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Title: The Other White Vigilante Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: July 25, 2020 Language: en Topics: protest, whiteness, black lives matter, white supremacy, police, journalism, snitches, liberals, critique Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-26 from https://itsgoingdown.org/the-other-white-vigilante/
White vigilantes play a vital paramilitary role in the functioning of
any settler state. The violence of such vigilantes was the driving force
in the US’s westward expansion, and at the same time the paramilitary
culture they developed became central to the official military, as
documented by John Grenier and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The vigilantes of
the KKK were the vanguard of the terrorist reaction against
Reconstruction, bolstering racial capitalism. Vigilantes like James Earl
Ray can assassinate problematic rebels, allowing the official branches
of law enforcement to keep their hands ostensibly clean. White
vigilantes patrol a border designed to kill, and they have assassinated
and injured numerous people participating in the George Floyd uprising.
More recently, another kind of white vigilante has carved out a niche.
This kind comes from the Left, and they claim to be critical of the
police and the white supremacist structures with which they work hand in
hand.
Meet Kristina Beverlin. Kristina was a participant in the CHOP in
Seattle who frequently used her social media (@krisbeverlin on Twitter
and @mindfulexplorer on Instagram) to share #BLM posts and criticisms of
the police.
On June 12, however, she shared photos of a Black man she claims to have
seen start a fire at the East Precinct. “I need everyone in Seattle to
retweet the photo of this man”, she writes. On July 14, Isaiah Thomas
Willoughby was arrested on federal charges of arson, which carry a
minimum of 5 years in prison and a maximum of 20 years. He was
identified thanks to Beverlin’s photograph.
This is not the first time Beverlin has worked as a volunteer snitch
under cover of her “journalistic” activities. On June 4, she tweeted a
video of a Seattle protester who she claims was “the first, to break
Nike’s windows. He had no fear of being arrested. Never tried to run.”
Multiple other tweets recycle conspiracy theories of police trying to
start riots, with large speculative leaps or rumors in the crowd as her
only evidence. She frequently extols the virtue of “100% peaceful”
protests and claims, also based on rumor, that the SPD wanted protesters
to burn the East Precinct down.
The marriage of pacifism and conspiratorial thinking is a key component
of the left-wing white vigilante. Brought up on Mel Gibson and Joss
Whedon movies, they believe that revolution is simply the revelation of
some nefarious conspiracy of power, that once people have the truth,
power will fall. The role of conspiracy theories in political thought
has anti-Semitic and anti-Black origins, and the 9–11 Truther movement
has already shown us that conspiratorial thinking aids the far Right and
weakens actual movements for liberation.
But in the cheap maneuvers of a snitch like Beverlin, we can also see
how conspiracy theories serve as an alibi for white people. Though
governments have their morbid secrets, NONE OF THE KEY ASPECTS OF WHITE
SUPREMACY AND CAPITALISM HAVE EVER BEEN HIDDEN. The intertwined
brutality of capitalism and colonialism—with the race regimes they
brought to life—has always existed in plain view. The “truth” that
should supposedly bring this system crumbling down has never been more
than one neighborhood away from even the most sheltered of white people.
If there are white people who did not join the fight against the police
before police murders were regularly caught on video, it is because they
chose not to listen to people of color.
Those whose hypocritical ethics force them into the streets only once
conspiracy to preserve their white privilege even as they take up an
oppositional pose.
OBVIOUSLY, people who are getting systematically murdered by the cops
need to be able to fight back, to defend themselves. Obviously their
expressions of rage are both legitimate and intelligent, and obviously
other people should fight alongside them, also exposing themselves to
bodily injury and the risk of imprisonment. Unless. Unless…
Unless that’s what the cops actually want us to do, and we’ll really
show them by being completely peaceful, not destroying anything, not
disrupting anything.
This infantile logic is so self-serving, it’s astounding. But some
people will do anything to preserve their power and privilege. That’s
why we have police murders in the first place.
Kristina Beverlin’s profile image shows a person, presumably her,
wearing a Batman mask, which, frankly, couldn’t have been scripted
better, as Batman validates the white imaginary of the ultra-punitive
vigilante upholding an unequal social order, the No Holds Barred
terrorism that is necessary for polite company to speak of rights and
due process, just as every District Attorney must be accompanied by its
KKK or extrajudicial assassinations to keep the system running.
