Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy

Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present

Moon-Kie Jung

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Racism has never been simple. It wasn't more obvious in the past, and it isn't less potent now. From the birth of the United States to the contemporary police shooting death of an unarmed Black youth, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy investigates ingrained practices of racism, as well as unquestioned assumptions in the study of racism, to upend and deepen our understanding.

In Moon-Kie Jung's unsettling book, Dred Scott v. Sandford, the notorious 1857 Supreme Court case, casts a shadow over current immigration debates and the "war on terror." The story of a 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai'i pairs with statistical relentlessness of Black economic suffering to shed light on hidden dimensions of mass ignorance and indifference. The histories of Asians, Blacks, Latina/os, and Natives relate in knotty ways. State violence and colonialism come to the fore in taking measure of the United States, past and present, while the undue importance of assimilation and colorblindness recedes. Ultimately, Jung challenges the dominant racial common sense and develops new concepts and theory for radically rethinking and resisting racisms.

PART I

DENATURALIZING COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: RECONSIDERING RACISM AND THEORY

But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life.

James Baldwin, “On Being White . . . and Other Lies”

COMPLETELY PENETRATED HEART

On a cold, drizzly morning in the fall of 2009, Kiwane Carrington woke up at the home of his longtime friend I. Thomas. The house, a modest rental, sat on the southern edge of a predominantly Black area on the north side of Champaign, Illinois, not far, but far removed, from the university on the city’s east side.¹ Carrington had been staying there for a few weeks by then, as he had for much of the prior summer. With the Thomases, the fifteen-year-old, who had lost his mother to pancreatic cancer the year before, found a home away from home. Both I.T.’s mother, Deborah Thomas, and her boyfriend would later describe him as “like a son.”

On October 9, a Friday, Ms. Thomas, a student at the local community college, had left early for a seven o’clock English class. In the next hour and a half, fifteen-year-old I.T., her oldest, and her three younger kids made their way to school. When Ms. Thomas returned home, she saw Carrington in the kitchen, fixing himself breakfast, and briefly chatted with him; he attended a different high school than I.T. and did not need to be there until ten. Sometime while she and her boyfriend were in their room, Carrington departed. By noon, the house was empty, with Ms. Thomas gone to her psychology class and her boyfriend to work at Wendy’s.²

By a little after one o’clock, Carrington, along with one of his best friends, J.M., was back at the Thomas residence. They might have looked for an open door or window; Ms. Thomas disapproved but was aware that I.T. and Carrington occasionally used one of the windows, if unlocked, to get into the house when no adults were home to let them in.³ Likely, Carrington and J.M. sought shelter from the weather, still chilly with intermittent rain.⁴ Unlikely, Carrington intended to turn on and rob his surrogate family.

A neighbor next door happened to spot the pair and telephoned the Champaign police. He knew Ms. Thomas and was concerned that the two “young guys”—“black males” when asked by the police—were trying to “find a way inside the house.” He did not recognize Carrington or his friend, obscured as they were by the “hoodies on their heads.”⁵ A radio dispatch for a burglary in progress went out. The first two police officers to arrive were Robert T. Finney, the Champaign police chief, and Daniel Norbits, a fourteen-year veteran of the force. According to the dispatch printout, Finney noted at 1:30:07 p.m. an “OPEN DOOR IN BACK”—just the screen door, as it would turn out; the main door remained shut and locked. Forty-four seconds later, someone at the scene transmitted, “SHOTS FIRED ON VINE [STREET], 1 SUSP DOWN”; the Illinois State Police-led multijurisdictional investigation of the shooting later determined that a single shot had been discharged.⁶ The downed “suspect” was Carrington. An ambulance arrived on the scene at 1:36 p.m. By the time the paramedics checked six minutes later, the “[patient] was pulseless and was not breathing.”⁷ All efforts to revive him on the way to and at the hospital failed, and Carrington was pronounced dead. The attending physician told a police investigator, “it appeared that a bullet had completely penetrated the patient’s heart.”⁸ The autopsy later concluded, “The death of this 15-year-old, black male, Kiwane Carrington, is from a Gunshot Wound of the Left Arm with Reentry Into the Chest, involving the lung, heart, diaphragm, vena cava and liver. A large-caliber, copper-jacketed bullet was recovered from the right upper abdominal quadrant behind the liver.”⁹

