

From 2015 to 2019, there were 116 bills introduced in state legislatures to restrict the right to protest, and fifteen states passed those restrictions into law, according to a new report from PEN America, a journalism advocacy group. This is a new phenomenon — before Trump took office, there were almost no such state initiatives.

The report notes that the laws reflect the selective use of “law and order” — they deliver harsher punishment to protesters while limiting “the liability of public or private actors for harm caused to protesters” and creating “carve-outs for law enforcement action against protesters.”

Immunity Is Now Baked Into Our Political Culture 

Immunity for the powerful, crackdowns against the people — this discrepancy is now baked into our laws and embedded in our political culture itself. And that’s not only the fault of politicians — it is our fault, too, because our elections and culture tend to reward it.

George W. Bush lied us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and yet he is routinely treated as a lovable, statesman-like figure. Donald Trump scammed investors and bilked vendors — and he was rewarded by being elected president.

Trump’s likely general election opponent, Joe Biden, authored the crime bill (and still defends it), helped Republicans pass the bankruptcy bill, and helped Bush lead America into the Iraq War — and he was rewarded first by being named vice president, and then by being given the Democratic presidential nomination. His campaign is being advised by Rahm Emanuel, who remains at the highest reaches of Democratic politics even after having left public office in disgrace after his administration covered up video of police murdering a teenager.

Meanwhile, the same Democratic Party tried to throw Bernie Sanders off the New York ballot, works to crush progressive primary campaigns, and threatens to blacklist consultants who work for grassroots candidates who dare to run against corrupt incumbents — while party operatives are apparently permitted to work for corporate interests that attack the party’s candidates.

None of this is an anomaly. This is what America is: a place that eagerly gives out get-out-of-jail-free cards to the powerful, while meting out harsh punishment to everyone else.

The question now is whether we can imagine a society that is different?

Can we imagine a legal system that punishes police violence and bigotry, repeals doctrines like “qualified immunity,” and protects the right to peaceably protest?

Can we imagine an economy that protects fleeced homeowners and impoverished renters from draconian bankruptcy laws, and instead deploys the iron first of law enforcement against the actual looters who are pillaging our communities — the politicians, lobbyists, and corporate CEOs who just stole $4 trillion from the public treasury?

Can we imagine a political system that holds elected officials accountable for their crimes, and empowers the leaders who are trying to fix the system?

In other words: Can we imagine a better America?

Many of our politicians clearly can’t — this is the world they have deliberately constructed, and they are perfectly happy to sit in their fortified bunkers as the world burns.

But the peaceful protesters braving threats of retribution and violence suggest at least some can still imagine that better world. Now it’s up to all of us to create it.

Social Media Is Making Racial Trauma Worse. The DSM Needs an Update.

By A.T. McWilliams, Slate

04 June 20

don’t know if my struggle with anxiety began before or after a police officer shouted “Keep your hands where I can see them!” as he pulled alongside my parked car. 

I only know that the following months were filled with sleepless nights, including many spent replaying every sound from the incident: the whoop of the siren—shrieking as it spun in red flashes; the slam of the police car door as the officer approached my window; and the bark of his criminalizing question, “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” 

Just when I thought my restless routine was done after so many weeks, I’d close my eyes and see four angry furrows etched into the officer’s forehead. Then, I’d feel sweat drip down mine as I recalled the way his fingers trailed his belt—inching closer to his pistol grip as he waited for my trembling reply: “I live here, officer. I live right across the street.” 

By the time I watched George Floyd shout “Momma!” as the suffocating knee of a Minneapolis police officer dug into his neck, I was well aware of why some days I couldn’t sleep through the night, or I didn’t want to leave bed, or I’d lost my appetite, or I couldn’t focus at work, or I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach every time I scrolled through Twitter. 

To many Americans, news of Floyd’s death simply marked another viral police killing—tragic, but like most trending topics, fleeting and inconsequential. But for me, and black people across the United States, every tweet, headline, and image sharing news of Floyd’s murder builds into a daily deluge of trauma—flooding our psyche, leaving us afraid to drown. 

I’ve felt this pain each of the several times I’ve been racially profiled by the police. And more commonly, I’ve felt it with each traumatic post I’ve read about Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, and other innocent black people who lost their lives at the hands of the police. 

