Outrage Snags

Amid all the impeachment buzz, there's a story that snagged my conscience a bit. A year ago, in Texas, A 26-year-old man named Botham Jean was in his apartment at night. The door (unlatched, apparently) opened, and someone burst in, pulled a gun, and shot him fatally. The shooter was Amber Guyger, an off-duty police officer who lived in the apartment directly below Botham. Apparently she had been distracted after her shift, talking on the phone, and went to the wrong floor, wrong apartment. Opening the door, she registered only seeing an intruder and firing.

That's Guyger's account, anyway. We can only imagine Botham's last, shocked moments.

I remember when this story came out. I was infuriated, as was just about everyone who heard about it. Guyger is white. Botham is black. The pattern here replicated all too queasily the violence by law enforcement against black and brown people.

Unlike all to many of those cases, though, Guyger did get off. Since she was off duty and unprotected by the shield of law enforcement (a shield which seems to many of us like the law doesn't apply to police officers excuse), the death was a criminal matter. Guyger was arrested and put on trial. This last week, news stories and videos of her cross-examination came out. "I hate that I have to live with this every single day of my life and I ask God for forgiveness," she sobs on the witness stand, "and I hate myself every single day. I never wanted to take an innocent person's life. And I'm so sorry."

The examining lawyer (for the prosecution) takes her apart. You were scared? Imagine how Jean felt as he lay dying from an armed intruder. You were scared? "“No one cares that you were scared.  You were trained to deal with stuff like this. You agreed to this job and you have to accept the consequences if you fail to do it.” She shot first. She had a full battery of first-aid materials she did not use.

National and social media have been harsh. Cry all you want. I hope you get what you deserve. I feel that, too. Righteous indignation. Outrage. A bit of schadenfreude.

There's a lot to that feeling. The affect here is overdetermined; that is, there's a lot of independent-but-crisscrossing lines of history and context that overcharge the indignation I feel toward Guyger. Let me try to parse out some of those lines:

• The fear I have of police officers and the overwhelming deference they're given to inflict violence with little to no consequence
• The anger I have about the systematic training officers receive that prioritizes deadly force conflict framings--the cop as warrior rather than guardian or ally. (She said she shot to kill as she had been trained to do)
• The pervasive, systemic racism that infuses white perceptions, making black and brown people sub-human and threatening
• The prior injustices of white officers who kill black and brown people and yet get off with no charges or a slap on the wrist
• The way that the defense mobilizes tropes that play into white supremacist and sexist narratives of the helpless weeping white woman, eliciting pity through tears
• The pleasure in seeing someone (the prosecuting attorney) finally calling out all that BS for what it is
• The inspiration/hope of seeing a white authority figure, a symbol of abusive privilege, being subject to justice.

There's more, but that's a start.

As overcharged, overdetermined affects do in the wilds of social media, the cluster of outrage/indignation online is also picking up some old-fashioned misogyny and hate (e.g., posts mocking Guyger's appearance, speculating about her intelligence, etc.). I try to peel away those affects from the sticky ball of feelings here.

But amid all those feelings is a nagging voice that makes me question the sanctity of my indignation. (And I must acknowledge my distance from this case and my skin privilege grant me the space to do this in ways not available to everyone.) I think of this story I read a decade ago, "Fatal Distraction." It's about people who leave their children in the back seats of cars, where the children overheat and die. It's harrowing, this article.

The author, Gene Weingarten, writes how that act--leaving kids in a hot car--usually occurs because of distraction. Parents or caregivers just forget. Whether this forgetting gets judged as a crime or as a tragic accident changes from place to place, an inconsistency that the author focuses on especially. Stories about child deaths spark an outrage not dissimilar to that I felt about Guyger. It seems so clear. Surely we can be outraged at parents who leave children in the back seats of cars.

What doesn't change by location, however, is the fact that distraction remains possible for everyone. The popular narrative of child car deaths is of the careless adult, self-absorbed, who should be punished. But research shows that everyone can be distracted--yes, distracted enough to forget a child in the back seat as you park and go off to work. Preventing deaths from distraction means not some vigilant will to remember but incorporating reminders into a car routine (for example, keeping a teddy bear in the car seat, which moves to the front seat--in the driver's line of sight--when a child is in the car seat).

Weingarten follows the after-stories of several parents who lose children. Some are charged and put on trial. Some aren't. Most voice something similar to what Guyger said: I wish I were dead. I wish I had died instead. I hate myself every day. The story talks about one such parent who dedicates herself to visiting other parents in this situation. She rushes up to them and embraces them, whispers in their ear, and weeps with them.

I have no idea whether it's right to put Guyger into that category of person who's committed such a devastating misstep. But the reality of moral luck means that it's not impossible for any of us to be in some kind of position similar to hers, where we've made a series of thoughtless decisions that have ended in someone's death. There's more than pure moral luck going on with Guyger (racist fear narratives and violent/confrontational police training). But, on some level, there but for the grace of God...

It's a snag on my outrage.

JF