Ep. 248: Racism and Policing (Al-Saji, Merleau-Ponty, et al) (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I like that and its potential relation to what Seth brought up. Cognitive behavioral therapy.

0:04 Phil: One of the things I really value about dialectical behavioral therapy. Right. Is it just really doesn't care about diagnosis very much.

0:11 Dylan: Right.

0:11 Phil: I mean, it doesn't really want to sort of analyze, okay, what caused this problem. Right. Or what condition do you have? It wants to look at what it often likes to call strategies for acting in the world and reformulate those strategies so that they work better for you. It doesn't want you to care that much about what has been happening. And I think that has some echoes for trying to think about racism. Right. Or prejudice. I think we spend too much time trying to diagnose the problem. Right. I mean, the diagnosis is pretty clear, actually. But we don't like that diagnosis.

0:44 Dylan: Right.

0:44 Phil: And so we largely ignore it. And then we worry about whether each of us individually sort of participates in that causality.

0:53 Dylan: In particular, you get hung up on trying to decide whether someone is a racist or not.

0:58 Phil: Exactly.

0:58 Dylan: Or trying to decide whether. And you spend all your time spinning your wheels. It's like trying to decide whether somebody is bipolar or schizophrenic or just having a bad day. Like, you spend too much time talking about being and not enough about becoming.

1:14 Phil: I think dialectical behavioral therapy emphasizes trying to look at our interactions and see whether they're working for us. And can we perhaps restructure and reframe, as Seth was saying, those actions, call them out, pay attention to them. This is the heart of Al-Saji's notion of hesitation, and it was at work in what you were talking about with checklists. The thing about a checklist is that it's kind of meta level. Whatever we put on it and however we try to follow it, its very existence points out to us that we act in ways that are influenced by procedures and ideas about what should happen and how things best happen.

And so it makes that explicit to us. And by making it explicit, Al-Saji argues, we may modify it. I would also suggest, though, that one of the problems at work here that none of our authors have been talking about, but that I've been thinking about and trying to write about, is the idea that we need to all be on the same page, right? That's, I think, a problem with checklists, right, is that we get the checklist out and everybody needs to do X before they do Y and before they do Z, right? We all have to sort of be on the same page and follow the same procedure.

And I think one of the ways that we can create hesitation, one of the ways that we can perform the kind of disruption Al-Saji Has in mind, is to open space up for not all being on the same page. One of the ways that we learn to live with each other, right, as she's talking about at the end of her article, is not just, you know, like, she doesn't want to romanticize, like, let's all just invite the other into our living room, right, and spend, you know, a couple of good dinners with them. What she's talking about is in our lived lives, right, in our daily lives, in our professions, right, in our interactions, can we make a space for those we're interacting with to not be on the same page, to see the world differently and to engage their seeing differently as a moment of hesitation, as a moment of recognition that, hey, not everybody sees the world the way I'm seeing the world here right now.

We're going to see the world the way we see the world. Actually, there's a really good story about this in Patricia Williams, the Alchemy of Race and Rights. She gives a little story about when she was a child driving along on vacation in some Alabama back road, you know, back then, and she's my age or. Or maybe even a little older Back then, those southern roads were black tar. Right. They were blacktop. And she and her sister were arguing about whether the road was black or purple. And she, being the budding attorney that she turned into, won that argument.

Right. And it got her sister to admit that the road was black. And then she was sitting there sort of proud of that. And after a little while, her father in the front seat said, you know, she still sees the road as purple. Right. And she said she's thought about that a lot over the years. And she thinks that's sort of the key to all of this, is that we're going to see the road the way we see the road. It's going to be black to us. When we look at it, it's going to be purple to us. But we can, with a significant amount of effort, open ourselves up to the possibility that the road can be seen another way that we can see it sort of simultaneously different and the same.

4:14 Mark: Yep. And I think this is supposed to go back to Merleau-Ponty as pointing out that the world is fundamentally ambiguous. You know, that if you're a hermeneutic phenomenologist, in other words, you focus a lot on the meanings. Right.

4:27 Seth: That you're.

