In 1925, teachers at the Negro Manual and Training High School of Muskogee, Oklahoma, made what they thought was an appropriate choice of textbook: The Negro in Our History, by the Harvard-trained Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had written this "history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro" to supply the "need of schools long since desiring such a work," as he wrote in the book's preface. Upon learning of this textbook choice, White segregationists on the school board sprang immediately into action. They decreed that no book could be “instilled in the schools that is either klan or antiklan,” insinuating that Woodson’s Black history textbook was “antiklan."  

The school board banned the book. It confiscated all copies. It punished the teachers. It forced the resignation of the school’s principal. “It’s striking how similar that feels and sounds to the contemporary moment,” the Harvard education historian Jarvis R. Givens told me.

A century ago, white segregationists were banning anti-racist books and “Negro studies” as well as punishing and threatening anti-racist educators all over Jim Crow America.

In response to these incidents, Woodson embarked on a new initiative to support educators and promote Negro history. In 1926, he founded Negro History Week, which officially became Black History Month 50 years later. And Woodson’s most important scholarly contribution, his 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro, highlighted the importance of teaching Black history. The book argued that Black children learn to despise themselves—just as non-Black people learn to hate Black people—when Black history is not taught. As Woodson wrote, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.” Combining pedagogical theory, history, and memoir, this was a book about the dangerously racist state of education, a book for 2023 as much as it was for 1933.

The Mis-education of the Negro was recently reissued with an introduction from Givens, who studies the history of American education and has written extensively on Black educators, including Carter G. Woodson. Givens helped develop the AP African American Studies course that was piloted in about 60 schools across the United States and recently rejected in Florida. We discussed the enduring relevance and power of this classic book 90 years after its birth.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ibram X. Kendi: For the past two years, many politicians and political operatives have made the case that teaching white students about African American history, about slavery, about racism, makes them feel bad or is even a form of miseducation. But these operatives do not seem to care about the educational experience of Black children. I’m curious what Carter G. Woodson would say about the impact on Black children of not teaching that material. What is Woodson saying in Mis-education?

Jarvis R. Givens: He argues that the physical violence Black people experience in the world is inextricably linked to curricular violence. He would say Black students must be equipped with resources to resist this violation of their dignity and humanity; they must be given an opportunity to know themselves and the world on new terms. To deny Black students the opportunity to critically study Black life and culture is to deny them the opportunity to think outside of the racial myths that are deeply embedded in the American curriculum.

[Read: How a museum reckons with Black pain]

Kendi: It seems like this book could have just as easily been titled The Mis-education of the American.  

Givens: The overrepresentation of European and Euro American history and culture offers white people this kind of inflated sense of importance. Woodson would say that this has historically been part and parcel of the identity development of white students, or any other group who is taught to look down on and despise Black people as a means of propping themselves up. There are several parts in the book when Woodson points to this miseducation of non-Black people—especially when he writes, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

Kendi: Many people would oppose educators and books that state that Black people are “demons,” as former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown. But there seems to be less concern about the harm that comes from what educators and books do not state. Can you share how Woodson talked about the harm that comes from absences?  

Givens: This is a really important question. We absolutely learn through omissions. We learn through things that are not included in curricula. It teaches us what’s deemed unworthy of inclusion, what’s deemed as lacking in “educational value” according to the state of Florida.

And this is something that I think is very, very important, even when we think about the way Black history and culture have been included. You know, for so long, you could read the entire history of slavery and never know that Black people resisted, that they led rebellions, that they formed Maroon communities. Students could walk away thinking that slavery was just this benevolent institution, that Black people had to work hard but they benefited from being immersed in the West and the Christian world. They made all these beautiful songs and sang all these Negro spirituals. This is evidence that they were happy. The absence of narratives about Black people fighting back presents them as these apolitical subjects. It strips them of their agency.

Kendi: So, those who are attacking what they call “critical race theory” characterize these omissions—that end up pacifying people—as “education.” And they classify anti-racist books (like, frankly, my own) and African American studies as “indoctrination.” What do you make of that?

Givens: If anything, there is a very clear system of indoctrination that has always been embedded in the American curriculum. It’s called white supremacy. By engaging in African American studies, we are inviting students to help undo that.

It’s also important to emphasize that there are diverse perspectives in African American studies. There is no one African American–studies perspective. We can have different kinds of intellectual projects and schools of thought. And the AP African American Studies course, from what I know of it, as someone who was part of the team of scholars and K–12 educators that developed it, is that we were all bringing the diversity of Black thought and debates to the table. The course represents a good model of the kind of plurality of thought that we might consider when we’re talking about reframing the larger structure of knowledge in American schools.  

