One idea that came up today in my discussion with my
independent study advisor was the concept of “categories of representations,” idea
that states that people’s perception of things conform to their idea of what it
should be, the assumption that
people, things, or actions that fall within a certain social category or role
always act accordingly with that role. In the context that we were speaking of,
we were talking about the largely unknown but horrific behavior of prison
guards against prisoners behind prison walls. My professor talked about how
it’s always very difficult to indict let alone convict prison guards of
misconduct, even though it is rampant and obvious, because people have a hard
time believing (or coming to terms with the fact) that “prison guards,” members
of a specific state-sanctioned social order, could act in inappropriate and
disorderly ways. This brings together many issues, one of which is the almost
blind faith most citizens put in the state and the authority of the state, that
any agent of the state, including
individual actors, only work for good because they work for the benevolent
state. Besides the fact that the state is the most violent actor in our social
order and therefore any agent of the state is also complicit and active in that violence, individual
state actors can and do act independently of their state-sanctioned roles.
The massive inability of many citizens to be seriously critical
of the behavior of state actors like prison guards is problematic for many
reasons. One of which is that individuals under the protection of the state due
to their social positioning (i.e. as prison guards) are rarely held accountable
for their wrongdoing. And second of all, the notion that the state is
benevolent even when it (through its agents) enacts terrible amounts of
violence minimizes the culpability of a
social order that produces this state-sanctioned violence and instead serves to
justify that violence under the notion that if the state is doing it, then it
must be appropriate (even when it’s clearly not).
This can be seen in a lot of conversations surrounding the
non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old
Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August. Many of Wilson’s supporters defended
his actions by claiming that he was “just doing his job.” It’s appalling and
quite ridiculous that anyone would intimate that shooting and killing unarmed
teenagers now falls under the purview of “just doing one’s job” for a police
officer. In fact, their job really is to handle and subdue violent individuals
with the least amount of bodily and physical damage possible. And the “just
doing your job” argument doesn’t hold up with the whole “self-defense” argument
either. Either you were doing your job, which now includes killing unarmed
people, or you were defending yourself – because your job is certainly not to
start fights with “dangerous” people for no reason so that you then have to use
deadly force in order to defend yourself against them. This example shows how
the categories of representations serve to distort and warp an egregious act of
police misconduct. Benevolent police officers, actors of the benevolent state,
cannot just kill people for no reason. That does not fit within the schema that
we as a society have created for our law enforcement. In this way, expectations
do not only define reality, but reality defines expectations. Police officers
shoot unarmed people (reality). That now must mean shooting unarmed people is
part of the job of police officers (expectation).
This not only keeps us from recognizing police misconduct
when we see it before our very own eyes (in the case of Eric Garner) but also
justifies that violence by expanding the role of the state actor who committed
that violence. An illustration in my head is of a fenced off area that
encompasses the appropriate behavior of any state actor. When he/she steps out
of that area, instead of a public that says, “Look! He/she just stepped out!
That’s wrong!” we expand that space in our minds to now encompass the area in
which that actor stepped into. You can see how this obviously expands the
breadth of violence and misconduct we allow individual actors to conduct. Mind
you, these are all individual
behaviors, but they act in the name of the state and with permission of the
state. Therefore, they are state-sanctioned
behaviors. While individuals are not the system, the more we allow individuals
to get away with in the name of a system
(i.e. killing an unarmed black person because
you’re a police officer or killing someone by throwing them in a shower of
boiling hot water because you’re a prison
guard – yes this did happen), the greater the purview, control, and
violence we allow the state to have over all of us as the general public.
We must turn a more critical lens on what exactly it is that
we allow our state and its actors to do in our name. We have to disavow ourselves
of the idea that just because someone acts in the name of the state that they
also act in the best interest of the people (1) because individuals are not
systems, so even if for some bizarre reason, you have faith in the system, that
doesn’t necessarily mean you should have faith in every actor of that system
and 2) because the United States has routinely enacted violence against people
of color, women, queer folks, and foreigners throughout its history and continues
to do so to this day).
