Kwame Anthony Appiah Interviewed by Michael Slate

October 28, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

At the Saturday, October 24 Rise Up October rally and march, and at the Thursday, October 22 Say Their Names public reading and remembrance in Times Square, Michael Slate was able to catch up with a number of people to get their reasons for coming out, and their views on the epidemic of police terror and murder. Following is the transcript of the interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah:

 

MS: Joining us now is Kwame Anthony Appiah. And Kwame, you’re an ethicist. And you’re an ethicist at the New York Times?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: I write a column there, but my main job is in philosophy.

MS: Ah, great. I always wanted to be a philosopher. Tell me something. You’ve been involved in this. You’re one of the people reading the names of the people killed by the police. What is it that compelled you to come up and do this?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: I think anybody who has any sense of civic responsibility has to be involved when their country is doing something seriously wrong. It’s being done in our name. It’s being done in our name, so we’re responsible for it in that sense. And when I was asked if I would come and participate in this, which is an event that aims to draw attention to the fact that we have too many people being killed by police in our country, too many Black people, too many white people, too many Latino people—too many people. Too many men, too many women are being killed. And we have to figure out what to do about it. And it’s not going to stop if we don’t use our collective powers as citizens to change course. And as many of the speakers said, this is not about hostility to the police. The murders are done by people who are bringing dishonor to their uniform, they’re bringing dishonor to the system. And so we must hope that more and more cops will come to see that the way of justice is also the way to be a police officer. The way to be a police officer is not to cover up, not to draw the thin blue line and refuse to take action against your colleagues who are doing these abusive things. The way of justice, proper policing, includes making sure that your fellow cops don’t do these terrible things.

What happens when you discuss these cases is that people pick some case where they think it was justified. I’m prepared to admit that sometimes people are shot by policemen in our country in circumstances where it’s warranted because they’re defending themselves or they’re defending somebody else. I’m not denying that. But if you just look all through these cases, that isn’t all that’s going on. What’s going on is that ordinary people who should be able to rely on the cops to protect them are being shot and killed in other ways, and as I say, if you’re just a moderately honorable citizen you care about what your country’s doing. And so if somebody asks you to come and speak out against it and not to just speak out against it but to try and think about how we can do something about it, why wouldn’t you?

MS: Let me ask you this. Because one of the things I’ve been thinking about... having been involved in this a long time myself and looking at the numbers of people, and just the numbers that we know—I mean they’re horrifying.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Yes.

MS: If you took just an average number of a thousand a year, we’re talking over 20 years 20,000 people. And that’s what we know about.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Yes.

MS: Now, the question that comes up to me is this question of genocide. It’s an ethical question, it’s a philosophical question that’s been posed many, many times—in particular in places where... whether it was Indonesia or whether it was Nazi Germany—and the fact that too many people turned their heads away and allowed this kind of thing to go on. Do you see any danger in relation to what’s happening here now?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: I myself don’t think that the content of genocide is very helpful in this particular context. But one thing that is helpful in this context is an idea that comes from thinking about genocide, which is the idea of being an active bystander, that is, the idea that when these terrible things happen, they happen in part because ordinary people who could do something stand by and don’t intervene. And I think one of the things that’s actually been moving for me in these recent years is the way in which people have just taken the trouble to record what’s going on. People who have nothing to do with it, people who don’t know the people who are being attacked by the police, and they’re acting responsibly. They’re being active bystanders, and then they have to decide if they have the courage to send the material to the authorities because in a country where unfortunately some of these crimes are covered up, people have a reason to worry about whether they’re safe when they report these things. So I’m moved by the fact that people have decided that one thing... it’s one of the good things about this new technology, that it empowers ordinary citizens to do one useful thing—which is just to be a witness, and a witness of an impeccable kind because you can say: it’s not just me that says this happened, here’s this videotape. Now videotapes have to be interpreted and they can be misinterpreted—I’m not saying that there aren’t risks there, as there are with human testimony. But the fact is, it makes a big difference. In many of these cases we would never have been able to focus on them in the nation and think about what’s wrong and think about what we want to do about them if we hadn’t had the film.