There were four people who could have directly seen and heard the fatal incident: Carrington, J.M., Finney, and Norbits.¹⁰ As his friend lay dying next to him, J.M. was at once arrested and hauled away. At the police station, in a windowless interrogation room, he decided alertly, on his own, not to waive his Miranda rights and answer questions.¹¹ He was subsequently locked up in juvenile detention over the weekend. With the initial burglary charge untenable, he would face a felony count of “aggravated resisting a peace officer” for many months, throughout which he did not give a statement. Of the four, only Finney and Norbits related to investigators their accounts, which, by law, could not be used against them in any subsequent criminal proceedings.¹² Finney told his story within four hours of the shooting. Meanwhile, speaking to two ranking Champaign police officers, including a deputy chief, approximately three and a half hours after the shooting, Norbits’s union lawyer “advised that Officer Norbits was not able to give a statement to the investigative team at that time”¹³ and/or “requested that the interview with Officer Norbits take place at another time. . . . [because] Officer Norbits was having some memory issues with the event.”¹⁴ About an hour afterward, at a meeting attended by Norbits, the attorney, two state police investigators, and one of the two Champaign police officers, Norbits’s wish to postpone the interview was granted, and it would not transpire until four days later. Perhaps irregularly and patently unwisely, the two from the Champaign force appeared to have the most and final say in the decision, injecting suspicion of favoritism and undercutting the independence of the investigation.¹⁵

According to the investigation, Finney had arrived at the Thomas residence before the other officers, just moments ahead of Norbits.¹⁶ He drove an unmarked Toyota Highlander, and he was dressed in street clothes: blue jeans, a University of Illinois sweatshirt emblazoned with the officially abandoned “Chief Illiniwek” logo, and a black leather jacket with his police badge affixed to it.¹⁷ Finney walked around the adjacent house from which the neighbor had called in. With the two teens by the backdoor, Finney approached from the side, advancing toward the lone, narrow opening, between the Thomases’ house and detached garage, to the otherwise fenced-in backyard. Norbits took a more direct route, up the driveway. Finney had the better angle on the scene. He recalled seeing an open “storm door,” which he radioed in. Then, to his left, he “saw Officer Norbits . . . moving up” the drive. Venturing “a little bit closer,” Finney “observed two individuals right at the door.”¹⁸

His vision blocked by the house to his left, Norbits eyed, on his right, Finney walking toward the backyard opening. Norbits described what happened next before he himself made visual contact with Carrington and J.M.: “I see Chief Finney emerge along the fence [of the neighbor’s house] . . . and all of a sudden I see Chief Finney draw his gun and say, ‘stop or I will shoot you.’”¹⁹ Going over the point multiple times during his interview, Norbits did not waver from this account. Perhaps concerned that Norbits had inadvertently left out a crucial detail, an investigator queried, “Dan, do you recall anybody specifically saying ‘police or Champaign Police’? . . . Do you remember that at all?” Norbits replied, “I don’t have any recollection of that.”²⁰ Keep in mind that Finney, unlike Norbits, was not in uniform but in casual attire; particularly if he raised his arms to point his gun at the kids, would his small badge, at chest level according to investigation photographs, have been readily visible and decipherable by the startled, doubtless scared, youths?

Set on “heightened” alert by and taking his cue from Finney’s abrupt threat and actions, Norbits unholstered his own gun and joined the confrontation.²¹ The officers instructed the teens to get down, as corroborated by the neighbor, who did not see but heard what was happening; the staff person at the police station, who overheard through the phone while on the line with the neighbor; and a third officer, who arrived right after Norbits and only heard, from the far side of the house. Finney concerned himself with J.M., while Norbits engaged Carrington. Many words have been used by the police, the state’s attorney, the media, and the public to characterize what occurred during the short span of less than three quarters of a minute preceding the deadly shot, most of which gave the impression of a two-sided fight. None of those words were Carrington’s or J.M.’s.

Physically, the two pairs were unevenly matched: the police officers were larger, most likely by a sizable margin. Carrington and J.M. were slight: police documents varied in their estimations, but the two adolescents were decidedly smaller than the average adult male.²² Finney happened to mention that he was 6 feet 1 inch tall, and Norbits was sure he was taller than Carrington but did not want to “guess” beyond that; in police photographs taken after the shooting, Finney and Norbits appeared to be at least of medium build.²³

Finney and Norbits described the youths as having actively resisted. Rather incongruously, both officers portrayed them as having been silent throughout, unintentionally calling to mind shock or fright more than belligerence. Whatever resistance there was, it did not include attacks on the officers, even in their stories to investigators. According to Finney, J.M. tried to move past him, and Finney pushed him back. J.M. allegedly made another attempt, and Finney applied physical effort to take him down to the ground; Finney’s minor injuries—scrapes to knee and hand, stretched shoulder ligament—were from this exertion, not blows inflicted by J.M. Norbits did not see Finney’s dealings with J.M. He himself was trying to force Carrington down. Like Finney, he did so, at least initially, with only his left hand, the one without his pistol. Norbits supposedly expressed concern about Carrington’s hands, possibly reaching into a pocket, which Finney recounted, too. (Neither Carrington nor J.M. had weapons, in their pockets or elsewhere, raising the specter of Amadou Diallo but not a bit of the police investigators’ inquisitiveness.) While he may or may not have gone down immediately, Carrington did not appear to have been particularly active in his “resistance.” Prompted by a police investigator with a seemingly leading question—“And um, is he [Carrington], he’s fighting back with you, or?”—Norbits reined in the rhetoric, “I mean, I, I can’t say he’s throwing punches but he’s clearly resisting.”²⁴ Similarly, to the question “Was he [Carrington] physically resisting Norbits?” Finney answered, “As far as I could tell he was still . . . I mean he wasn’t going along with the program either.”²⁵

