Is silence violence?
“Silence is violence” is increasingly a justification to meet said violence in kind. Unfortunately, the reciprocated violence tends not to be of the silent variety.
Recently, a crowd of demonstrators for racial justice passed through a neighborhood in DC demanding, apparently, that everyone they encountered raise their fists in a salute of solidarity. Some videos came out of this event that I found pretty troubling. This feeling of mine would probably classify me, in the eyes of these demonstrators, as a reactionary of sorts. I, on the other hand, feel like they’re acting like bigots. Their mantra “silence is violence” assumes that their way of thinking and acting is the only morally appropriate response to events. They call “no justice” and respond “no peace”, but their mob action, their peace breaking, the real violence in this scenario, is an obstacle rather than an avenue to justice. Their implied notion of justice is ill-defined and perfectionistic. It doesn’t allow for an objective, measurable, attainable definition. However much our society may improve, I fear we won’t be able to satisfy them. For that reason, I worry that there’s little hope of earning back the peace that they’re withholding as a bargaining chip.
Is silence violence? Consider the case at hand. Would anyone be hurt if these diners didn't roll their fingers into fists and raise their arms in the air? Clearly not, in any literal, immediate, physical sense. Maybe the protestors feel that people who don’t show overt solidarity with them are, in some indirect sense, accomplices to racial violence.
Certainly, there is a reasonable theory by which the tacit acceptance of another person’s act of violence could itself be considered a violent act. Say you’re in the passenger seat of your friend’s car outside their ex-partner’s house. They angrily tell you how evil their ex is. Reaching across your lap, they open the glove compartment and pull out a gun. “Let’s go in,” they say. Together, you enter the house. Their ex is sitting in the front room. The two start shouting at each other. Eventually, your friend points the gun and pulls the trigger, killing their ex. If, by this point, you haven’t tried to stop them, or called the police, or at least run out in fear, if you’ve just stood by and silently watched everything, you’re probably culpable. Your silence has made you an accessory to murder.
Are these restaurant goers accomplices in a sense like that? To what? What violent act are they passively observing? The death of George Floyd? They aren’t witnesses. They have no testimony to give, no evidence to bring forward. The perpetrator is behind bars, awaiting trial. His day in court will come. Is it their duty to drag Derrick Chauvin out of his cell and lynch him?
Or is it the case of Philando Castile, who was shot dead at a traffic stop, likely without cause, by an officer who was later acquitted by a jury? How could these individuals have changed that outcome? Is it their duty to prejudge defendants? Or to intimidate juries? To unseat judges? To take the law into their own hands?
I hope the activists don’t want these things. Judicial independence is essential to real justice. Mob justice isn’t justice at all. I trust the calm deliberation of a jury far more than the passionate inveighing of a crowd in the street. A lot of care, over many generations, has gone into devising legal systems that strive to treat people fairly. Those systems judge cases with regard to laws set forth by democratic processes, and interpreted by professionals in a spirit of reason and caution. These safeguards around our power to deprive one another of life and liberty are an essential element of a free society. Legal judgements must be the product of open, fair, rule based processes. The alternative, such as the justice of an angry mob, grants power by fiat to small groups in a way that’s necessarily tyrannical.
Certainly, legal systems make mistakes. Hundreds of convicted people have been subsequently exonerated by DNA evidence through the work of the Innocence Project for instance, often after spending many years in prison.
We can be sure that that’s just the tip of an iceberg of undetected false convictions. And, because criminal cases in our legal system are evaluated on the standard of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, we almost certainly err on the side of underconviction. There are likely far more people who have gone unpunished for crimes they did commit, than those serving time for ones they did not. Among them, no doubt, many police officers who abused their power and authority in criminal ways. And the potential litany of failures of our justice system doesn’t stop there. There are many clear cases of failures of due process due to under provisioned public defender’s offices, or of defendants waiting too long for their right to a trial. And surely, as humans, judges and juries in their deliberations, and attorneys in their representations, are subject to biases.
