Many years ago, as a philosophy undergraduate, I learned that before I could address the “big questions,” I needed to take a logic class or two in order to acquire some basic rules for clear thinking. While I don’t pretend to be a master of the field, I did pick up some tools that have proven helpful over the years.

Most recently, in regard to the commentary on the the situation in Ferguson, race relations in the St. Louis area, and in the United States in general, I find myself thinking that maybe we’d be better off if we were sending our children to college to study philosophy and learn a little about logic before we train them to make a living – which seems to be the current single justification for higher education. Specifically, I seem to encounter again and again two memes that, because they are so prevalent, predominantly but not exclusively in conservative venues, might benefit from a little explicitly logical analysis:

Black on Black Crime vs. Abuse of authority.

Lots of folks get themselves all wound up over the fact that lots of angry, mostly black people hit the streets to protest the killing of unarmed, African-American Michael Brown by a jumpy white police officer in Ferguson, while very few, if any, are marching in the streets to protest the stream of African-American men, women and children killed almost daily by other African-American individuals in their own neighborhoods.  

At the heart of this riff is what is termed a category error, defined by Wikipedia as “a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, … or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.” At the risk of oversimplifying, a category error consists of comparing the proverbial oranges to apples.

The confusion – or category error – here is the belief that it is the simply the death of these young men at the  hands of often white policemen that leads to the protests and turmoil they leave in their wake. The outrage is sparked, however, not by their deaths, but by the way they die. The anger we see stems from the perception of pervasive police brutality and abuse of power that, in the most extreme cases, may lead to implicitly sanctioned murders of black Americans.

Which is not to say that we don’t all abhor black-on-black crime – or white-on-black, black-on-white or white-on-white crime. But the object of our opprobrium in these cases is crime itself, a problem for which we have more or less effective, institutionalized ways to respond. We deal with crime through our justice system. A significant part of that system involves policing and our courts, which is why abuses by those entities, along with their perceived racial biases, urgently need to be addressed separately.

Black lives matter (BLM) vs. All lives matter (ALM).

By now most of us have watched some television commentator or another respond to the Black lives Matter movement by declaring self-righteously, all aquiver with their own brilliance, “all lives matter” – as they indeed do. Possibly the most obnoxious was the recent declaration by GOP presidential wannabe, Mike Huckabee, that Martin Luther King would be appalled by BLM since, don’t cha know,  “all lives matter.” Many of us are getting seriously tired of having to deal with friends or family who think they’ve shut down the entire BLM protest movement with this insight.

The problem here is that these deep thinkers seem to believe that that they’ve turned the tables on BLM proponents and caught them in a – gasp – racist argument of the form while, at the same time, affirming their own superior humanity:

Major premise: Black lives matter

Minor premise: All lives are not black lives

Conclusion: All non-black lives don’t matter.

This is a syllogistic fallacy involving an “illicit major” premise. The implication is that BLM proponents are presenting a major premise that is incorrectly understood as universal and hence improperly excludes lives that are not black.

However, rather than srving as the major premise, “black lives matter” is actually, rather obviously, the conclusion of this argument

Major premise:  All lives matter

Minor premises: There are black lives

Conclusion: Black lives matter.

To any one with an iota of sense the only reason to use this argument to underpin a socialmovement is that somebody – most saliently the abusive police and court authorities of the first meme – have been acting as if black lives don’t matter. And that, folks, is the problem. Not the imagined exclusionary and divisive nature of BLM.

Of course, it is one thing to be wrong and another to be offensive. And the condescension and implicit racism of these two memes are just that. The “Black-on-Black” motif is often the first step in an effort to blame the victims of black crime and its frequent concomitant, poverty, complex, not very well understood issues at the best of times, on the victims who, we are told, just need to pull up their pants and act like their responsible, usually white, critics. As for  “all lives matter,” consider this offering from Steve Benen:  

A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago to imagine someone telling their neighbor, “My father just died and I’m heartbroken.” The neighbor should say, “That’s awful; I’m so sorry. How can I help?” But if the neighbor responds, “A lot of fathers have died, and since I believe that all parents matter, it’s wrong to elevate yours above others,” he’s lacking in a certain basic decency.

By @BGinKC

I don’t know how to break it to you, but police brutality in the service of the one-percent has always been the institution’s  reason-for-being in the United States of America. One need only look at the history of policing in America to arrive at the realization that fealty to the rich has been ingrained in the institution since it’s inception. Just trace the arc as policing moved from a function of the community to a function of the state — and that move was in service to rich people.

