Agency: Haves and have nots

Oxford University Scholarship Online defines human agency:

Our self‐understanding as human agents includes commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: That agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent’s reasons for acting.

I’ve written about agency in a couple of recent posts, related to the Ma’Khia Bryant tragedy, because it seems to me her most ardent defenders want to strip her of it for political gain. Oh, they grant her agency when it suits them; with implausable claims that she called 911, but they insist that all her other, documented actions are to be excused because of her age and “the system.” Many went so far as to contend teenage knife ‘fights’ are a rite of passage so common that police should ignore them. Ma’Khia lacked agency. Teenagers in general lack agency.

I came across an essay on this conveniently ambiguous attitude at the Manhattan Institute. A short time later I came across a post at Askblog. I strongly urge you to read both, and I’ll try to give you a little incentive below. They shed some light on SJW motivations and reasoning in playing the agency card.

First, a slice from Askblog reader Roger Sweeny in: The mind and moral categories

I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. They ask the question, “Who (and what) do people believe has a mind?” A fetus? A dog? A robot? Google? God? They crunch some numbers and find that people seem to have two groups of characteristics of mindness. One is the ability to experience sensations and emotions. The other is the ability to act, to decide and do.

They tell us that entities that can feel but can’t act turn on our moral senses. Outrage at a man beating a dog. Pity for those in the hospital dying. Moreover, something in us wants to believe that those who are suffering are blameless. But we also want to find moral causes. We want to find something to blame. Best if it is something with a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer. Almost always, they say, there is a moral dyad. In fact, whenever there is something with a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer, we want to find the other half of the dyad, something relatively powerless and suffering.

Many opponents of wokeness have argued that it “denies agency” to the designated victims, that it treats them as powerless children. So far at least, that charge has not weakened the support for wokeness…

The less there is overt racial discrimination, the more there is a need to believe in a malevolent system. That may seem counter-intuitive, but so is the reality that revolutions do not occur when things are getting worse but when things are (generally) getting better.

Now we’ll turn to a long article at The Manhattan Institute: The Social Construction of Racism in the United States

This paper uses survey data to make the case that racism in America lies, in significant measure, in the eyes of the beholder. This not only concerns people’s perceptions of the prevalence of racism in society but even of their personal experience.

The quality of racism is inversely proportional to the SJW declaimed quantity. Think Jussie Smollett, he was just trying to fulfill the demand.

Tocqueville identified the reasons early on:

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that
democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when
they have least fuel. . . . When all conditions are unequal,
no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the
slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general
uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more
insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence
it is natural that the love of equality should constantly
increase together with equality itself, and that it should
grow by what it feeds on.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In a similar vein, Coleman Hughes, in a pathbreaking 2018 essay,
remarks on Tocqueville’s paradox as it concerns racial liberalism
in America: “It seems as if every reduction in racist behavior is
met with a commensurate expansion in our definition of the concept.
Thus, racism has become a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy:
transformable but irreducible.”

This is part of an explanation for Critical Race Theory: Systemic racism is necessary, because it can be winnowed out of every object or human interaction, no matter how benign. Just move the goalposts.

There’s a reason that everything is now viewed through a racial lens. Every day in every way you are bombarded with “evidence” of racism in everything. Over time, this sways minds. Much to our detriment.

Reading a passage from critical race theory author Ta-Nehisi Coates results in a significant 15-point drop in black respondents’ belief that they have control over their lives…

Surveys showed that liberal whites are more supportive of punitive CRT postulates than blacks, who are more likely to aspire to agency and resilience. Moreover, CRT appeared to have a detrimental effect on African- Americans’ feeling of being in control of their lives. This makes CRT a poor choice for policymakers seeking to improve outcomes in the black community.

Finally, my survey results indicate that as much as half of reported racism may be ideologically or psychologically conditioned, and the rise in the proportion of Americans claiming racism to be an important problem is largely socially constructed.

