The Danger of Naming Them Evil
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
When we finally learned that Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery, a black man, a 25 year old aspiring electrician and fitness buff on a morning run, had been chased down and shot dead by a white father and son, the tiresome predictable began. Gregory and Travis McMichael were quickly labelled evil -- singularly, aberrantly, essentially so. The stories that soon emerged about their history served to strengthen that assertion.
Then later Breonna Taylor, a 26 year old black woman, an EMT and aspiring nurse, was asleep in her home when she and her boyfriend were woken by people breaking into their front door. Her boyfriend called 911, then shot at the intruders. Taylor was killed in the ensuing exchange of fire. The intruders were police officers serving a “no knock” warrant -- at the wrong address. Those officers, and that whole police department, were quickly labelled evil people.
Just as we were processing that killing, George Floyd, by all accounts a “gentle giant” who was a great dad to his son and daughter, and led a gospel choir in one town where he’d lived, was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck while a growing circle of people protested and called for the officer to let him breathe. Three other officers stood by, watching. The video of Floyd begging for his life and finally calling for his mother is incontrovertible and irretrievably traumatizing evidence of brutality.
Again, Derek Chauvin was quickly labelled evil, singularly so. “Do you see the look on his face?” one white person on my feed wrote, “that man is pure evil.”
This is dangerous thinking, that individual people who kill unarmed black men and women are essentially evil, because it’s counterproductive to the transformation so many of us seek.
Here is one reason why. Philosopher Elizabeth Minnich[i], warns in her 2018 book, The Evil of Banality: On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking that we conflate what she calls intensive evil and extensive evil to our great detriment. Intensive evils are the acts of one or a few. Focusing here distracts us, she argues, from extensive evils, “massive, monstrous harms carried out by many, many people over significant periods of time ...the evils of which we so often say, ‘unthinkable’.”
That is the kind of evil at work in the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Of course those deaths were singularly devastating, to their loved ones and to black people especially. And then, after the video of Floyd’s death went viral, the world erupted in protest. That global response recognizes extensive evil, not a singular murder by one white officer, or the actions of one white father and one white son.
If we focus our outrage on the evil or actions of specific people, we risk missing “massive, monstrous harms carried out by many,” in this case hundreds of years of racist violence at the hands of white people, the foundation of which is baked into our very structures and culture. That’s what the world is erupting about.
There’s still another reason, though, that it’s dangerous to characterize an individual as essentially evil. I’ll go back to the day we learned that Ahmaud Arbery’s killers had been arrested and charged, when social media exploded with the certainty of their essential evil. As that day wore on, I shook my head, knowing what would come next, and by midafternoon there is was in my Facebook feed, a screenshot of a new, private Facebook page, “Justice for Gregory and Travis McMichael.”
I couldn’t access the actual page, but the screenshot included a friendly father and son photo, and this description, “These 2 God fearing men were only trying to project their neighborhood. The area has had a string of break-ins and this man fit the description and did not comply with simple commands. Our hearts go out to the McMichael family in their time of need. Amen.” At the time the screenshot was taken, the page had 18,487 members.
(There is so much wrong here; Ahmaud Arbery only “fit the description” of being black, and show me one white man who would “comply with simple commands” by two black strangers. But that’s for another conversation.)
That such a page would emerge was to my mind inevitable. Here’s why: because people are complex creatures, without exception. No one can be fully defined by one aspect of their character, behavior, culture or appearance. Definitions of that sort are the basis of all bigotry. Still, it’s a paradox of human thinking that we can easily engage in such defining when we don’t relate to the person being defined, but we absolutely cannot abide it when we do. We experience it as violence, or at least the threat of violence, because violence begins with characterizing another human being as less than fully human, as essentially one thing.
Of course there are 18,487 people (and I imagine many more have signed on to the page by now) who think of themselves as god-fearing, protective of their communities and families, who would feel vulnerable if their neighborhood experienced a string of break ins. I assume they either don’t accept the concept of systemic racism, live in denial of the racism of their peers, or fully buy into a racist perspective. In any case, they see these men characterized as less than fully human, as only one thing, evil, and of course they respond defensively. Then they go on the offense (remember, they identify as protective of their own.)
So what did it accomplish, reducing those men to nothing but “evil?” Nothing. Arguably, it distracted from the all-encompassing racism that makes those killings possible, and it exacerbates if not invites a distracting response, even the escalation of violence, because people cannot abide by reductions of whole human beings, to whom they relate, to one thing.
We can cry out white fragility all we want, and I’m not making an argument here that it doesn’t exist. I’m suggesting that the knee-jerk response of naming a person who commits a racist murder as singularly evil will do nothing to undermine -- and arguably feeds -- racism. That defeats the purpose of the work of anti-racism, which is to insistently, persistently starve racism out. To that end we need to be focused, disciplined and strategic, and inviting violence is just strategically unsound.
Within hours of the appearance of the “Justice for Gregory and Travis McMichael” Page, another page, “Actual Justice for Gregory and Travis McMichael” appeared with the simple description, “Let’s pray these good ol’ boys get the justice they so richly deserve.” The picture at the top of the page is of a historical guillotine.
And what does this accomplish?
[i] Elizabeth Minnich is a founding ILI Advisor