MS: Well, think if Walter Scott, who was killed in South Carolina—if that guy, that young man hadn’t been there, an immigrant, if he hadn’t decided that it was morally necessary to turn that thing in, we would have just known Walter Scott as a guy who tried to steal a cop’s gun, the cop tased him, Walter Scott ran away and was killed by a cop in the line of duty.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Right, it would have been a normal police killing. Yes, so I do feel that that’s one of the lessons from these larger historical occasions. The reason I don’t think it’s terribly helpful to think of this in terms of the concept of genocide is because this is terrible but it’s not the result of an intentional government policy to eradicate a part of the population. I know there are people who think it is, but I’m not among them. That’s why I don’t think it’s helpful. It’s bad enough that it’s the result of laziness, malice, incompetence, and a bunch of other unpleasant things.

MS: Although there is an element... if you look at particularly the situation of Black people in America today where there are people... you look at what Michelle Alexander has exposed in relation to mass incarceration. There is an element of this of a people that’s no longer needed, and a people that’s also... it’s a very sharp contradiction for the system because people do rise up, they do rebel, and they do raise deep questions and fissures in society. And to me that is something that I think actually plays into this whole question of the character of what’s happening.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Well, there’s no doubt that the scale of incarceration in our country is a scandal and the fact that it has a racial character. I mean, we have too many people of every color in prison by any reasonable standard. But we particularly have too many Black people. We not only have too many Black people in prison but we have too many Black people on probation, we have too many Black people being stopped and frisked. So it’s perfectly clear that the whole problem is terrible and has a racial character. Though it’s very important not to forget that a third of the people shot by police in our country now roughly are Black people. But that means two-thirds of them are other people of color and white people. And that’s terrible too. Now 30 percent is an awful lot in a country where you’re only 12 percent of the population. So it shows that it has a racial character. But the fundamental problem is that we’re killing and incarcerating too many human beings. And I frankly don’t have a very good account of why that is—because we are way out there in terms of the statistics, way out there from the standards of other industrial nations. Actually no country in the world incarcerates at our rate except the Seychelles, and that’s a tiny country and the UN imprisons pirates there—so that’s why they have a high rate of incarceration. But we have a preposterously high rate of incarceration. On the other hand, it is worth noticing that our incarceration rates vary enormously by state. Louisiana, which is the most incarcerating state in the nation, incarcerates at a rate whose multiple of the incarceration rate in New York is of the same order as the American average is the multiple of what’s going on in France, say. Are you surprised that I mentioned Louisiana?

MS: Not at all.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: And so again this shows, I think, something to do with the fact that this is a reflection of the great racial fault line in our country. I think what’s going on in Louisiana just wouldn’t happen in a community that was not racially divided. There are too many white people in Louisiana prisons too, and the fact that Louisiana is a highly incarcerating society has many explanations. But the fact is that there is a connection, it turns out, always between our racial pathology and the other social pathologies that we are living with. I mean, I get depressed thinking about these things, not because I get depressed thinking about bad stuff. But because I don’t feel very hopeful about... you can’t just tell people something bad is going on, you have to tell them something to do about it. It’s just depressing to be told that something bad is going on.

I’m mildly optimistic—the incarceration rate is going down, there is now a broad consensus, which is not just people on the left, there are now even conservative people who realize that there are moral and prudential reasons why our incarceration rate is not good for the country. It’s obviously not good for the people in prison and their families and that’s enough of a reason in my view. But even if you didn’t care about them, it’s terrible for the country. So I think the argument takes a very long time and that’s what’s depressing. But I think the argument is being won. So in that way when I get depressed, then I think: well, maybe we are beginning to win the argument and people are realizing. The president even has started pardoning some people, trying to reduce federal prison numbers. I suspect he’ll do more before he leaves office since federal pardon power is one of the things that a president can do that nobody’s allowed to question. It’s completely discretionary. So I’m a little bit optimistic, but we have a very, very long way to go on the incarceration question because we have so many people in prison and so many prisons.