Kendi: You wrote beautifully about the fight of Woodson and the Black teachers of his generation during Jim Crow in your book Fugitive Pedagogy. At that time, too, white segregationists were banning not only Woodson’s books but all sorts of anti-racist books and lessons. But Black teachers found ways to still teach Black students the truth. What are some of the lessons, particularly for teachers in this moment who want students to learn about racism and U.S. history and racial equality?  

Givens: The teachers I wrote about in Fugitive Pedagogy were deeply aware that the efforts to restrict what could and could not be taught in the classroom infringed on the dignity of Black students, and it also infringed on their dignity as Black educators. And there is a larger lesson here: that the dignity of students is always bound up with the dignity of teachers. How we treat and handle teachers says something about who we are as a society.  

The de-professionalization of teachers in America is something that’s been happening for a very long time. The teaching profession has become so debased not on the part of teachers themselves, but in terms of the social pressures that they’re having to operate under. It really exposes a deeply ingrained crisis in the culture of the society that we live in. Teachers are not viewed as intellectuals. They’re seen as people who are just supposed to come in and follow a script and not be thinking beings at all.

[Read: What anti-racist teachers do differently]

Kendi: Certainly. When they follow the unthinking script and demand that students do too, GOP operatives claim that is “education.”

And that brings me to a few of the striking quotes from The Mis-education of the Negro that I wanted to get your thoughts on. The first is relevant to what we were just discussing: “The mere imparting of information is not education.”

Givens: Woodson is saying that the purpose of education cannot just be simply to dump information into the minds of students. It has to be about guiding students on a journey to understand themselves in relationship to the world around them and to understand what they can do to push for social transformation so that they can live and aspire to a good life—a more meaningful life.

Kendi: Another quote from Woodson’s book: “The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with this interpretation of the crimes of the strong.”

Givens: Woodson is raising questions about the ideological underpinnings of the official curriculum. This is connected to where he points out that “the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching.” He’s asking us to consider: What does it mean to base the education of Black students on an interpretation of human experience and a set of philosophies and ethics that justified the plunder of Africa and the enslavement of Black people? It erases and negates Black perspectives and the human striving of Black people. Therefore, Woodson says, “the education of any people should begin with the people themselves.”

Kendi: And finally, the most memorable quote from Mis-education: “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

Givens: He’s naming how an education not based on liberatory principles can lead to oppressed people being complicit in their own domination. He’s naming how Black people can become so thoroughly miseducated that they become enlisted into the anti-Black protocols that have structured the world that we live in. This quote, for me, is very important for our reflections on Memphis and the violent death of Tyre Nichols.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

In “The Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution Is a Miracle—And a Menace,” my colleague Derek Thompson grappled with the rise of the drug Ozempic, the latest in a long line of much-hyped ways to lose weight and perhaps the most effective yet. My first encounter with the weight-loss industry, as a kid, was the cultural phenomenon of Jane Fonda’s VHS workout tapes. By the time I was in college, the weight-loss industry was as strong as ever––but so was a countervailing cultural critique of unrealistic beauty standards. Later, public-health concerns about obesity were ascendant. What are your thoughts, cultural memories, or personal experiences about weight gain, the weight-loss industry, diet, exercise, beauty standards, diabetes, medical treatments for obesity, or anything related?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

There is near consensus in America that the five police officers who brutally beat Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, leading to the 29-year-old’s death in the hospital days later, perpetrated a horrific injustice. In that sense, the Nichols killing is more like, say, the widely condemned 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, than the more contested 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But a detail of the Nichols killing has fueled a polarizing debate about why it happened: All five cops facing murder charges in the case are Black.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is also Black, argued in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon that the racial identity of officers undermines the narrative “that issues and problems in law enforcement” are about race. It doesn’t matter who's wearing the uniform, she said, “we all have that same responsibility. So, it takes race off the table, but it does indicate to me that bias might be a factor also, you know, and the manner in which we engage the community.” The New York Times quoted Robert M. Sausedo, who leads a nonprofit organization formed after the 1991 Rodney King beating: “It’s not racism driving this, it’s culturism. It’s a culture in law enforcement where it’s OK to be aggressive to those they’re supposed to serve.”