4:27 Mark: The phenomenology is not just describing colors and shapes, but that you're seeing everything's in terms of meanings. And of course, those meanings, we know a lot about the degree to which they are socially rooted and the degree to which they are potentially changeable. That if something is an agreed on meeting, I think the word purple applies to that. And I just. That's the way I see it, and that's the way I'm going to use the word. And it just. That just seems objective. But we could work way back. Maybe color is not the best example of this, but certainly social statuses and things like that, racial classifications, we can much more easily see how they can have historical and social roots and how those categories that impose themselves, that seem in our experience like it's just objective.

I'm just reacting to people because this is the way that they are, that no, maybe we need to step back and hesitate, as Al-Saji says, to give room for doubt about those supposedly objective attributions.

5:23 Seth: One of the things that comes out really clearly in her notion of hesitation that I think is different. I like the idea that we're talking about not trying to make attribution, like being, as Dylan put it so elegantly, being versus becoming. And I think there's also an aspect in which you're trying to divorce Yourself from the notion of truth, or at least agreement on fact. That what this hesitation is supposed to do is to ideally open up a space where it's not just that you see the world differently, but really that it somehow doesn't quite capture the nuance.

It's. You open up the space to recognize that the way that you see the world is not a factual representation of the world. It's not determined by the world. Like, you have a reaction, and that's because that thing is that way. You are disgusted because that thing is the type of thing that involves disgust. Instead, you recognize that your reaction to it is somehow separated from you guys. Know what I'm saying? I'm losing the words here.

6:22 Phil: You're doing great, actually. I mean, because what you're saying is that what gets called to your attention is that your seeing is a seeing. The work that I do with these anti racist groups. Like one of them is the People's Institute, right? Which is the first one, I think, back in the mid-70s, I think, or late-70s, founded by people of color. They keep talking about. That's sort of the key here. You've got to get clarity about the fact that you're seeing, right? You have to see. You're seeing. Not just see the thing you see, but to see the seeing.

And they also argue that there's no sort of middle ground, right? There's no not being a racist, you're a racist, or you're an anti racist. There's not the possibility, right, of just sort of moving through the world, right, in ways that don't consciously act out attitudes or beliefs that disparage or foster inequity for certain groups or certain people. So I like what you were saying, Seth, because what you're saying, I think what Al-Saji Is wanting to argue is that when we can see that we're seeing, it's not just that we can see differently, it's that.

I like your formulation. We open a space in which the world calls differently to us. It calls us to act differently. It calls up different possibilities. And this is the response I think these people would have to the question of determinism is that we can be reflective, right? We can see, as Dylan was talking about earlier, the ways that we act on ourselves, the way our body acts on itself as a body. And when we see that, what we do is open up a space for a kind of intentionality of practice. That is exactly what cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on.

7:59 Dylan: It's cultivating a right stance towards ambiguity. And I think in this case with hesitation. I think she's focusing particularly on the ossified aspect of habit that you can crack open by injecting some ambiguity into those habits and opens it up. I found myself thinking of other kinds of habits that are like hesitation that have to do with things that are less triggering maybe, than discussions about race. Like, we were talking about driving, and I mentioned just driving defensively. So one of the things that I do probably a little bit differently when I ride my motorcycle versus when I drive a car is I have a habit of being even more situationally aware.

And one of the ways that happens for me is that I basically ride as if everybody on the road is purposefully trying to kill me all the time. And that's a way of formulating a stance, of developing a habit of utter defensiveness on the road. And to me, the way that resonates with this idea of ambiguity is that it's not like all these people are going to be doing the same thing when they're driving around me, and that I can just say, well, they're going to stay in their lane and they're going to. Then they're definitely going to turn. They're going to wait at the stoplight.

Because I have the right of way. Is I open up the ambiguity of the world to say, well, not everything's going to happen the way in which it's supposed to happen. And in order to, in this case, preserve my life, I have to be open to the possibility that it's not going to go that way. And this idea of hesitation is much more deep and meaningful in that respect. But it has that same kind of thing of you are. Well, I guess I'm left with Seth's formulation of opening up, of not having it rigidly ossified about how you act.