Our system of legal justice, like every human creation, is imperfect. We, as a society, through our legal system, perpetrate injustices every day. We have a duty to recognize that fact. We have a duty to investigate our failures. We have a duty to continue to reform and improve the processes by which we deliver justice. We should fund public defender’s offices better. We should provide grants for research into the sources of error and delay and bias in our system. We should innovate in trial procedures. We should advocate for greater accountability of law enforcement. We should invest more in officer training. But these processes look nothing like a middle aged woman on a street bench in Washington DC being coerced into raising her fist in the air. Reforms like these, reforms that can really lead to better justice, aren’t on the lips of the social justice protesters.
Perhaps that’s Ok. These are protesters, not policy makers. To insist that they be experts of some sort before they express their anger would be to deprive them of their right as citizens to decry the wrongs they believe they see being done. They protest. Even if, perhaps, they do not solve. They’re doing what is within their power to do, in the hope of righting the wrongs they perceive.
That’s fair. But the “silence is violence” narrative implies that the problem is simple. The titular slogan of the movement, Black lives matter, itself suggests that the problem is just a simple switch waiting to be flipped in the hearts of some backward thinking individuals. If enough people just realized that Black lives are not disposable, if enough people just raised their fists and said “enough is enough”, injustice would be done for. But that’s not right. We can, and must, and will, make our system of justice more perfect. But if we make it ten times better, or a hundred, it will still produce numerous injustices. Innocent people will still die. Guilty people will still walk free. We can be certain that there will be terrible viral videos for years to come. If peace must wait for perfection, we’re doomed.
We tend to think that directing intense criticism at the people responsible for solving problems will ensure that they solve the problems faster. We assume that pressure is an unambiguous good. But in his book, Black Box Thinking, Mathew Syed describes what he calls blame culture as a counterproductive response. He relates the events surrounding the death of an English baby due to neglect and abuse. A newspaper account of the event that pointed the finger at the social workers responsible for the baby’s case led to a public outcry. Syed says:
This is what people think accountability looks like: a muscular response to failure. The idea is that even if the punishment is over the top in the specific instance, it will force people to sit up and take responsibility. As one pundit put it: “It will focus minds.”
The resulting angry protests and death threats actually appear to have led to substantially worse outcomes for at risk children. Many social workers left the profession, those who remained removed children from their families on slight pretexts to protect themselves, and yet child deaths increased significantly.
Syed contrasts blame culture with a growth culture in which failures are regarded as opportunities to learn and improve. The FAA, for example, has famously embraced a blameless investigation process for air accidents and near misses and flying today is about twenty times safer than it was fifty years ago. In high blame environments, people have strong incentives to hide their mistakes rather than discuss them in an open and constructive way that allows for learning. Blame implies a personalization of failure that prevents us from seeing underlying systemic causes and fixing them. “Blame”, Syed says, “undermines the information vital for meaningful adaptation. It obscures the complexity of our world, deluding us into thinking we understand our environment when we should be learning from it.”
The fact is that we’re better at delivering justice as a society than ever before. Fewer people are the victims of violent crime today than at any other time in our history. It appears that fewer people are killed by the police—though historical data is scant. Surveillance by people on their smartphones can now help us improve even faster. The Innocence Project carefully documents the process failures that have led to the false convictions of their exonerees and they use that information to advocate for specific reforms. Police today are more professional than in the past. Incarceration rates are falling—though still extraordinarily high from a global perspective. And trial procedures continue to evolve. Still, our progress is too gradual for some. As we rest on our laurels, they might argue, people are dying.
But, if we accept that the problems we face are complex, and they are, if we understand that, even at its best, reform will be incremental and incomplete, and it will, then perfectionism is hopeless. Accelerating progress will require science, data, innovation, and experimentation not intimidation. Oversimplifying the issues, assaulting practitioners, and shutting down discussion and debate is counterproductive. Hostile, harshly punitive, public attitudes toward police departments are a barrier to transparency. Open discussion and debate is exactly the method by which progress will be made. We should hold police accountable for illegal behavior, while also recognizing that policing is a hard job that routinely puts people into dangerous situations: sometimes police will do their best and people will still be hurt or killed. We should create the conditions to systematically learn from such tragedies. Do we care more about finding scapegoats and scoring political points or about saving actual lives?
