We Do The Things We Do
Because We Believe The Things We Believe
I was catching up on podcasts recently. I heard Glennon Doyle say something on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast and it struck clear through me, like a bell:
[Y]ou do the things you do because you believe the things you believe. You are the way you are because you believe the things you believe. So the reason why resolutions don’t work is because they’re always about actions without deep consideration of the beliefs beneath the actions.
I keep thinking about Tyre Nichols, the vibrant, creative, young Black father who was beaten to death by Memphis police officers. What do you think those police officers believed— about their role in the community, about themselves, and about a young man who they caught in their crosshairs that night?
Doyle was talking in the podcast about changing behavior on a personal level via resolutions and the like. She was arguing that trying to change things about ourselves simply via will or discipline is a losing proposition. If we don’t interrogate and transform the underlying beliefs that fueled our problematic ways of being in the first place then those beliefs will inevitably worm their way back in and undermine any attempt to change.
I can’t help but think that the same holds true on community and societal levels. We can reform police departments endlessly, for instance, but if we never interrogate the underlying beliefs we carry about why police exist in the first place; if we never seek to understand the ideologies that feed the systems that create the community issues that supposedly necessitate the existence of special police units in “high-crime” neighborhoods like the SCORPION Unit that the officers who beat Tyre Nichols to death belonged to then our reforms will come to nothing. Nothing.
Thinking of ideologies are something outside of ourselves that we can easily and discretely isolate and choose to follow consciously or not ignores the reality that ideologies both arise out of and inform beliefs (what we perceive as inherently true). Some ideologies are so pervasive and the beliefs that feed them so unconscious we don’t even realize they’re there. The analogy often used to describe the effects of white supremacy, for instance, is of a fish trying to think reflectively about the nature of water and not breathe in the parts of the water that they don’t like. Good luck with that, little fish.
In a recent Facebook live, historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes the popular Substack Letters From an American, argued that the remedy to the scourge of police killings of Black people was to stop putting people in power who believe that authority affords them the right to do whatever they want. She further argued that refusing to empower people who abuse their authority in this way would necessarily change the system of policing entirely.
To go back to Doyle’s point about lasting change, I think Richardson is wrong on this one. Without interrogating why we imbue police with power at all— to monitor, to detain, and to kill when threatened— we will never get to the root of the problem. Without examining what we believe about poor people, about black and brown people, about how and when violence is justified, or about what justice even means, we will never lastingly change anything.
Until or unless we confront our core beliefs about hierarchies of human value we will never transform how we treat each other in this country. Instead, we will continue to proclaim ourselves a land of freedom and opportunity for everyone while simultaneously supporting systems that restrict some people’s freedom, opportunity, safety, security, health, livelihood, and life expectancy.
We will tell ourselves stories about how they are less worthy. How they don’t work hard. How they get what they deserve. We will accept the images and tropes fed to us without question. Black-on-Black crime. Welfare mothers. Super-predators. Illegals. Haven’t you heard all Mexicans are rapists? All Native Americans are alcoholics and savages? All young black men are thugs?
These core beliefs then create behaviors that further cement the beliefs in an endless feedback loop. In her detailed and disturbing history of American policing for The New Yorker Jill Lepore described the feedback loop like this:
Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.
So, it’s not just that we must interrogate the beliefs that underlie the repetitive, violent, vigilante behaviors of our police under the assumption that alone will change things. We must, at the same time, demand different behavior— from our police, from ourselves. Behavior that speaks to an unerring belief in the inherent value of all people, that sources power from horizontally integrated connections and not separative, vertical hierarchies, and that makes peaceful resolution of conflict our primary expectation. If existing systems are inconsistent with those beliefs, if they cannot create an environment conducive to the behavior that expresses those beliefs, then we have to demand new systems.
We must interrupt the unconscious and unexamined feedback loop that allows for an unending parade of police killings of black and brown people with a new set of behaviors and live intentionally into new convictions.
If you think interrupting the current feedback loop is impossible, a pipe-dream, let me tell you it is not. I was raised all my life with the idea that there is that of God in everyone. No exceptions. It turns out that, even so, I am not always the most peaceful person. I have resented and rebelled against the idea time and time again. I have hated people. I have denied their essential humanity. I have felt righteous satisfaction when bad things happened to those I deemed unworthy or wrong.
At a certain point, however, I looked around at the world that sort of belief created, that I was helping to create, and wondered, is that the world I want to live in? Functioning from an assumption of common baseline divinity may be a harder sell given the complicated, often painful nature of this world, but it also actually works as a strategy. Nine times out of ten acting as if it is true changes the tenor of my interactions with people. It makes the world I can touch, that I have direct impact on daily, something approaching the world I want to live in.
I still have all the feelings. But even when I am irritated, offended, enraged, or vengeful, this belief prevents me from lashing out, dehumanizing people, or justifying violence. It also forces me to reject any system that implicitly values some lives more than others, whether it be due to race, ethnicity, gender, religion, ability, national origin, or any of the other ways we delineate people. Those identities matter. They change the way we move through the world, our access to resources, safety, and peace. But they don’t equate to value, and so in my own life I refuse to act as if they do.
Rejecting hierarchies of human value doesn’t just mean changing my own behavior, though. It also means speaking up publicly. It means standing firm in opposition to oppression and violence, which enforce those hierarchies. In her essay, Jill Lepore quotes The Guardian, which noted that “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” The number of black and brown people in that number is also still vastly disproportionate to their percentage of the population. The violence, the demographics— it’s all obscene, and my beliefs demand that I say so.
A strong chorus of us, in fact, said so in the city I live in. And now we are steadily “reimagining public safety” and the role of our local and county police. Is the effort perfect? Not by a long shot. But we’re asking the right questions, interrogating the beliefs that lead to the systems that create senseless death, and inviting in the possibility of real, lasting change.
What I’m saying is, the reality that killed Tyre Nichols? It doesn’t have to be that way. But black and brown people, women, queer folks, disabled folks, the mentally ill, and immigrants will continue to be targeted, beaten, and killed until we all commit to the hard work of bringing this country into some kind of integrity, into a deep introspection about the beliefs we carry as a nation that fuel our violence and an unerring commitment to behavior and systems that support the idea that every life actually matters, that we all deserve safety, and opportunity, and peace.
May we never rest in this pursuit, Tyre, so that you can. We owe you, and each other, that.
Yes. Maam
Hard stuff