Bill Cosby And His Enablers

Even victims of discrimination can look away from -- and thereby enable -- other forms of violence.
Gilbert Carrasquillo via Getty Images

Long before the Black Lives Matter movement raised the problem of immoral police (and vigilante) violence, African Americans grappled with its reality and the seemingly impenetrable logic which undergirds it. The mind reels at the justifications proffered for killing a 12-year-old child, or the calculation that finds an officer raining blows on someone’s grandmother, or the science that encourages a man to fire a gun over his shoulder and into a crowd.

Fiction undergirds all of these acts -- of furtive movements, reasonable fear, and therapy through violence. So strong is the power of the legitimizing narrative, that even those who are victims of these violent fictions are rarely deterred from crafting justifying fictions of their own. In the 19th and 20th century, the old discriminations against white ethnics -- “no Irish need apply”-- did very little to prevent those same white ethnics from engaging in anti-black racism. Yet for a starker example, it may well better to look closer to home.

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