The demand that people raise their fists is a demand for support for a particular worldview and program. It’s enshrining a particular way of framing and addressing a problem as orthodoxy. For some of the DC demonstrators, someone refusing to raise their fist might seem to be saying the equivalent of “Black lives don’t matter”. But a largely decentralized political movement like BLM can mean many things to many people. Someone else might reasonably believe that raising their fist would imply they agreed that “the police are racist murders” or “we should defund the police”. A recent post on the BLM website summarized itself:
We know that police don’t keep us safe—and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health, and education investments—we will never be truly safe.
That’s a controversial view. Refusing to express public support for BLM might mean someone thinks the police do keep us safe. Or that the evidence they’ve seen does not seem to support the generalization that one of the essential branches of our government is fundamentally corrupt.
Or a person might not comply because they just don’t believe in going along with mobs. That’s laudable. I think this specific protest is interesting because it feels iconic of our political times. The protesters aren’t trying to persuade people with facts or reason. They’re offering people an ultimatum: join us and demonize others or be demonized yourself. It’s an exercise in divisive radicalization. In this case, even if you were sympathetic to the demonstrators’ cause, I think avoiding implicitly condoning their strong arm tactics would be reason enough not to go along. Indeed, one of the women in the videos told the reporter who posted it “in the moment it didn’t feel right [...] I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching with them for weeks.”
I’m sure that these protesters are earnest in their desire to do good. I hope that, with reflection, they’ll see that the non-compliance of these citizens is not a sign of their evil hearts. If that angry mob were to descend on me, I hope that I too would have the courage to not comply with their unreasonable demand. I don’t believe that demonizing the police is fair, or likely to save lives. It may very well cost lives. And I don’t agree with the tactics of these protesters. They’re illiberal and undemocratic. I would encourage everyone to go against mobs, regardless of their motivation. “Silence is violence”, is increasingly a justification to meet said violence in kind. Unfortunately, the reciprocated violence tends not to be of the silent variety.
Silence isn’t violence. Declaring someone else’s silence an act of violence is coercive. It says to them “if you don’t agree with me unconditionally, I’ll take that as an immoral act and treat you accordingly.” Under conditions of coercion, silence can be integrity and courage. These incidents, by so clearly juxtaposing real, present, hostility and aggression, with the hypothetically criminal act of silence, demonstrate the evident inequality of silence and violence. The claims of these demonstrators are about justice. But justice demands a sense of proportion. And what we see in these videos does not look proportionate. If we decide that merely existing in a society in which injustice occurs warrants such treatment, we have reason to fear whether any of us will ever know peace again.
I just saw that a similar case in Portland was described in the New York Times yesterday. In that case, a large group of protesters marched through a residential neighborhood shouting through bullhorns for people to come out of their homes and join them. The crowd stopped for a time outside a house flying the American flag. According to a neighbor “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. (hank.politicaltherapy@gmail.com)
I really like the discussion of the judicial system and the constant need to try to improve it, based on past errors, failures, biases and sometimes just inefficiencies. When I first campaigned for judge over 30 years ago, part of my stump speech was that we only ever have justice with a small j. When we heard about love, hope, charity, peace, or even justice, at our parents knee, we probably had some notion of those things with capital letters, like they were perfect/ absolutes. But working in the trenches as a lawyer and then a judge, it was clear to me that there were various qualities of justice from courtroom to courtroom, but none were perfect. But the best were in courtrooms where the judge really cared about the people in front of her and worked hard to understand the facts and to properly apply the law, and then issue clear, understandable decisions. I would tell a campaign audience that it is men and women just like me and you who serve as judges and lawyers, witnesses, bailiffs, court clerks, court reporters, jurors and police officers, and none of us are perfect and so our work product would never be perfect either. Nevertheless, that we each had the potential to do our jobs well, and if we each did our allotted task well, we could be proud of the quality of justice that resulted. I vowed to work hard and to treat people with respect and do the job as well as I possibly could, even if imperfectly. I was elected in a 5 way race and was reelected 3 more times after that without any opposition, serving 24 years.
For just a little sense of what Matthew Syed has to say, Since I have not and may not ever read the Black Box book, I found this video https://www.leadingauthorities.com/speakers/video/matthew-syed-black-box-thinking