But many on the left insisted that white supremacy or institutional racism were to blame. As Shaun Harper, identified in Forbes as a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, put it in an analysis:

Institutional racism explains how five Black men could engage in police brutality, leading to the death of another Black man. They participated in the same trainings as white cops. They entered a profession that was born of anti-Blackness ... They worked in a place where decades of anti-black policies and tactics were created. How a police department behaves, thinks about Black communities, and mistreats Black people informs how its employees engage with the Black citizens they were hired to protect and serve—even when they’re Black.

This debate sometimes frustrates me. Say that two people who want to reduce police killings and misconduct both believe bad training in police academies is one significant contributor to unjust policing––but one characterizes the training regime’s flaws as “toxic police culture” and the other attributes them to “white supremacy.” I think they should focus on identifying and implementing best practices at the training academy rather than debate the best abstract characterization of the problem. But so many of our debates happen at the highest possible levels of ideological abstraction.

A Case Against Special Units

Here’s an account of how the Memphis police unit whose members beat Nichols came about, told from 50 feet rather than 50,000 feet:

Chief Cerelyn Davis of the Memphis Police had been on the job for only a few months in 2021 when she saw that homicide numbers were rising toward a record. Near her new home downtown, drivers were buzzing wildly through the streets, often late at night. She had a plan to confront the mayhem. For reckless drivers, she told her team, officers were to focus less on writing tickets and more on an all-out strategy of seizing cars from the most dangerous drivers. Violent offenders needed to be targeted with new urgency. If the state could not take a case to court, she determined, her agency should ask federal prosecutors to take the case instead. “We all have that understanding about being tough on tough people,” she said at a community event in November of that year.

Two days later, Chief Davis, the first African American woman to lead the department, launched her most ambitious strategy: a new police unit named Scorpion — or Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods — would deploy some 40 officers as a strike team in some of the most volatile corners of the city. Before long, some residents complained of heavy-handed tactics, of officers from the new Scorpion team employing punitive policing in response to relatively minor offenses.

I suspect that a DOJ investigation into the Nichols case and the murder trials of the officers who were involved will provide support for the argument, made most skillfully this week by Radley Balko, that in Memphis and beyond, special units of under-supervised, supposedly elite police officers are prone to horrific abuses and are therefore bad responses to rising crime, however tempting they apparently are. (Watch the TV series The Shield for a dramatization of how and why).

But maybe that’s not what the facts of this case will show.

Whatever your theory on why Nichols was killed, I submit that the root causes will be more constructively debated after more details are probed, documented, and released. We need more evidence before assuming we know what caused any specific killing. This newsletter will revisit the case.

The Policing-Reform Debate With Sherilyn Ifill

In last week’s newsletter (published prior to the release of video in the Nichols case), I wrote about the various reasons the American public’s response to police killings is more muted now than it was in 2020, and went on to lament that in the years since 2015, when The Washington Post began its project tracking all police shootings in the United States, the number of Americans killed by the cops hasn’t meaningfully decreased, despite all the attention paid to the issue:

Long before Black Lives Matter’s ascent, I was among those inveighing against policing injustices and America’s catastrophic War on Drugs, and trying and failing to significantly reduce police misconduct. Black Lives Matter arose in part because most of us who came before it largely failed. When it did, I hoped it would succeed spectacularly in reducing police killings and agreed with at least its premise that the issue warranted attention.

But it is now clear that the Black Lives Matter approach has largely failed too.

Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began.

Sherrilyn Ifill, a civil-rights attorney and the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, posted a response to my piece on her Substack after footage of the Nichols killing was released. I appreciate the knowledge and passion she brings to the issue and hope to engage her perspective, but first I need to clarify one aspect of my argument that her rendering of it misunderstands.

In her telling, the central premise of my piece is captured by the question “Where should we assign blame for continued police violence?” In fact, my piece did not even attempt to assign blame. Instead, it focused on how best to reduce police violence. And I think this distinction is too often missed when evaluating all sorts of public policy and activism.

To probe whether a tactic or strategy for reducing police violence succeeds or fails is not the same as probing whether advocates of that tactic or strategy are to blame for the underlying ill. For example, if a civil-rights lawyer successfully pressures a police department to adopt body cameras for all of its police officers, but their presence does not deter excessive use of force, the lawyer is not to blame for the brutality. Nevertheless, their body-camera initiative failed, in this hypothetical, to reduce brutality, which anyone who is interested in actually solving the problem had better face squarely.

