One commentator explained the poll results by saying that for white Americans, the justice system and the police system generally work the way they're supposed to. Meaning, when we get arrested, it is almost always because we've done something wrong, or because any reasonable person could have thought that we did. When we go to court, or see each other go to court, we generally get a relatively fair trial. And because we experience the American justice system and police system as fair, most of us assume that it works for all Americans the same way it works for us. If we drive by a cop stopping a black driver, most of us think, oh, he must have been speeding. We don't think, he was stopped because he has a nice car, because that's not a reason we'd ever get stopped. When something like Ferguson happens, most of us are disposed to believe the cops' story--because we wouldn't get shot 6 times just for jaywalking. We continue to buy the narrative that claims that any police violence against communities of color is their fault--because we don't think police arrest or shoot people for nothing. And so we continue not to understand that it's race, not the law, that determines how Americans are treated by police officers. We don't realize that living under the rule of law is a racial privilege in this country.
It makes me think about a movie I watched years ago, Aimee and Jaguar, which tells the true story of a relationship between the wife of a Nazi officer and a Jewish woman in hiding in 1940s Berlin. (It's on Netflix, if you want to watch it--it's in German but has English subtitles). Felice Schragenheim, the Jewish woman in the movie, was living undercover in Nazi Berlin. She met Lilly Wurst, the wife of a Nazi officer, through Lilly's Jewish housekeeper, and they fell in love. Felice didn't tell Lilly that she was Jewish until they had been together for quite a while, and by that time Lilly I guess loved Felice enough that it didn't matter to her anymore--although she seems to have bought the Nazi party line before they met. In the movie, when the Gestapo come for Felice, Lilly almost immediately goes to the police and asks if she can see her.
At this point in the movie, if you're Jewish, you're shouting at the TV screen "What the fuck are you thinking, lady?? You can't visit someone in a concentration camp! They're gone! That's it!" This seemed so ridiculous to me that I expected to find that the scriptwriters had made it up, but they hadn't. The real Lilly did get to see Felice more than once while she was being held at a transit point before being shipped to Thereisenstadt. Later on Lilly somehow (possibly through her Nazi connections) arranged a meeting with Thereisenstadt's commandant and actually traveled to Thereisenstadt to see if she could get him to free Felice. The commandant threw Lilly out of the camp, and deported Felice from Thereisenstadt soon thereafter. Felice died somewhere on a march between camps, and a lot of her Jewish friends felt that Lilly had essentially killed her by trying to free her.
So was Lilly an idiot? Certainly she was naive. But--and I think this is what this story has to do with Ferguson--she was also probably used to seeing the police as fair, even as protectors. Lilly was blonde-haired, blue-eyed, married to a Nazi, and the mother of four very Aryan looking little boys. (She was also probably queer, but lesbians weren't persecuted by the Nazis the way gay men were). She almost certainly had seen people being put into ghettos or deported, but she probably had also believed the Nazi media when it explained that these people were criminals or terrorists or trying to harm German national security--her own experience hadn't led her to believe that the Gestapo would pick up people who hadn't done anything wrong. I don't know what Lilly was thinking when she went to Thereisenstadt--whether she imagined that she could use her own privileged status to free Felice, or whether she thought she could show them that Felice hadn't done any of the things that were supposedly the reason Jews had to be punished. Maybe some combination of both. But it's clear that she really hadn't understood that Felice, as a Jew, was completely outside of the German system of law and order. (To her credit, when she did understand, she later hid 3 Jewish women for the rest of the war).
I guess this story reminds me how invisible the "other America," the "other Germany" can be from anyone who has racial privilege, whether well-meaning or not. It's easy for people who are treated in accordance with the rule of law to be convinced that anyone who's punished is punished because they've committed some criminal act. And that makes it easy for white Americans to think of police brutality or legalized murder as a "black problem" (47% of white Americans, remember, think that race is being given too much attention in the Ferguson case). But the fact is that it continues in part because we think of it that way. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean that it's not there. If Lilly Wurst, who thought the Nazis would release her Jewish lover, seems naive to us, it's worth considering that that's exactly how white people seem to people of color in America-- and with reason. Maybe it's about time we stopped being so naive and started taking police brutality against communities of color seriously, started treating it as the unacceptable crime it actually is.
I leave you with a segment from today's Democracy Now, an interview with a 90 year old Holocaust survivor who was arrested in St Louis on Monday while protesting. When Amy Goodman asks her at the end why she keeps doing activism (she is, after all, fairly old), she just says she remembers what it's like, to be discriminated against and oppressed.
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