This familiar pain is a symptom of black people’s shared post-traumatic stress disorder—a uniquely American epidemic, 400 years in the making. And as viral police killings force black Americans to repeatedly endure secondary trauma—or the emotional stress that results from witnessing the trauma of others—this country must reckon with not just its policing crisis, but also the hidden cost: the unjust spread of a black American stress disorder that is undiagnosed, untreated, and—in the age of social media—ubiquitously spread. 

While secondary racial trauma is still a nascent research topic, firsthand experiences with racism have long been proven to cause higher rates of PTSD for people of color as compared with white people. It should come as no surprise that black people, who are the most likely victims of police violence and hate crimes in America, are also most likely to live with this mental illness. 

Following Michael Brown’s death, researchers began surveying Americans to understand the national impact of viral police killings, and proved their measurable impact on the black American psyche. According to one 2018 study in the Lancet, about half of the black Americans surveyed had been exposed to one or more police killing of an unarmed black person in their state in the previous three months. According to this research, black Americans are exposed to two additional poor mental health days each year due to this police violence. That is 55 million poor mental health days per year collectively, not far from the mental health impact of chronic diseases like diabetes. Conversely, white survey respondents experienced no discernible mental health impact after being exposed to news of unarmed black people killed by police officers. 

While white Americans can typically endure news of police brutality unscathed, black Americans are forced to tend to wounds many of their co-workers or friends may never see, including those that grow to become anxiousness or depression. 

The wounds you cannot see are always the slowest to heal. And in this case, they reopen every time black Americans learn of one of the hundreds of black people killed by police each year—many of whom are memorialized as trending topics across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, transforming social media into a boundless source of secondary traumatic stress. 

“We already know that engaging in social media, whether it’s race related or not, yields higher rates of depression and anxiety,” Riana Anderson, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on black mental health, told me. “This is especially true for black children, who face far more discrimination than other young people on the internet.” 

Anderson described research released earlier this year showing that black adolescents experience discrimination five times every day—compounding the secondary trauma of seeing innocent black people die on film. When I asked Anderson how black people across ages should care for their mental health following a death as widely broadcast as Floyd’s, her advice was simple: “Stay away from social media.” She continued: “We’re at war right now. And just like in war, your body must do what it can to protect itself from the environment. Survival is the goal, so you must focus on being psychologically well.” 

While millions of traumatic headlines, images, and videos fill social media feeds each minute, the American Psychiatric Association has yet to qualify such distressing content as a diagnosable cause of PTSD. According to the APA’s fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the effective bible of psychiatric diagnoses, secondary trauma as caused by electronic media shared outside of the workplace is not a sufficient determinant of PTSD. But many black psychiatrists across the country are demanding that social media’s endless deluge of brutalized black bodies be taken into account. 

“Such a stipulation just doesn’t make sense for the black experience in America,” said Danielle Hairston, a psychiatrist at Howard University and the president of the APA’s Black Caucus. Hairston compared media-based distress to witnessing loss in your own family. “If every day, you’re seeing a video of someone who looks like you—someone who could be you or your family member—murdered or beaten, what’s the difference between that and you experiencing it in your own family?” 

Since 2015, Hairston and her colleagues have urged an update to the DSM-5 that recognizes such traumatic media exposure and called for cultural sensitive treatment for media-based retraumatization. She has also encouraged the provision of community resources for patients following viral police brutality, supports that rarely reach black communities—even for the black adults who are diagnosed with a mental illness, only 30 percent receive treatment compared to 49 percent of white Americans. 

All corners of society should be identifying ways to equitably bolster the mental health of black people right now. Company leaders should offer paid time off for their black employees, and if possible, offer free or subsidized counseling for them and their families. Schools, whether they serve young children or adults, should create spaces for black students to gain mental health support and treatment. 

Without treatment, the anxiety and depression borne from PTSD risks transforming into anger, sometimes righteous and useful and sometimes not. As James Baldwin put it in words that have in recent weeks—like the images of George Floyd’s murder—spread across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook: “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time.” 

Those who tweet or post Baldwin’s quote often omit the following critical sentence of the passage. The challenge of that anger is  “how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” 

Baldwin’s sagely reflection on rage is meaningless without his subsequent call for self-preservation. In the war against racial injustice, our mental health is our greatest armor. If we want to do good, we must be well.