When I noted in passing that my writing against police abuses in the aughts failed to reduce them, I was not implying that I am to blame for continued police abuses or killings. Likewise, when I wrote that the Black Lives Matter approach to reducing police killings has failed, I was neither asserting nor implying that BLM is to blame for police killings—just that its attempts to reduce them have failed. The coalition to reduce police killings won’t succeed until it reduces police killings!

A Point of Substantive Disagreement

In Ifill’s telling, Black Lives Matter has made some important progress with its approach––indeed, she and I agree that it called for and achieved “greater awareness and confrontation with the truth of police violence.” I think that she is also correct to point out that it played a role in increasing the number of cases in which bad cops are criminally charged and helped elect some reform-minded district attorneys. As yet, it’s too early to judge the ultimate effects of those changes, but it’s certainly possible that they will reduce police killings in the future.

But I disagree with another of Ifill’s claims:

What has been most successful is the building of a movement of people who work every day to reimagine a new kind of public safety. Most people who are not afraid to imagine that our lives could really matter, now agree that the current system cannot be reformed and must be made over. Indeed it seems inevitable. The under-staffing and recruiting failures of police departments around the country demonstrate that no matter how much money is thrown at policing, the work itself has lost its appeal to a significant number of young people and is unlikely to reconstitute itself in the same form.

In 2014, I wrote about how “video killed trust in police officers.” In my lifetime, I would say that that process began with the beating of Rodney King and concluded with the George Floyd video––at this point, very few Americans remain unexposed to horrific footage of police atrocities.

Last year, Gallup found that half of Americans support “major changes” to policing. But there isn’t anything close to majority support for abolishing or defunding the police. Such proposals are reliably underwater among all Americans, among white Americans, and among people of color. So although it is true that policing is less appealing today to young people and that there are recruitment problems, I regard those labor shortages as an alarming portent of falling quality at policing institutions that will continue to exist in much the same form, not a hopeful sign of progress. I’d much rather that reform-minded young people intent on improving criminal justice were signing up to professionalize police ranks and leave no place for bad cops to hide.

There is so much more to talk about in Ifill’s piece––and I wonder if she might like to do a written back-and-forth on the subject to take some of them up?

Reform California’s Most Abused Environmental Law

The Los Angeles Times is editorializing on a court case that illustrates how NIMBYs are exploiting the California Environmental Quality Act:

A California appellate court is considering whether noisy college students are an environmental impact, akin to pollution or habitat loss, that should be addressed before UC Berkeley can build a new dormitory to ease its student housing shortage. The case involves the university’s plan to develop People’s Park, a swath of open space owned by the university and claimed by protesters in 1969, with housing for 1,100 students and supportive housing for 125 homeless people, along with a clinic, public market and landscaped open space.

Neighborhood groups sued to block the project, arguing the university violated CEQA. In a tentative ruling issued in December, the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed the university failed to adequately study certain impacts, including noise. The ruling said that because college kids can be loud when talking, drinking and partying, the university should have studied and sought to reduce the “social noise” from future student residents.

Berkeley’s lawyers argue that noise from humans socializing shouldn’t be considered an environmental impact, and it’s a dangerous precedent to require additional environmental analysis based on who is going to live in a housing development. Would housing for the elderly prompt the same analysis? Some CEQA experts warned the decision, if finalized, could give Not-in-My-Backyard litigants a powerful new tool to block housing and other development projects.

Provocation of the Week

Writing at The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey continues to advance one of the most interesting theories about capitalism in today’s America, how to improve it, and the barriers in the way:

Changing laws to solve real-world problems is no longer the primary focus of politics in the rich democracies. Politics today has elevated the performative over the practical: eschewing the “slow boring of hard boards” as too slow, boring, and hard, it embraces spectacle and self-expression as ends in themselves. The shift to “identity politics,” in the full sense of that term, thus goes beyond a reorientation of political divisions from economic to demographic cleavages. As the larger culture has shifted from materialism, or the quest for tangible gains in the real world, to self-expression, political conflict likewise has moved away from a focus on the tangible actions taken by government and instead concentrates more on disputes over the relative status of clashing political identities. The demographic groupings arrayed on the left and right all have legitimate grievances with how government currently operates, and there are policy changes that could address those grievances and deliver concrete benefits. But seeking substantive redress is not where the real action in politics is these days. Rather, what truly motivates and energizes are symbolic clashes that raise the status of one’s own chosen political identity—and, more importantly, lower the status of one’s opponents.