9:39 Seth: Dylan, I like the let's stick with the driving analogy for a second because I think there's. The aspect that we need to tie back to this thing is that we can't get away from the fact that we're creatures that live in time. So our embodiment and our reaction to the world always comes with a narrative history that's associated with it. So your driving example, the one I always use, is this. You're driving on the freeway and somebody swerves across from the left lane in front of you in the right lane to get to an exit ramp. And you're like, ah, you fucking asshole.

Inconsiderate. You're thinking, corporate prick on his way to the airport, you know, on the phone, whatever and that's a reaction you can have, or you can hesitate and you can say, what if that's somebody, a working, single, working mom who just got a call from the daycare center that her child's sick and she's struggling with blah, blah, blah, and she's rushing and, you know, she was not paying attention, but she's distracted because, whatever, you will literally have a physically different response.

10:35 Dylan: I've been trying to cultivate that kind of attitude myself. I'm very prone to the first one.

10:39 Seth: Yes. No, I. I've spent years and years and years now trying to work my way towards the second one. But anyway, the point being that I think that's the power of what Al-Saji is getting at with this hesitation is it's opening a space, it's seeing that you're seeing, but it's also not just opening a space for encountering the world a different way. One of the things she says that's profound is she says, when we rewrite the narrative of the future, we're also rewriting the narrative of the past. So it's an opportunity to basically redefine the entire story of who you are and how you've become what you are. If you change your habituation, you're changing your story and your narrative. But it's interesting that she talks about it projecting both forwards and backwards. And so that's why this, you know, this hesitation is such a meaningful and powerful concept.

11:29 Phil: I agree. And I think Dylan's invocation, right, of the distinction between being and becoming is very important in this respect. All of these thinkers, right, But Bergson in particular argues that that's simply what we are. We are becoming. We are the leading edge of the building up of all of this, and its vector is changeable. And when we change the vector of that leading edge, then all the rest of it comes along on that ride in that new direction. That's how we're sort of changing the story of the past, because the past now leads here rather than there.

And so I think that one of the important things to call out here is the way in which habit has gotten kind of a bad name, right? I mean, like, we talk about habits as something to be overcome. And as Gadamer says about horizons, right. I don't think we can overcome our habits. I don't think the goal is to overcome our habits. I think we need to understand our habits as the kind of organism we are. It's the evolutionary strategy for interacting productively with the world. I don't think they're designed to be ossified. Right. I think they may become ossified, but I think that habits are by themselves, right?

As this evolutionary strategy, open to disruption, open to hesitation. What Heidegger talks about with the distinction between being present at hand and being ready to hand. He talks about the way in which that ontological shift takes place when the bit of the world we're trying to use doesn't function the way we want it to function anymore. In other words, where our practice gets disrupted. I think habits work in the same way. Right? Habits are practices. Right. They are sort of go to practices. I mean, here's what Alcoff says in chapter four.

The habitual body perceives a world that means what it means as grounded in our historical practices and our needs. It grows its knowledge in its activity. And yeah, we can get to the place where we're not sort of growing any new knowledge. I mean, we see that happen. I see that happen. I performed that in some ways right in my life. I don't think that's the fault of habit. I think that's just a way of sort of comporting ourselves toward our habits.

13:31 Dylan: My disposition has been, probably because of how much I'm influenced by Nicomachean ethics, is to think about habits as being something that we cultivate towards our own excellences and to really emphasize that part about it. Of course, this is one of the reasons I like the Al-Saji thing, is that she's helping us formulate this idea that there's sort of a habit about habits that has to happen and seeing our habits and understanding that the fact is that sometimes they are directed in making us better and sometimes they're making us worse in some kind of basic way.

I wanted to point us at the beginning of the Al-Saji article in the Phenomenology of Racializing Vision. Just because there's one particular habit I think that she's really focused on, which is this habit of othering, which ends up being racialization, is a kind of othering as the way I'm understanding it as being the thing that she's pointing as the thing to be interrupted the most. And I thought that'd be worthwhile for us to talk a little bit about how she understands othering.

14:32 Mark: Well, so I remember she brings up Fanon in this respect. So we've talked about him. You know, had an episode specifically on him.

14:39 Dylan: In fact, that's how she starts it off.

14:40 Mark: Page 136.

14:41 Dylan: Yep.

