Shawn Vestal: Don’t choose sides, just stand against violence

Don’t pick a side.

If you don’t look very closely or think very hard, the crushing violence that we have seen this week – the senseless and unjustifiable slaughter of police officers protecting peaceful protesters, who were responding to the senseless and unjustifiable slaughter of black men by police officers – seems an opportunity to join an army in a war.

Cops versus citizens. Black versus white. Us versus them.

But this is only us versus them if we choose it – if we decide to put these tragedies into scales, weigh them, rank them, assert greater and lesser heartbreaks, and feed our various angers with the result.

This is only us versus them if we let our worst instincts define us.

As awful as the events of this week have been, and as fraught and complicated as questions of race and violence and guns and law enforcement can be, they need not suggest to us that we are impossibly divided. They offer a chance to declare a simple point of agreement: A unified opposition to senseless and unjustifiable killing.

The man who shot and killed five police officers in Dallas, apparently seeking victims by skin color – he was picking sides. The people who assign blame to an entire political movement, and by inference, an entire group of Americans by skin color – they’re picking sides. Those officers we see, in videos from Chicago and South Carolina and Minnesota and Louisiana, and their defenders – they’re picking sides.

In a country that is bursting along the demographic and political seams – a country in the midst of an intensely unpleasant and unproductive period of stalemated disagreement – this violence has indeed divided us. It took no time for some to begin declaring war in the wake of the Dallas shootings, in language that took no pains to disguise its overt racial animus: “Black Lives Kill,” declared the Drudge Report headline. The #alllivesmatter hashtags were pre-loaded, a sneering rebuke to Black Lives Matter.

It is clear that some white Americans interpret the outpouring of anger and sadness that arose from the sickening videos we saw this week – and the pattern they represent – as a personal attack. As an assault on their side. This sense of pent-up fury toward the black community, and the opportunity to unleash a righteously resentful rage toward it, is unmistakable.

It represents a massive failure of empathy and a triumph of stereotypical thinking.

Just as it does to define all cops as killers.

These are not equivalences. The historical and systemic failures of racial justice in America are deep and long-standing and virtually impossible for those of us in the majority to fully understand. Some of us don’t even try. We watch from a distance, and thug-ify the people with the bullets in them.

Animus toward the police exists on a different scale and history. Technology has given citizens the chance to document police behavior that might otherwise go unseen, and plenty of it has been appalling. People are dying too frequently at the hands of the police, and it’s happening disproportionately with people of color, and that’s not something a just society accepts. Too often, the response to criticism of police has been defensiveness, an attempt to conflate calls for better policing with being anti-police – calls to pick a side.

But there is, sometimes, a failure to recognize the important and dangerous work that most cops do. Anger about bad policing often broadens into anger toward all policing, which plays its own role in the corrosive relations between cops and citizens. That kind of thinking provided the justification for a vicious killer to kill and injure those Dallas police officers – who, it should be noted, were protecting peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, doing their jobs to ensure the constitutional rights of American citizens to assemble and speak their minds.

Does it feel as if the country is coming apart? Is that an overreaction? I don’t know if I can tell. The contempt that fuels our public discourse is massive and deep. I feel it and express it, and I don’t necessarily believe it’s unwarranted in all instances. The times feel urgent and definitive, and the stakes are high.

But it must remain possible to believe there is a single side that we share as Americans. That we don’t have to choose an army in which to fight our nation’s oldest, sickest divisions.

It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree. It doesn’t mean we must feel the same about these events, or that we can’t see them from different perspectives. It doesn’t mean we must engage each other with a false, senatorial civility, or pretend to be race-blind and ignorant, or ignore the impossible knot of debate surrounding gun violence, or stop listening with an open heart to the experiences of people for whom this country has offered a tiered system of justice, or refuse to speak out on questions of equality.

But when it comes to police brutality and to brutality against the police, we don’t have to pick a side. We can be on the same side: Against all of it.

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.