Her justifications for her snitching are also telling. In the initial
thread about the precinct fire, she repeatedly uses law and order
language to delegitimize this Black man who allegedly lit the match. She
describes the behavior of a street person with all the pathology a Karen
can muster.
“He is acting like a drunk. Like he’s mentally ill[…] One guard who said
he had to physically remove him from damaging property yesterday.” “he
wobbled off […] muttering to himself[…] mumbling”.
Now that she has cast him inequivocally as an antisocial element, homo
sacer, she wades right into another trope systematically used in the
delegitimization, surveillance, and murder of people who are considered
pyscho-emotionally abnormal, another group—together and overlapping with
Black people—disproportionately targeted by police violence. She claims
he is faking it.
“But no one who is drunk or schizophrenic navigates crowds like that. Or
blends in like that.”
The expert journalist has spoken. Not only are ALL drunk people
incapable of walking in straight lines, ALL people with some mental
health diagnosis are incapable of navigating around obstacles or
blending in with a crowd (even though many in fact have special practice
at doing exactly that to avoid the violence of the normies).
Aside from the disgusting combination of racism, ableism, ignorance, and
snitching, Beverlin presents us with a key move out of the conspiracy
theorist playbook: arguments based on faulty common sense, appealing
therefore to someone’s prejudices in the guise of reason. What makes her
such an effective snitch, representative of a broad phenomenon, are the
combination of prejudices she is appealing to.
People with mental illness cannot be trusted. Black men are violent.
Violence is bad. The police are lawless and conniving.
In what type of person, exactly, do these four different prejudices
coincide? The answer: middle class people and white people with a
superficial, spectacular critique of policing. In other words, the vast
majority of white allies and other people trying to push the rebellion
in a reformist direction.
Subsequently, in defending her snitching after Willoughby is arrested,
Beverlin turns to other arguments. She highlights her hard-hitting
critiques of the SPD. She’s a useful ally, she seems to say, and her
continued presence in the movement is well worth the sacrifice of one
Black man’s life. Black lives might matter, but her comfort, status, and
self-image matter more. When asked how many cops have been arrested or
fired as a result of her citizen journalism, she declines to answer, but
we can assume the number is a big fat zero.
Desperate to preserve her theory linking Willoughby to the police, now
that it is public knowledge he is not actually a cop, she claims there
are videos of him spouting pro-police positions in the past. Regardless
of the veracity of the claim, and the absolute hypocrisy given the fact
she has assisted in a prosecution, it is still a facile justification
for sending a Black man to prison. In contrast, the federal affidavit
claims Willoughby was motivated by anger at how he was treated in a
previous arrest. In other words, he putatively had pro-police positions
in the past, but was now responding to an incident of brutality he
experienced at the hands of cops, and this fucking Karen destroys his
life because she chose to believe rumors that it was actually the police
who wanted the precinct to get burnt down.
Oh, and also—and this is important—because “I damn sure didn’t want a
single person to think that -> I <- had started the fire”, according to
one of her tweets, explaining why she began photographing him.
The methods needed to defend ourselves from right-wing vigilantes are
clear, and movements are doing what they can to increase these
capacities. But how do we defend ourselves from left-wing vigilantes
like Kristina?
We need to widely discredit conspiracy theories as a trojan horse for
right-wing logics and complicity with the State. Because conspiracy
theories rely on an inability to distinguish between faulty and decent
logic, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. Collective
self-education needs to be prioritized in movement spaces. This can be
difficult, however, when movements swell overnight, growing
exponentially, with people coming in from a mainstream society that
rewards self-serving ignorance (to be clear, I’m referring primarily to
privileged people here, since nothing atrophies intelligence like
complacency).
We need to share methods for didactic crowd strategies, a pedagogy of
the mob. In the past, techniques have been shared about how to create a
more social riot, taking care of one another and creating synergy
between rock-throwers and chanters, for example, but it is more
difficult to communicate in a crowd about things that will play out long
after the riot is done, like conspiracy theories and arrests.
Often, stories are the most effective way of spreading an idea. After
Amy Cooper was caught trying to win an Oscar with her terrified 911 call
in Central Park, millions of white people got it. Well, not it,
entirely, but at least one small part of the arsenal of whiteness that
is used to brutalize people of color.
Just as Amy Cooper was made an example of, white vigilante snitches like
Kristina Beverlin need to become exemplary, stories of how pacifism and
conspiracy theories combine to turn supposed allies into cops’ best
friends and agents of white supremacy. She has destroyed a Black man’s
life to defend her own comfort.
What happens next?