White Men’s Unchecked Emotions Are Killing Americans

Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are dead because men could not manage their emotions.

Sandra Bland is dead because a man, a white man, couldn’t manage his emotions.

Walter Scott is dead because a man, a police man, a man with a gun, could not manage his emotions.

We live in a society that has made a series of decisions at the local, state, and federal level that exalt emotional response as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. But not just any emotional response, primarily the emotion of fear. A police officer is allowed to shoot to kill if they feel threatened. If they feel unsafe. Not, mind you, as a last case scenario to avert a clear, observable, and imminent lethal attack, but merely if they feel that such an attack might be possible. We have incentivized knee-jerk emotional responses that prey upon an individual’s biases by making those emotions the reason for, and lawful defense of, lethal force.

We have incentivized police-escalation of conflict and the results are not pretty. The videos of the deaths of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and others provide terrifying evidence of the freedom police feel to escalate a situation from “talking” directly to “lethal force” with impunity.

And boy howdy does that defense work well for police officers. In 2015, there were 1,146 people killed by police officers in America. The number of police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter in 2015? Zero. Zero police officers convicted of murder or manslaughter for the 1,146 homicides police officers committed.

Some of these cases were a genuine life or death situations with an armed offender capable and intent on doing harm. But many were not. According to The Guardian, 229 of the 1,146 were unarmed and hundreds more were armed with something like scissors — or their armed status is “disputed”.

If you are a trained police officer, can an unarmed person make you feel as if your life is endangered? Consider this case from April of last year, where an officer made a routine traffic stop, a struggle ensued, the man went for the officer’s gun and successfully grabbed the officer’s taser. At this point the officer had sufficiently lost control of the situation and was forced to use his service weapon to shoot the man. This was the real story of officer Michael Slager. Pretty scary, huh? You can imagine after a struggle like that the officer must have feared for his very life.

Except it’s all a lie.

We know this because a video surfaced. What actually happened is that Officer Slager calmly raised his pistol and fired 8 rounds at a man, Walter Scott, who was running away in fear for his life. Officer Slager then dropped his taser near the hand of the mortally wounded Scott and quickly named the emotion he was feeling “fear”, the exonerating emotion.

But is fear the emotion you feel when someone is running away from you? When you are in charge, you are the authority, you give an order and are disobeyed, what is that emotion? Anger? That doesn’t seem specific enough. I’ve been angry, and I’ve never shot anyone. There’s a kind of fury that comes with believing that you are entitled to deference, to demonstrative respect, believing ultimately that you are dealing with someone of a lower station than yourself, and then being disobeyed. It is the Entitled Fury that springs from a feeling of your own violated superiority.

What emotion was Brian Encinia feeling when he told Sandra Bland “I will light you up” as he pointed a gun at her? Was he in fear of his personal safety, as he claimed?

What emotion were officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback feeling when they pulled their squad car up, got out, drew their weapons, and shot a 12-year-old boy? What emotion were they feeling as they watched him bleed on the grass without ever administering any sort of aid?

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what emotions they were feeling. We have incentivized white men to escalate any and all confrontations to violence if that will make them feel better. We discourage language, and instead offer lethal violence as a consequence-free way to soothe emotional discomfort.

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Of course it is not just men who work in law enforcement whose emotions have special status in the committing of aggressive acts. In the 33 states that now have some sort of Stand-Your-Ground laws, the American Bar Association finds that homicides are up. In other words, in the states that tell you that if you feel threatened by someone, and you shot that person and kill that person because you felt scared, that is okay. Would there have been violence if you hadn’t escalated the situation? Who knows and it doesn’t matter anyway. You felt scared that there might be. That’s what counts.

The law is not objective, it is subjective to the user’s experience. But of course not all user’s experiences…

Is Race A Factor In These Killings?

Oh my God yes of course Race is a factor. Race is a huge factor.

We all have biases. We are all biased, to some degree, to empathically relate more to the experiences of people who remind us of ourselves. For a lot of white people who have been privileged enough to be immersed in an American culture of nearly exclusively white protagonists, precious few demands have been made to stretch our sense of compassion past racial boundaries in order to empathize within our narratives.

White people are rarely asked to identify their own complex humanity in people of other races.

It takes work to recognize and overcome biases. Work that we all must actively participate in. Especially we white people. Because in the mean time, Racism is the force that maintains the white experience as the default experience. Because white people, like all people, tend to empathize with those that we can see ourselves in and we tend to root for those people as an extension of ourselves. But white people, unlike other people, occupy the vast majority of positions of authority at every level of our society. Which means that white people have created our rules. It should not then be surprising that the rules reflect an inherent bias towards the experience of white people.