14:42 Mark: In section one, she's attributing this to Fanon. Racialization is a process by which identities of self and other are constituted.

14:49 Seth: She says it's not only that, but also socially.

14:52 Mark: She has a lot of not only that, but also this. That is a. She says that so many times. I just like to interpret that as. She's making two distinct interesting points.

15:02 Seth: Okay.

15:03 Mark: It is not only that, but it is also a socially pathological othering that involves projection. So whatever is undesirable in the self is projected onto the other. So according to Fanon's analysis, conflicted between these two models, that on the one hand, you have the picture of the pure. I can. This is the way Alcoff characterizes white privilege, is that it's. You're just walking around, you have a totalizing experience. You feel like you are master of the domain. You don't have to hesitate because you are confident in your habits, you're confident in your judgments.

You are seeing the world like it is. There is no other out there that could escape your potential understanding. You're sort of engaging in an imaginative imperialism such that, you know, we're all just people. I'm a person. That's what humanism is. We can see through everybody's eyes. In that sense, white privilege might make you just forget that other people don't feel this way, that they don't have this freedom to move around the world. But Fanon takes the stronger point that, no, it's not just that we ignore the other, but that defining whiteness, defining ourselves, it's essential that we actually have the other there.

To say that is not me, that we use abjection, as we talked about in our Kristeva episode, that our sense of wholeness, our sense of self actually requires, but implicitly, it forgets the disregarding of certain others. So I'm not sure how to judge between those. Are those really in conflict? I don't know.

16:33 Phil: But what that makes me think about, I think in a very similar way, to take this to policing again, Cops and suspects are patterns of behavior, right? They're embodied roles that implicate each other. Right. That require each other, that are grounded in a particular meaning of the world as configured by historical practices and institutions. Right? And in a sense, that's why there is this, I think, so strongly felt, I would argue, almost universal feeling of us, them among police officers, that to be a police officer requires that there be something that needs policing in a very sort of straightforward way.

And as Fanon talks about whiteness and blackness, right. The police officer gets to formulate the idea and the practice of him or herself as in opposition to the projection of what they don't want to be. Right? They want to be what is safe. They want to be what is orderly. They want to be what is helpful. And whoever they have to interact with must therefore necessarily be unsafe, threatening, dangerous. They must be criminal. It's very hard, I think, for a police officer not to inhabit that. I mean, in part because we sort of segregate them very intentionally.

Badge is a larger metaphorical term, right? Not just a description of a physical thing that you hang on your shirt emblems, right? We give them a badge, we give them a uniform, we give them a gun, right? We distinguish them as demarcated to serve this role. And then whatever isn't so demarcated is open to at least, and maybe necessarily as soon as a cop interacts with them, necessarily suspect, problematic there to be solved by the kind of policing they know how to do. And let's face it, the kind of policing they're trained to do is very, very narrow.

I think about this a lot. It seems to me now, I'm still thinking about all this, but it seems to me now that you can describe the primary function of policing, both historically and as it's practiced in the world right now as maintaining order. The primary goal is to maintain order. And of course, individual police or police departments don't get to define what counts as order, right. That's handed to them the power structures in a given community, right. Define what they want as order. What counts as order. This has cultural and historical grounds.

But how do cops get tasked with maintaining order? They're not asked to cajole people into being orderly, right? Like, you know, they're not asked to sort of model it, be model citizens, and hopefully the people around you will be orderly. They're not asked to incentivize it. Right. Except negatively. No, they're asked to control. So the primary role, the primary practice of police officers is to control. They go into the world to control the world. When they're called out, they're called out to get control. And with everything we've been saying, when that's at work, what happens there is that anytime you interact with someone, you project onto them the need to be controlled.

And the slightest departure from behavior that looks like they're submitting to your control is necessarily read as dangerous and threatening. And I think that's true at a structural, broad level. Before we start talking about the way in which as Fanon does, or George Yancy does, the way in which black people have been Defined as dangerous and threatening. The way that we all collectively see people of color as suspect.

