For right-wing lawmakers hoping to raise money in time for their mid-term campaigns, few bogeymen serve the purpose as well as Congresswoman Maxine Waters. As a Black woman and racial justice advocate, Waters ticks any number of boxes on the side of the ledger marked: Things the far-right despises.
And so it’s no surprise that as we awaited the jury’s decision in the trial of former officer Derek Chauvin, her words to protesters would be deliberately twisted to suggest she had issued a call to violence in the event of a not guilty verdict. What better way to conjure the specter of Black mobs and liberal perfidy? What better way to shift attention from the murderer in the room, Chauvin, and the brutal law enforcement apparatus he served?
When Waters joined the protest over the recent police killing of Daunte Wright and told demonstrators they would need to “stay in the streets” and be “more confrontational” should Chauvin be acquitted, she was not encouraging riots. Confrontation only means violence in this instance if you presume that Black people are irrational beings without the capacity for strategic thought or discernment. And however much white conservatives might view them in such a manner, it goes without saying that Waters does not. She believes they understand what confrontation means, the same way civil rights protesters did when Dr. King called the Birmingham campaign “Operation C” (and yes, the “C” was for confrontation).
Perhaps Waters should have known her words would be mangled this way by the right. Fine. If so, one can fault her for presuming good faith from those who despise her and the causes for which she fights. But at some point, one has to place the blame squarely where it belongs: not on the congresswoman, but on those who deliberately stoke public fear and anger with claims they know are false.
Worst of all, even the judge in the Chauvin trial suggested that Waters’s words might hand Chauvin an appealable claim leading to an overturning of the guilty verdict. The idea that Chauvin was the victim of an unfair trial because Waters’s remarks likely intimidated the jury into their decision is the dominant conclusion of the right-wing rage machine. Tucker Carlson has said it. Ben Shapiro has implied it. And Laura Ingraham has all but screamed it, with an assist from Alan Dershowitz. In Dershowitz’s case, he went so far as to liken Waters’s comment to the Klan intimidating southern juries to acquit whites accused of killing Black people during segregation. That’s right, Alan Dershowitz — a once-respected legal mind, for some unknown reason — comparing Maxine Waters to the nation’s oldest terrorist group.
But the idea that Waters’s words prejudiced the jury is illogical on two levels. First, although they weren’t sequestered, there is no reason to assume the jurors even heard about them. And if they did, that would only be true because right-wing media amplified her words to gin up outrage. She said what she said to protesters, not in a national interview. Her intended audience was the people in front of her. If the far-right doesn’t amplify those words in a cynical attempt to discredit the movement for police accountability, there is no way the jurors could have known about them. So if anyone is guilty of tampering with the jury, it’s Carlson and company, not Waters. They are the ones who poisoned the well by relaying what she said to them, presuming they found out about it at all.
And second, to suggest a guilty verdict could only have come from a jury afraid to fairly do their jobs strains credulity because the case against Chauvin was strong. Multiple medical experts testified that Chauvin’s actions were the proximate cause of George Floyd’s death. The defense’s claims about drugs in Floyd’s system were irrelevant to the adjudication of that fact. One cannot shoot someone, for instance, and then point to their high blood pressure or chronic diabetes as evidence that they might have died anyway, even without your bullet. The idea that the jury would have needed the fear of riots to think Chauvin guilty could only be believed by persons whose contempt for Black people is so intense that to them, no officer who kills one of their number could ever have been in the wrong. We saw what we saw, and doctor after doctor and officer after officer assured us we saw it correctly the first time.
Now, is it possible that some jurors might have been worried about the possibility of riots in the event of an acquittal? Oh sure, that’s possible — and it would have been possible with or without Maxine Waters in the mix. That would have been possible even had there been no property destruction or rioting last summer after the killing of George Floyd. Even if every single demonstration in 2020 had been entirely peaceful — and roughly 97 percent were according to the best analysis to date — memories of Los Angeles in 1992 or other cases where brutal cops have been let off for their actions could have been in jurors’ minds. Considering how quick white folks are to fear Black violence and how ubiquitous those stereotypes have proved to be, one hardly needs a comment like that made by Waters to think such concerns might have been extant in the jury room.
But what are we to do in the face of such a possibility?
If the argument is that jurors are so scared of riots that they will convict cops no matter the evidence, and thus, no cop can receive a fair trial, do we simply refuse to charge and prosecute police officers who kill? Do we say that juror fears, with or without justification, should allow officers to skate rather than submit to an admittedly imperfect judicial process?
Honestly, what other remedy could there be? One can’t demand that Black people stop protesting, and yet, even peaceful protests today could spawn fears of violent ones tomorrow, especially if reactionaries are lying about the current ones to make them seem more violent than they are. During the civil rights era, it was typical for white folks opposed to the movement to argue that King and his associates were “stirring up trouble” that would ultimately lead to violence. So what, other than simply refusing to try officers at all — out of concern for their due process rights — could possibly be the answer to this new panic about jury intimidation?
Of course, the irony is, by not prosecuting such officers, no matter how strong the evidence, we would all but guarantee an explosion of rage far more potent than any that might now be imagined. If one wishes to foreclose the possibility of peace and safety, by all means, that’s the fastest route to chaos and destruction.
And at some level, one has to imagine the far-right knows this; they know what the reaction to such blanket immunity for cops in the name of due process would be. To the extent they are all but calling for that immunity, it leads one to conclude that it is they who want riots. It is they who long for chaos. And why? So they can point to Black people as the source of all the nation’s problems. So they can unleash the police with the blessing of the public to crush any and all resistance to racism. So they can usher in the kind of quasi-authoritarian rule for which they long — the kind about which Trump’s reign encouraged them to fantasize.
We must see them for what they are; they don’t really care about Derek Chauvin, except as a symbol of white male authority brought low, a harbinger of pending doom, a metaphor for the diminution of hegemonic white masculinity. And they certainly don’t care about due process. They care about discrediting the movement for Black lives and liberty. That is all they have ever cared about — they and their ideological forbears going back 400 years. They must be exposed, discredited, and politically crushed.
And in the latter case, for a lot longer than 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
I’m an antiracism educator/author. My latest book is Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020). I post audio at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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Previously Published on Medium
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Chad Davis on Flickr