In “The Retreat from Reality,” I discussed the rise of the new cognitive style associated with the turn toward the performative: what Yale law professor Dan Kahan calls “expressive rationality.” The performative political style, with its unshakeable confirmation bias and heightened susceptibility to conspiracy theories and other mass delusions, is often depicted as a triumph of unreason. But Kahan argues convincingly that what’s really going on is a shift from one kind of rationality to another—from “instrumental rationality,” focused on matching means to ends for practical action in the real world, to “expressive rationality,” focused on constructing and maintaining rationalizations that confirm the righteousness and superiority of one’s chosen identity. In other words, a shift from doing good in the real world to feeling good about yourself.

… While ordinary instrumental rationality in politics focuses on achieving outcomes—influencing government action in this or that direction—expressive rationality focuses on taking stands. So long as you subscribe to the appropriate views and defend them with sufficient vigor, you can rest safe as a member in good standing of your chosen political tribe. Assuming any responsibility for actually moving public policy into closer accord with those appropriate views isn’t necessary; on the contrary, doing so can actually be hazardous to the effective maintenance of your tribal identity. After all, effecting real policy change requires sustained, constructive encounters with people who disagree with you—searching for common ground and building consensus around it, understanding and relating to where the other side is coming from and then making judicious compromises in pursuit of half a loaf. Do any of that long enough and you can be sure that true believers on your side will start calling you out as a turncoat …

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim and perpetrators were all Black, leading to confusion and distress. The basketball star LeBron James tweeted, “WE ARE OUR OWN WORSE ENEMY!” This kind of self-directed criticism is familiar to anyone who has had their hair trimmed in a Black barbershop. What is novel today is the amount of anger and the specific form of critique that James’s tweet, for one prominent example, engendered. One of the more polite and re-printable responses: “i’d say white supremacy was our worse enemy but okay lebron.”

White supremacy used to refer to the belief, encoded in both custom and law, that white people sit at the top of a biological racial hierarchy and that they must remain there. But in the past decade or so, it has become a much vaguer and more totalizing concept, denoting invisible structures, latent beliefs, and even innocuous practices, such as punctuality, that supposedly maintain the comparative advantage of white people at the expense of everyone else. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the period of racial reckoning that followed, all manner of experience was probed for evidence of “white supremacy.” Some on the left have adopted the term as a sort of shorthand for the the invisible hand of all American social and political life.

This understanding of white supremacy has led progressive journalists and activists to bring attention to (some might say obsess over) racial background in lethal encounters involving white and nonwhite people. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, was a white Hispanic. Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, was not merely an agent of the state but specifically a white police officer. Derek Chauvin, a white man in a multiracial group of officers responding to the scene, was the one to kneel on George Floyd. When Robert Aaron Long, a white man, murdered eight mostly Asian workers in three massage parlors in Atlanta in 2021, he said he was a sex addict and suggested he was driven by shame. But some community leaders insisted that anti-Asian animus was the X factor. According to one media narrative, repeating Long’s professed motive amounted to making “excuses” for “white male murderers.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Unraveling race]

For some on the left, whiteness and white supremacy retain their explanatory power even when white people are nowhere to be seen. The same year as the spa shootings, when Americans were bristling against school and business shutdowns and crime rates were spiking, nationwide hate crimes against Asian Americans surged by 339 percent. Anti-Asian violence in America has always been “a diverse and majority-minority affair,” as Wilfred Reilly wrote in 2021. “The 2019 Bureau of Justice Statistics report [found] that 27.5 percent of violent criminals targeting an Asian victim are black and only 24.1 percent are white.” Yet as video and anecdotal evidence emerged of vicious Black-on-Asian assaults and homicides, progressives wouldn’t let go of their hobbyhorse.

“Ultimately, there is a failure to remember what got America to this place of racial hierarchies and lingering Black-Asian tensions: white supremacy,” a 2021 Vox article explains. “White supremacy is what created segregation, policing, and scarcity of resources in low-income neighborhoods, as well as the creation of the ‘model minority’ myth—all of which has driven a wedge between Black and Asian communities. In fact, it is white Christian nationalism, more than any other ideology, that has shaped xenophobic and racist views around Covid-19.”

Like everyone I have spoken with, I was sickened and saddened by the killing of Tyre Nichols. When the videos were released, I was visiting my parents, and the footage was all any of us could talk about. Any attempt to make sense of the atrocity felt insufficient. My mother, an observant Christian, pointed to the existence of evil. My father, a sociologist by training, noted how power dynamics can affect, or corrupt, encounters between strangers. I stressed the role of ego and general incompetence—these officers were young, granted far too much authority, and grossly inexperienced.  