Whites are more affected by social justice/social media conditioning. Blacks are more sensible. I’ll bet there is a correlation with who has read Ta-Nehisi Coates or attended a D’Angelo brainmash session.

Monetizing black deaths

Does it matter if Ma’Khia Bryant was the person who called 911 just before she was shot by a police officer in Columbus, Ohio?

I’ll say no.

She would have been shot anyway because of her behavior after the police arrived. And she still would have been shot multiple times because her extreme physical and verbal aggressiveness, and failure to stand down when ordered, could only be distinguished from a murder in progress by God.

The question of who called 911 arises only because some of those urging us to just let children fight with knives also strongly insist that Ma’Khia Bryant is that person.

Why? I suppose it’s an effort to reinforce Joy Reid’s trial balloon that “…what scared a 16-year-old girl enough that she felt that she had to grab a kitchen knife facing two adult women… No one’s asking what would’ve scared a kid who’s in a foster situation so much that she felt that she needed to defend herself or pick up a knife.” If she was scared she would have been better off staying that way.

If Ma’Khia is cast as a frightened child, defending herself from adults, and as a victim of her own good intent, it’s easier to blame the shooting on systemic racism than on her bad decisions. She had no choice, she isn’t well equipped to make choices anyway, and the system killed her even though she tried to do the right thing.

As noted yesterday, this is in line with stripping her of agency. As a black child she had little, and what little she mustered – calling 911 – resulted in her destruction. The system is murderously biased in its core.

But if Ma’Khia was afraid (indicated if she called 911) you’d expect she would be relieved to see a police officer 10 minutes later. Maybe even put him between herself and the people she feared? You might expect she’d have stood with a wall at her back saying, “Don’t come near me!,” rather than charging, knife in hand, at a smaller person shouting “I’m Going to Stab F**k Out of You, Bitch!”.

She didn’t welcome the police, and she acted the opposite of defensive. She not only wasn’t relieved to see the officer, but she practically ran him over in her urgency to attack “the girl in pink.”

There’s more that Joy Reid failed to consider. Perhaps because she felt her message was more important than mere facts.

The 911 caller says “This girl trying to stab us and our grandma.” It could be that Ma’Khia said that, but since she was a foster child her grandma likely didn’t live there. And who would “us” be?

There is a remote possibility of an “us.”

If you’ve seen the police body-cam video you know that a tall black man in a gray hoodie followed Ma’Khia down the driveway as she knocks a heavy set female in blue to the ground, swinging her right hand toward the woman. It’s not clear from the video if Ma’Khia is holding a knife at this point (though 5 seconds later it’s clearly in her hand).

The officer, who has just arrived, turns to his right – toward the ensuing melee taking place no more than 3 feet away.

The cop draws his gun, shouting “Get down! Get down!”. Because by now he’s seen the knife in Ma’Khia’s right hand? Everybody should be digging a foxhole at this point.

Ma’Khia jumps up and charges a girl in a pink tracksuit. Simultaneously, the man in the gray hoodie kicks the woman on the ground twice. He makes no attempt to deter Ma’Khia. He is Ma’Khia’s ally. He kicks women lying on the ground. In front of a cop.

The cop turns to his left to track Ma’Khia – she has the knife – and shouts again. Ma’Khia pins the girl in pink against a car while bringing her arm into a striking position. The cop fires 4 rounds, fatally wounding Ma’Khia.

The man in the grey hoodie cries, “You shot my baby!”. The man in the gray hoodie is Ma’Khia’s father.

He’s had a warrant out for his arrest since January, and has been arrested numerous times, including for non-support and domestic violence. He’s entitled to benefit of the doubt, but non-support and domestic violence are directly relevant here. His daughter is in foster care and he kicks supine women.

He also doesn’t live at that house. So, how did he come to be involved? Probably because Ma’Khia called him as reinforcement. If she knew he had an outstanding warrant, Ma’Khia might well have been hesitant to call 911. In any case, he knew, and he came to the scene prepared to commit assault – in front of a cop – anyway. I haven’t heard Joy Reid wondering if that was the first time he set such an example for his daughter.