With Carrington “in a sitting position,” according to Finney, Norbits’s gun fired;²⁶ in Norbits’s version, Carrington fell after the shot.²⁷ A sitting position would seem to be more consistent with the “downwards” trajectory of the bullet.²⁸ Belying the impression of tight spacing between Carrington and the gun—“I remember trying to get him down on the ground, er, yea and the gun goes off”²⁹—the autopsy concluded “without evidence of close range firing.”³⁰ Norbits fully acknowledged that he was trained to keep his “fingers indexed” off of the trigger.³¹ His gun, a Glock 21, featured “internal safeties to prevent accidental discharge” that become “deactivated” only “when the trigger is pulled.” Since the gun was found to be in “proper working condition,” and there was no evidence or allegation that Carrington himself reached for the gun, the clear implication was that Norbits had to have squeezed the trigger.³² Finney “didn’t see the shot being fired.”³³ His memory of shooting Carrington “a real vague recollection,” “a blur,” Norbits stated repeatedly and incoherently that he did not remember.³⁴

Norbits was placed on administrative leave during the ensuing investigation. Without interruption or sanction, however, Finney continued in his duties as the police chief. Further, within a month of Carrington’s death, Steve Carter, Champaign’s city manager and Finney’s boss, who arguably wielded more power than the mayor or the city council, declared his unflagging support for the police chief. At a city council meeting, Carter proclaimed that Finney had done nothing wrong and that he was an “excellent police chief.”³⁵ At the time, the state police-led investigation was in progress, and the prosecutor presumably had not made any determinations on the case. Evidently, nobody seriously entertained bringing charges against Finney, or credibly could have, given his undisrupted tenure in office.

On December 8, 2009, Julia Rietz, the state’s attorney for Champaign county, issued a fourteen-page report, concluding, “Although Carrington’s death is tragic, the evidence provided by the Illinois State Police investigation does not support the filing of criminal charges, and rather supports the conclusion that the shooting was accidental.”³⁶ Among the charges Rietz ruled out was involuntary manslaughter. According to Illinois statute 720 ILCS 5/9–3, “A person who unintentionally kills an individual without lawful justification commits involuntary manslaughter if his acts whether lawful or unlawful which cause the death are such as are likely to cause death or great bodily harm to some individual, and he performs them recklessly,” and per 720 ILCS 5/4–6, “A person is reckless or acts recklessly when that person consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that circumstances exist or that a result will follow, described by the statute defining the offense, and that disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the situation.”³⁷

Rietz’s decision turned on two choices. First, she opted to believe Norbits and Finney wholesale. There was no part of their, or their colleagues’, narratives that her report doubted, much less contradicted. No indication of scrutiny or skepticism. Crucial irregularities (e.g., four-day delay before interviewing Norbits), disagreements in accounts (e.g., Finney’s first words to the teens; bodily position of Carrington when Norbits shot him), and potential discrepancies in the physical evidence (e.g., autopsy finding of no evidence of “close range firing”) were unnoticed, uncommented upon, or explained away. Her report also showed no effort by her or her office to question Norbits and Finney further, despite the fact that their interviews with the police investigators had been conducted in a congenial, collegial manner and were legally shielded against self-incrimination.³⁸ Given Rietz’s credulity, it was of little surprise she deemed “that Norbits acted reasonably when he engaged in a physical altercation with Carrington with his weapon drawn.”³⁹

Second, Rietz chose to fill in a crucial blank, Norbits’s partial amnesia, with a restrictive application of the law and charitable speculation. Concerning the act of shooting itself, she determined that “there [wa]s no evidence that Norbits made a conscious decision to disregard a substantial risk when the weapon discharged.”⁴⁰ Comparing this statement against the law’s wording, we can see that she severely limited what was subjected to the test of “gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would exercise in the situation”: it was confined to “when the weapon discharged,” the very moment the trigger was pulled. All of Norbits’s actions between his decision to physically subdue Carrington with his weapon drawn and his pulling of the trigger—like the placement of his finger on the trigger while physically engaged with Carrington, a practice self-admittedly at strict odds with his extensive training and knowledge—were thus subtly pushed out of consideration. What about Norbits’s consciousness? Rietz judged that “the evidence indicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Denaturalizing Common Sense
• Part II. Denaturalizing the Nation-State
• Part III. Denaturalizing Ignorance
• Conclusion: Denaturalizing Racisms Present and Future
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series List