Writing at CNN on Friday, Van Jones offered another explanation under the headline “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism.” It is certainly possible that the five young, dark-skinned men who beat Nichols so mercilessly had each internalized a poisonous self-hatred. (On Monday, the Memphis police department revealed that two other officers had been disciplined as part of the investigation, at least one of whom is white.) And there is also a serious argument to be made that racism does not require interpersonal malice but may be understood as the limited and limiting system in which individuals make free but constrained decisions. In the latter telling, the institution of American policing is foundationally derived from southern slave patrols and now operates as a disciplining force to protect capital and hold the poor and marginalized in place—all of which makes it an inherently anti-Black enterprise, regardless of the racial or ethnic makeup of the individual officers in its employ.

[David A. Graham: Inhumanity in Memphis]

I am, to a degree, sympathetic to these views. I will never forget the day my brother had his front teeth separated from his mouth by the cold flashlight of a cop whose skin was darker than his own. But I am deeply skeptical of the reflex to attribute all violence and misconduct to structural racism, to impose that smooth framework on every atrocity no matter its jagged grain. I tweeted in response to Jones’s headline that we ought to at least consider the possibility that these five officers’ reprehensible actions fall on them alone.

By the next morning, that tweet had gone viral. I attempted to extend the thought further, writing, “Twitter is an amazing prism because you can watch fringe epistemologies congeal into orthodoxy in real time. A view that still strikes most as an enormous stretch—that white supremacist racism explains bad actions of non-whites even where no whites are present—is one example.”

This statement drew support as well as ire. The writer Joyce Carol Oates quoted it with a rebuttal: “yours is a somewhat disingenuous interpretation of a simple theory: that the race of the victim may determine the punishment, regardless of the race of the perpetrators. (in which case, if the victim had been white, the Black officers might have treated him less brutally.)” That tweet went viral, too, generating millions of views. Soon, my notifications were flooded with responses making a similar point, many of them quoting a specific passage from James Baldwin’s 1985 book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen:

Black policemen were another matter. We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—“for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a White one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a White policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.

Baldwin made this point with psychological acuity throughout his career. In his 1955 debut, Notes of a Native Son, he writes—eerily, in light of Memphis—“There were, incidentally, according to my brother, five Negro policemen in Atlanta at this time, who, though they were not allowed to arrest whites, would, of course, be willing, indeed, in their position, anxious, to arrest any Negro who seemed to need it. In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”

Those were Baldwin’s insights some 40 and nearly 80 years ago, respectively, and they say something historically true with ramifications for the present. I erred on Twitter in dismissing as merely “fringe” this position—that even nonwhite actors can buy into notions of their own personal or group inferiority, and also contribute to their own structural disadvantage. And yet, is even Baldwin’s exquisite articulation really the last or even the most compelling word on what is happening between and within groups in 2023?

Americans hardly have a monopoly on brutality, or state-sanctioned brutality, such that only peculiarities of American history can explain violence in the present. We have spent the past year observing groups of white-skinned Russian men do unspeakable things to the white-skinned Ukrainians at their mercy—things most of these same men would never do by themselves—simply because they were together and they could. Strength is provocative; weakness is too. I believe that this is what my father means when he invokes power dynamics (it may also be what my mother means by evil), and it cuts across every ethnic line.

[Franklin Foer: The horror of Bucha]

In the case of Tyre Nichols, in particular, the offending officers are Black, but so is the city’s chief of police, the majority of the force she oversees, and the community at large. The notion that the most likely explanation for this specific horror in this specific locality at this specific time ought to be reduced to a permanent, invisible, and unfalsifiable force called white supremacy veers dangerously close to determinism. Perversely, this infantilizing logic can’t help but absolve the five officers of responsibility for a heinous crime that most people and most police officers of any background do not commit.

Such moral reasoning has become conventional wisdom, embraced vocally by white liberals, among others. But white and nonwhite people alike should be wary of forfeiting their agency so easily. We should always remain skeptical of systems-level thinking that reduces the complexity and unpredictability of human action to a simple formula.

Why did those officers kill Tyre Nichols? I don’t know, and I’m wary of anyone who says they do.

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Speaking on The Football News Show, Michael Brown and Leon Osman discuss how the eight signings Chelsea have made in the January transfer window may put pressure on Graham Potter.