None of this proves Ma’Khia was not the 911 caller, but that has nothing to do with why she died. The only reason it matters is to bolster BLM donations: She was a frightened child, and a victim of systemic racism. We will probably eventually find out who made the call, but the urgent need to embellish the neo-racist narrative supersedes the need for fact.

Never bring empty hands to a knife fight

Sixteen year old Ma’Khia Bryant, waving a knife and screaming, “I’m Going to Stab F**k Out of You, Bitch!”, was shot by a police officer as she charged past him and attacked another black teenager. She had previously thrust the knife at a third teen right in front of the officer, knocking the other teen to the ground. The officer was present because Bryant’s housemates had called 911, reporting they feared being stabbed.

Byrant, loudly threatening murder, in clear possession of a deadly weapon, either did not feel threatened by a white police officer pointing a gun at her while he shouted “Get down, get down!,” or she was so enraged she didn’t care.

Bryant made many dangerous decisions in 9 seconds. She survived all of them until the last: She thrust a knife at another human being half her size she had pinned against a car. Again, in front of a cop shouting, “Get down!” Whose gun she knew was drawn. In the moment, she wasn’t buying the BLM theory that white cops are just itching for an excuse to shoot black people.

In stopping Bryant, the officer had far less than 9 seconds to make his decision, and he had every reason to expect he was thwarting an attempted murder: Saving a black life. Otherwise, today’s BLM agitprop might have been, “The cop was right there, and HE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING to protect that black girl!” Or, maybe not. Black on black crime isn’t so important to BLM. See: Chicago.

That does not mean Ma’Khia Bryant’s death is not tragic. It is. It does mean a reasonable person might conclude that she was murderously enraged. A condition the cop had mere seconds to evaluate.

Ma’Khia Bryant’s death is a tragedy. Proclaiming this incident evidence of systemic police violence against black people is also a tragedy; for police, for Columbus, for blacks, for our polity. The decision on that could have proceeded at a more leisurely pace, but mostly it didn’t. Because demand for ‘this sort’ of tragedy exceeds supply.

To maintain purity in the BLM narrative, sacrifices are demanded. One of those is to posthumously strip Ma’Khia Bryant of agency; because of her skin color. Which is the ultimate racist insult.

Here we need a brief diversion to define “knife fight:” Two or more people. With knives. In a fight.

This was not a knife fight. It was a knife attack. You don’t bring empty hands to a knife fight. That’s what Ma’Khia Bryant’s opponent had. And the opponent was not fighting, she was covering up. In fear.

We need this definition because people like Valerie Jarrett don’t know it:

A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter.
— Valerie Jarrett (@ValerieJarrett) April 21, 2021

BTW, shooting multiple times is what you do until a deadly threat is definitively over. And when the threat is immediate, you do it immediately. And “break up a knife fight” is more plausibly rendered as “prevent a murder.” In a knife fight, there is no obvious aggressor. Here, there was.

Right, Valerie. Accountability. I demand it.

Then, we get Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther weighing in on the side of Ma’Khia’s incidentality.

“Bottom line: Did Ma’Khia Bryant need to die yesterday?” he added. “How did we get here? This is a failure on the part of our community. Some are guilty but all of us are responsible.”

Two answers and a comment:
1- No, she did not. 2- Specifically? Ma’Khia was imprudent. 3- Blaming everybody in the general vicinity rather than making a point of individual responsibility is your failure. Which is disrespectful to everyone.

I did not want to, but I watched the video. I’m pretty sure I hear Ma’Khia asking the cops trying to help her; “Why did you shoot me?” That, Mayor Githner, is a question you might have tried to answer honestly. She didn’t know? Maybe other 16 year olds of all races would have benefitted from an answer.

The ultimate lack of agency theme is infanthood, of course. So, a hands off approach to imminent homicide by knife wielding, murder threatening, 200 pound teenagers is “for the children.” Bryant was a baby.

