Monday
The Trump administration’s horrors keep adding up, with Attorney General William Barr’s chilling remarks at a special Justice Department ceremony being the latest example. This past Wednesday Barr told the assembled police officers and prosecutors,
Today, the American people have to focus on something else, which is the sacrifice and the service that is given by our law enforcement officers. And they have to start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves…[I]f communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.
In addition to sounding like a mob boss’ threat, the remarks are clearly fueled by Barr’s own sense of grievance. He himself feels like he isn’t getting proper respect. The incident reminds me of a James Baldwin short story.
Written during the Civil Rights protests, “Going to Make the Man” (1965) is the account of a police officer who is unsettled when a once subservient black population begins demanding (to use one of Barr’s words) respect. The protagonist is a white chief of police who has been beating up protesters who refuse to stop marching or singing. Now in bed with his wife, he is unable to perform.
He finds himself longing for a time when African Americans knew their place. He remembers when he would see them standing around saying, “‘Yes suh, Mr. Jesse. I surely will, Mr. Jesse. Fine weather, Mr. Jesse. Why, I thank you, Mr. Jesse…’ Hell, they all liked him, the kids used to smile when he came to the door. He gave them candy, sometimes, or chewing gum, and rubbed their rough bullet heads…
And later in the story:
He was only doing his duty: protecting white people from the niggers and the niggers from themselves. And there were still lots of good niggers around–he had to remember that… the good niggers must be mighty sad to see what was happening to their people. They would thank him when this was over. In that way they had, the best of them, not quite looking him in the eye, in a low voice, with a little smile: We surely thanks you, Mr. Jesse. From the bottom of our hearts, we thanks you.
Now, however, he finds himself wondering whether even the older African Americans really appreciated him. The younger ones, meanwhile, definitely reject his paternalism, which becomes painfully apparent when one of the protesters, beaten to a pulp by the cops, calls him out. The interchange occurs after Jesse realizes he knows the man’s family:
“You remember Old Julia?”
The boy said, from the floor, with his mouth full of blood, and one eye, barely open, blaring like the eye of a cat in the dark, “My grandmother’s name was Mrs. Julia Blossom. Mrs. Julia Blossom. You going to call our women by their right names yet.– And those kids ain’t going to stop singing. We going to keep on singing until every one of you miserable white mothers go stark raving out of yur minds.” Then he closed the one eye; he spat blood; his head fell back against the floor.
Baldwin realizes the extent to which a certain kind of white manhood relies on feeling superior to blacks. It’s why many Americans never accepted Barack Obama as president, why they were sure he would take their guns (emasculate them), and why Donald Trump got so much mileage out of his birtherism. Insecurity and self-doubt lie at the heart of white supremacy.
In the story, Jesse can only perform again when he recalls a lynching he attended as a child. I don’t know whether or not Barr himself has such fantasies. His remarks, however, indicate that his racial resentment runs deep and help explain why he has thrown in his lot with Donald Trump. The president shares his view that the world has been upended, and Barr will do everything in his power to make sure that the proper people remain in control.
When the chief law enforcement officer of the land thinks this way, it’s a problem.