Racism is the bias, the nasty, pervasive bias, that makes large, black, and unarmed Eric Garner feel like a threat. He couldn’t possibly be worth listening to. He feels scary beyond talking with, beyond de-escalating, a threat worth physical, violent, ultimately lethal force… while this guy, this heavily armed white man brandishing his weapon in public along side his defiant attitude and disrespect for authority, this guy is totally worth reasoning with. He is worth engaging on a human level. Because of the sanctity of life and all.

Could that have been done with Eric Garner? Was there a human being in there to be spoken with, listened to, respected, and ultimately preserved for further life on this planet? Unfortunately none of that matters, because one man felt scared. One big, tough, trained police officer could not see the human inside the dark skin and felt too scared to continue a difficult conversation. The law says his feelings are more important than his working diligently to diffuse — or at least not directly escalate — a tense situation.

Racism is the bias that says I belong here and you don’t. Racism is the bias that says my experience is valid, your experience is not. Racism is the bias that says I earned what I’ve got and your presence here feels like a threat, like you want what I’ve got, like you covet what I am entitled to. There is so much fear, entitlement, and fury in the Racism of white people. And then white men create laws that use feelings to justify lethal force because white men don’t want to learn to manage their emotions and make space for the emotional truths of others.

Did Eric Garner feel scared? Did Trayvon Martin? The white people’s laws are unconcerned with non-white feelings. George Zimmerman had some feelings, after all, and was standing his ground as Florida law encourages him to do. But that, of course, implies that the public streets were not Trayvon Martin’s to stand on, and he should not have felt entitled to do so in the first place.

What About Guns? Do Guns Make This Better or Worse?

Guns escalate emotional tensions. Emotions escalate conflicts.

One frequent confusion seems to stem from the fact that the gun might give the holder of the gun a feeling of empowerment. Holding a gun feels nice. It means people have to listen to you. It is nice feeling like people owe you attention or obedience, and guns grant that emotional gratification to their wielder.

Of course, another way to say all of that is that guns create or enhance a feeling of entitlement. Studies indicate that carrying a gun makes you more likely to engage in aggressive, road rage behavior. [Sadly there aren’t many studies that investigate the links between gun possession and aggressive behavior because the gun lobby successfully pressured Congress to pass a law against investigating such questions. Why, I wonder.]

The confusion comes because there’s another side of the equation. Being present while someone else, especially a stranger, is carrying a gun demands that you pay them special attention. Guns escalate emotional tensions. Remember the last time someone on the street walked up and asked you for money? Now imagine they were carrying a handgun. Tense?

American men, especially white American men, have a lot of emotions these days. Guns are great for turning momentary, fleeting emotional impulses into lethal, permanent consequences.

There is the argument that guns make us safer. This is the argument of many who carry a gun for ‘personal protection’.

Did a carrying a gun make Philando Castile safer?

Or did the mere presence of a gun in Philando Castile’s possession immediately escalate emotional tensions through the roof causing a police officer to use his weapon to turn a momentary emotional response into a tragic, permanent consequence?

Was racial bias a part of this police officers emotional response? If Philando Castile had reminded that officer more of himself, would that officer have been less fearful? Would he have felt less entitled to emotional dominance, less compelled to fire his weapon? The officer himself may never understand the complex emotional equation that occurred in fractions of a second. He, like so many American men, have not been taught to manage their own emotional discomfort but instead to use a gun to manage others.

The reality is that guns do not make us all safer.

Guns are meant to make some people feel safer. Which people? White people.

If you are not the carrier of the gun, or if you are not the right carrier of a gun, guns not only decrease your feeling of safety they decrease your actual safety.

White men’s inability to manage their emotions, and the laws they’ve passed to relieve themselves of accountability for them, has replaced the duty to diffuse with an entitlement to escalate.

Restraint is no longer seen as a virtue, an important tool in easing tensions and seeking peaceful resolutions. It is now seen as a handicap, making you unnecessarily vulnerable to people who make you feel afraid. But lack of restraint means that innocent people die. Giving in to the fear, the anger, the fear, the Entitled Fury, the fear, the fear, the fear means that people will die and our laws will not punish the killers. Roosevelt was right about fear. The unmanaged emotions of men are killing Americans every day. We can do better. We must.