Kiara Yakita, founder of the Black Liberation Movement Central Ohio, said she was not surprised by another police shooting. “Why did they kill this baby?”

Mayor Githner, meet Kiara Yakita. You guys should talk.

MSNBC’s resident homophobe, Joy Reid, wondered on air what could have caused Ma’Khia Bryant’s murderous rage:

‘We don’t know the details of what happened beforehand but I’m bothered that no one is asking what could’ve scared a 16-year-old girl enough that she felt that she had to grab a kitchen knife facing two adult women,’ Reid said.

‘No one’s asking what would’ve scared a kid who’s in a foster situation so much that she felt that she needed to defend herself or pick up a knife,’ she added.

Well, Joy, it wasn’t Ma’Khia who called 911. Though she likely was told it would happen. It wasn’t the two women she attacked who grabbed a knife and charged down the driveway. It was Ma’Khia who assaulted those “two adult women.” It was MaKhia who showed no fear of a cop with a drawn gun. She wasn’t cowering in fear somewhere safe. If anyone was afraid, it was the girl in pink pinned against a car by someone twice her size and trying to avoid the knife.

Maybe no one’s asking that question because it’s a stupid question. And I note, Joy, that you ignore the same question whenever it applies to guns.

There’s a lot more straight-up, attempted agency theft out there, but let’s move to a more subtle form of it: The BLM take that childhood knife fights (again, this wasn’t) are so common an occurrence that even in the instant someone is screaming, “I’m Going to Stab F**k Out of You, Bitch,” and thrusting a knife at an unarmed, cringing victim – police on the scene should stay out of it. Or maybe forward the problem to the Community Instant Mental Wellness Counseling Authority BLM wants to replace them with.

Here’s a Tweet from Black Lives Matter activist, Bree Newsome:

Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.
— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) April 21, 2021

What could be more racist than implying blacks have poorer impulse control, are naturally more violent, too stupid to stand down in front of a peace officer, and care little for black lives?

BTW, some teenage knife fighters in those eons died. From being stabbed. Which is what the 911 call was about. By your definition of ‘knife fight,’ I’ll bet the majority of those had no knives. Oh, and you’re right, if police stop responding to 911 reports of imminent stabbing they’ll be shooting fewer homicidal knife wielding people of all skin colors.

Let us conclude with relevant comments from Clarence Thomas on how “Progressives” play the agency card:
Clarence Thomas Rips SCOTUS Double Standard On Teen Maturity: ‘Child’ For Murderer vs. ‘Young Woman’ For Abortion-Seeker

Thomas’s comments follow recent deadly acts involving teen females. Sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was fatally shot by police this week when she lunged with a knife at another young female. In March, a 13-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl were arrested and charged with felony murder in the death of Pakistani immigrant Mohammad Anwar.

*Update 12:10, April 29:
Ms. Newsome has been silent about this teenage knife-‘fight’ of April 19th, the day before Ma’Khia’s death. Ohio girl, 13, stabbed to death, and another 13-year-old girl is charged with her murder I wonder if the police officer who shot Ma’Khia had heard about this murder in Cleveland.

And, while we’re at it, here are a few more teen stabbings awaiting Newsome comment. US only. Last 2 years. Not at all comprehensive (only 2 pages deep in the search results). Excludes adults stabbed by teens.

Teen stabbed to death in Stonewall
Teen mother stabbed to death by another teenage mother who will be tried as an adult, police say
Arrest made in stabbing death of Falls teen
15-year-old girl stabbed to death in grocery store during fight with 4 younger girls
A teenage killer’s eerie tweets she sent after stabbing friend to death: ‘We really did go on three’
Teen held in fatal Long Island stabbing that police say was recorded by dozens pleads not guilty
Body of Ala. Teen, 17, Was Found Stabbed and Beaten in Creek, and 3 Girls Are Charged with Murder
14-year-old charged with murder after another teen was stabbed, Columbia police say