“Hands up, don’t shoot”
I write today to compliment Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart for “the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write.” I contrast Capehart’s courageous article with the decision made by a historian in Borges’ short story “Theme of the Hero and the Traitor.”
The African American Capehart, who I’m proud to say graduated from my alma mater (Carleton College), has concluded that Michael Brown was in fact reaching for Officer Darren Wilson’s gun in the shooting that triggered the Ferguson protests and that led to the “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan. The Department of Justice cleared Officer Wilson and Capehart agrees:
The DOJ report notes on page 44 that Johnson [a witness] “made multiple statements to the media immediately following the incident that spawned the popular narrative that Wilson shot Brown execution-style as he held up his hands in surrender.” In one of those interviews, Johnson told MSNBC that Brown was shot in the back by Wilson. It was then that Johnson said Brown stopped, turned around with his hands up and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” And, like that, “hands up, don’t shoot” became the mantra of a movement. But it was wrong, built on a lie.
The article was hard for Capehart to write because such a truth could undermine efforts to hold the Ferguson police force, not to mention police forces around the country. accountable for the times when they are in fact guilty. Capehart expresses this concern by hoping for the opposite:
Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger “Black Lives Matter.” In fact, the false Ferguson narrative stuck because of concern over a distressing pattern of other police killings of unarmed African American men and boys around the time of Brown’s death. Eric Garner was killed on a Staten Island street on July 17. John Crawford III was killed in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on Aug. 5, four days before Brown. Levar Jones survived being shot by a South Carolina state trooper on Sept. 4. Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was killed in a Cleveland park on Nov. 23, the day before the Ferguson grand jury opted not to indict Wilson. Sadly, the list has grown longer.
Whether or not it undermines activists for social justice, however, a journalist’s first responsibility is to the truth:
But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong. And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.
Capehart stands in contrast with the historian in Borges’ story, who is researching the life of an Irish freedom fighter who mysteriously dies on the night before his greatest success:
Kilpatrick perished on the eve of the victorious revolt which he had premeditated and dreamt of. The first centenary of his death draws near; the circumstances of the crime are enigmatic; Ryan, engaged in writing a biography of the hero, discovers that the enigma exceeds the confines of a simple police investigation. Kilpatrick was murdered in a theater; the British police never found the killer; the historians maintain that this scarcely soils their good reputation, since it was probably the police themselves who had him killed.
It so happens that, the further the historian gets into the issue, the more things fail to add up. Ultimately he discovers that Kilpatrick was not a hero but a traitor and that this fact was learned just prior to the revolt. Fearing that the revelation would undermine the cause, Kilpatrick asked that he be executed in such a way that would further Irish liberty. His execution was carefully orchestrated to make it appear as though the police were the actual killers.
The story has further Borgesian twists and turns, all of them deliciously complex, that need not concern us here. I’m interested in what the historian chooses to do with what he has learned:
After a series of tenacious hesitations, he resolves to keep his discovery silent. He publishes a book dedicated to the hero’s glory…
Borges captures how we can be drawn into a fictional labyrinth and lose our way. If we don’t have honest arbiters who are dedicated to truth, then the fabulists win.
In our society our arbiters include, in addition to historians and journalists, scientists, economists, political scientists, doctors, the courts, and professors and teachers in general. Granted, complete objectivity is never possible, which is why rigorous self-scrutiny and genuine open dialogue are essential. This is why scientists and social scientists must check each other’s results, why historians most scrutinize each other’s prejudices, why legal minds must examine court decisions, and why news organizations must call out people like Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly. (NBC did, Fox didn’t.)
Truth is not always entirely clear, especially in the humanities, but even there we have disciplinary standards of evidence and argumentation that must prevail. Just because truth is elusive doesn’t mean that we should cynically give up on it. When falsehood is discovered, we must censure those who are guilty and, in some cases, drum them out of the profession. If veritas doesn’t come first, then everything else we do is put at risk.
Unscrupulous men and women constantly strive to undermine the arbiters of truth. To cite one recent revelation, we have learned that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that global warming is caused by variations in the sun’s energy rather that human activity, has collected
$1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
If we want to hold on to our souls, we must reject such Faustian offers. Capehart is holding on to his, and justice will be served as a result. “Hands up, don’t shoot” has struck a chord because it taps into a reality that African Americans recognize all too well. Worrying that the actual story about a false martyr will diminish the power of the symbol is to underestimate the power of truth to set us free.