MS: I have one more question, and this goes back to our friend Niemoller. People know about “when they came for these people I didn’t say anything” down to when they came for me there was no one left to say anything. But people don’t... a lot of people aren’t aware of the other statement he made when he came out of the concentration camp he was put in. And he posed a question about what a difference it would have made, how the world might have been different, how things might have been different if more people had spoken up. Let’s talk about that a little.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Well, the hope of a movement like this one—to which I’m just invited here today, I’m not one of the organizers—but the hope of a movement like this one is that more people will speak up, and in the end we have a very imperfect democracy. But in the end if enough people care about something in our very imperfect democracy there’s an incentive for political representatives to do something about it. So I think it is important for lots of people to say their truths about these things and to have events like this, and the ones that will be going on in the next couple of days in New York and around the country. To raise the number of people who are speaking about these things. I try to talk about mass incarceration in most of the occasions that I talk in public because it’s relevant to what stuff I do. I’m not imposing on people. They didn’t ask me to come and talk about French movies and I start talking about mass incarceration. They ask me to talk about ethics, they ask me stuff about justice, they ask me stuff about honor. Well, mass incarceration is an issue of justice and ethics and honor and so I feel it’s appropriate to talk about it. And what I find is that a lot of young people... I mean, first of all more than when I started, say 10 years ago, more young people already know that we are a preposterously incarcerating society, which they didn’t. But also more people think, yeah, that’s right it’s a terrible thing, we shouldn’t be doing it—so they want to do something about it. And that means they do all kinds of things. Some of them are involved in prison education programs, some of them are working to support people who want to have programs of amnesty, and so on. I mean, I think there are things to be done which is why I’m not so depressed. If it were just a problem and I couldn’t think of anything to do about it that would be depressing. But I think there are real programs out there of action that people have come up with. And against the background of more people speaking out and having a stronger, more widespread sense in the society that something is wrong, one can, I think, eventually hope that there might be real change on this issue. Now I know you think that we need to change the whole system.

MS: Right!

Kwame Anthony Appiah: And if we changed the whole system I’m sure that this would not be... if your system in the form that you would hope came into being we wouldn’t be talking about this. I’m a more... have a narrower view of what we need to do and a less ambitious and less revolutionary view, but I think you and I can both agree that until the revolution comes there’s lots to be done anyway. One can’t wait to solve... sometimes the best is the enemy of the good, sometimes people are so focused on changing the big picture that they forget that they can make a difference in the small picture. And I think this is one of these places where kind of city by city and state by state and federal law by federal law we can improve things. So there’s just no easy way to get millions of people reintegrated in the short run. One of the problems with our... it’s not just that we have too many people in prison. It’s what we do to people in prison and in particular what we don’t do. The international covenant on political rights, the UN one, says that the function of the penitentiary is both to punish and prepare people to be reintegrated. We’ve forgotten that, and forgetting that is a breach of our obligation to international law—it’s not a trivial matter! And we really have [forgotten]. There’s so little work in prisons... and then when people are released... if someone’s been taken away all this time, they have no resources, no bank account, no money, and you give them 50 bucks and put them on a bus. What do you expect them to do!? Right? I mean, what are they supposed to do? If you want to... if you send all these people to prison, especially if you now admit that many of them shouldn’t have been there in the first place, you’ve gotta do a better job, you’ve gotta do a better job at finding... helping them find their... all of us finding the way back to being fellow citizens and fellow workers with them. It’s hopeless on that front. I mean, there are some very good people working on this, but if you look at the scale of the problem there aren’t enough programs.

MS: Alright. Very nice to meet you. Thanks for being here.

 

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