20:03 Dylan: I think what you described is at the root of a lot of the discussions about police restructuring and you know, the conversations around the roles that we put on police or that we expect of police in terms of different kinds of orders. And that whether or not that maintaining order, broadly speaking, is best met by the kind of skill set that police have, that's one part of the conversation. You know, if maintaining the order has to do with something more like maintaining the order regarding people with mental health issues, it might be a different kind of skill set. I'm nervous only about getting down a very, very sort of practical political philosophy road. Another tributary in the discussion about it, because I think that we have less to work with on it, less to

20:55 Mark: work with as to the, you know, what we should actually do policy wise. Because that as soon as you bring, you know, get this practical, then it is like all the stuff we're talking about in, like we want to encourage hesitation. I mean, this. It's sort of addressed right the way I was just when I was setting up here these two kinds of ways of thinking about white privilege or something is thinking of it from our point of view as individual thinkers here and how we could, through our erudition and study, we could improve our ways of seeing. But that makes it all sound very elitist and you know, to actually roll this out and recognizing it as a general principle of psychology and constructing trainings that will take advantage of this and that actually resulting in something since, as Vitale points out, you can have all the sensitivity training you want, you could even have Al-Saji informed sensitivity training.

And it's seems like it doesn't do anything that, oh no, we have to do something more fundamentally, restructuring. We have to maybe just have different people be the police officers. And then, well, how do you do that? How do you make sure you. It just immediately opens a huge number of practical problems that we are not going to be able to. Maybe Phil would have some informed opinions about. I certainly don't.

22:03 Dylan: Phil was pointing to the structural relationship, not in the sense of even the bureaucratic structure, but in the sense of the mode of expecting police that their role is to control. And that already lays the table for a whole bunch of things.

22:18 Seth: There's another way to characterize it is there are other agencies in the government whose role it also is to control. But as I think Vitale makes the point, the police are the only ones who are authorized to use violence, deadly force at Least against citizens. Right. I'm not talking about the army, but, like, the issue is all of the institutions of government, all of these things, they're all suffused with the same structural, habituated views of the communities. Whether you're talking about mortgage lenders, you know, or the dmv, Right. Or the police.

The difference is the police are authorized to use violence and deadly force at that. And that. That has just been accentuated since, you know, the war on drugs. And they started seeing the channeling of surplus military equipment to the police. So right now, the ire is directed at the police because they are the ones who are the most graphic and visceral enactments of this level of racism and so forth. But Vitale's point, and I think Phil's point and I think the point of all this is we could try to reform the police. You can change them into a group that isn't allowed to use force.

It's not going to change many of the practical and habituated acts that there. We need to do things like find some way to structurally change so that people of color are treated equally. That we understand that poverty is the cause of crime and not the, you know, the other way around. And that we. All these things about doing to try to reframe our existence, living with and among each other in community. And that's really the only substantive. There can be steps we have to take to get there. And there are ways to alleviate the pain and perhaps restraining the force of violence, which is something we've talked about on other episodes, about the necessity of violence and the desire to put constraints on that.

But this is symptomatic as opposed to being the cause.

24:17 Phil: That's the point I'm wanting to make here, is that we can't do any of the things that Mark was talking about and expect them to make a difference. The problem is bigger and harder than that. We tend to do this, right? I mean, we vote in this way, right? Let's vote for the person that will save us, right? Let's pick the one person that will fix all these problems for us. And then we don't participate in any action or activity, right. That they ask us to do. If they get to the place of asking us to do it. We constantly are looking for the person who is the problem.

And all of the stuff we've been reading is trying to argue to us that we are all the problem, right? That there are structures of habituation, of perception and embodied activity that have brought all of us to this place where we're at. And so it's ridiculous to expect a cop to see the world differently than the way cops see the world right now, because they're just seeing it the way all of us see it, right? Cops don't shoot black bodies more because cops are racist, except in the sense that, yeah, I'm racist. Cops shoot black bodies more because black bodies are habitually seen as more dangerous and less valuable.

And that plays itself out in embodied ways across our society in the way that Seth is talking about. I can connect this back to Al-Saji, if you want me to, with a kind of a concrete example that I was thinking about actually this morning before we started that relates to training. It was when I was a cop that a particular book came out called Street Survival, and it was republished again in 2015. Right. It's a very popular book. In some ways, it's not even necessary anymore because as Vitale points out, there's so many organizations right now that are sort of focused on teaching officers how to survive.