There has always been a mechanism for maintaining the status quo. We won’t go all the way back to England and the middle ages and the evolution of policing from tythings and the tythingman that was charged with keeping order among his group of ten families in agrarian settlements.

In colonial America, the community was charged with policing itself, and the punishment was geared toward humiliation of the offender, employing methods like stocks, dunking stools and scarlet letters to shame to rule-breaker. But as cities grew and industrialization emerged, populations grew too large to be controlled by constables and community mores. This paralleled the emergence of the wealthy industrialist and political classes that desired protection from the masses they exploited in order to gain their wealth and power in the first place. This is what the textbooks refer to as the political era of policing and it emerged in the crowded urban centers of the northeast in the decade between 1830 and 1840, and uniformed police were the norm in every established urban center in the country by 1850.

From the outset they worked for the one percent, and private forces — emphasis on “force” — worked right along side the commissioned police officers of the era to break strikes and keep the rabble in line. Pinkertons, the favorite of the rich industrialist that wanted to — ahem — “discourage” unions from organizing famously called in the Pinkertons to bust heads along with unions, and in a pinch they could be counted on to offer falst testimony against troublemakers so they could be dispatched on the gallows, under the color of law. The most infamous case of this was the breaking of the Pennsylvania Miner’s Union in 1876. Twenty miners were accused of terrorism; allegedly for being members of the Molly Maguires, a militant Irish group. None were members, but the testimony of a Pinkerton agent got them sentenced to hang, and the negative publicity from the case effectively killed unionizing in Pennsylvania for two decades.

The so-called “tea party” was allowed to brandish weapons and hold up signs that proclaimed violence (“If Brown can’t stop it, a Browning can” at an anti-healthcare-reform rally) because they were, in effect, demanding the status quo remain unchanged.

But every time the status quo is threatened, the police are deployed against the masses by their masters.

We see it when we look at the unionization era of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The massive violence against unions and working people — the 99% — is bookended by the Pennsylvania Miner’s Union organizers I mentioned above and the Matewan Massacre in West Virginia in 1920, when the police joined the miners who were fighting back. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, seven union-busting hired guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency lay dead, including the two brothers who were in charge of the contingent; along with four townspeople, among them the mayor.

Matewan was the turning point. It also took the better part of five decades to arrive at that point, and the road went through Haymarket Square in Chicago and Ludlow, Colorado.

We saw the same sort of police violence directed at Suffragettes as we saw directed at unions. Why? What did these peaceful women do to deserve the brutality directed at them?

They threatened the status quo. They threatened the white, male power structure. If women were granted the vote and a say in how things were done, the power of the ruling class would be diluted.

We saw it in the sixties with the civil rights movement…

…and the anti-war movement.

We see police brutality every time the status quo is threatened. And the 99%/Occupy Wall Street movement are a threat the likes of which the status quo hasn’t faced in decades, if ever.

The fear of the 1% is evident in the violence they are eager to unleash their uniformed thugs to perpetrate.

And that is what underlies the bold and arrogant nature of the police as they attack protesters.

We saw it from the beginning when the white-shirt Tony Baloney maced women who were penned behind orange mesh and posing no threat.

We saw it in Oakland when police beat protesters…

…and fired rubber-covered bullets at them.

We saw it in Seattle last week.

And we saw it at UC Davis yesterday, when a so-called “public servant” walked down a row of peaceful protesters, who were no threat to anyone, they were sitting on the ground, for fucks sake, and sprayed them directly in the face with police-grade pepper spray…then something amazing happened:

After the blatant, criminal assault against peaceful American citizens — who were committing no crime, merely exercising their First Amendment Right to peacably assemble and ask for redress of their grievances, the very citizens that had just been brutalized with chemical weapons encircled them chanting “shame on you” and “Whose University? Our University!”

But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part happens when they use the People’s Mic to tell the police “We are willing to give you a brief moment of peace so that you may take your weapons and your friends and go. Please do not return.”

And they do.

The police, who moments before had been pointing firearms at the students take their toys and go.

UPDATE: GMTA, I guess….My friend Imani (@AngryBlackLady) is on this, too, and she has the contact information for UC Davis. Including the police officer who busted out the pepper spray.