Right. And teaching them to think about their jobs as engaging, in a sense, very much a military approach. Right. That our cities are war zones and that the people they're engaging are enemy combatants, in a sense. And one of the trainings that became popular about the time that I was a cop, and I don't know if they still are or not, was these shooting ranges where what you shot at was no longer just the traditional target with rings, right, and a 10 ring, but you shot at these cartoonish cardboard cutouts that represented kinds of people, right?

So there was the pregnant woman with the baby in her hand, right? There was the guy that was cartoonishly a thug, right? With an unshaved face and a floppy hat and a gun pointed right at you. And there were people of color of various forms in those exercises, and cops were asked to go through those. And the task was to shoot the good ones. I mean, shoot the bad ones and not shoot the good. Yeah, let's go get that. Right? The task was to shoot the bad ones and not shoot the good ones. And I really was understood at that level. And I think that by itself, there's a lot of philosophical work to do there, right?

That kind of clean and neat division of kinds of people into good ones and bad ones. Right? But there was a lot of angst produced by that, Right? Because you were judged by how many good ones you shot, right. Or whether you only shot the bad ones. And it was understood. It was tacit, but it was understood. Every cop knew that they were being tested to see how racist they were. Right. And so you don't want to be racist. You don't want to be a racist cop. So there's really a lot here that matters. And how you interacted in those situations changed based on that.

And I think we really missed an opportunity there to do a kind of training that would be influenced by Al-Saji. And that's not to test whether we're racist, to see how many good people we shoot, but it's to call attention to those cadets who are going through that exercise. That context matters, that they're operating differently in that situation because they understand that situation differently because of a rich context. And I can tell you in my study that instance after instance of police violence that is unwarranted and unjustified stems from, I think, largely two things that are deeply connected to what we've been talking about, the perception of threat and danger, which is a kind of projection, very much like what you guys were talking about when you talked to Judith Butler.

Right. And the way that you talked about. It's very difficult to distinguish between what we recognize as violence and threat from an external sort of factic ground or what we're projecting. And so what I was arguing earlier is that cops read any departure from being controlled as threat and violence precisely because they're not reading context. They enter into situations and they've not been trained to read the context and to see that this action in this context might not be threatening at all. Dylan talked about mental health a little earlier.

They're beginning to be trained to recognize it in that circumstance, but they're not at all trained to recognize it in relation to sort of class or race.

29:11 Dylan: Also, you're coming back to the idea of control. Is that part of that, to me would be understanding that is reducing the amount of which control is the indicator of success. So if you're incentivized to say you're doing your job, if you're controlling things, is not quite right. Is understanding the context in which control might become the thing that needs to be the marker of success. But there are lots of other times where control is not the marker of success. It's not that there's some other indicator that is your marker of success. But if you constantly say you are doing your job, if you are controlling the situation, then in fact it makes it so that you become reluctant to release control, because then all of a sudden, maybe even reluctant to end the interaction.

The most recent shooting in Atlanta makes me think of this New York Times has sort of A moment by moment analysis of it. And I think it plays out exactly this way. The interaction goes over like half an hour or something like that. You can just palpably feel that what's happening is a tussle around control and a reluctance to relinquish control. Because I'm interpreting it right now, is that the cop feels like that's his job. And whatever the indicator is, he hasn't given up. The indication this isn't the thing that I need to control right now.

30:31 Phil: That interaction went smoothly until the guy didn't want to be arrested. I mean, he was complaining, right? He was like, why can't you just let me go home, right? I just live nearby. Let me just walk home, right? And I get that the officer would be reluctant to do that, right? There are a lot of civil suits about, you know, people that get injured because they're publicly intoxicated and the officer let them walk home, right? And something bad happened to him there. But there are options here, and we don't even need to get into that like what the cops should have done.

What you're pointing at is that when the guy didn't want to be arrested, when he began resisting the control, that's when things escalated, and they escalated rapidly. In the incidents that I analyzed, that happens over and over again precisely because there's a kind of ignoring, unintentional maybe or unintentional forgetting of the context, right? Like this is just a guy who is found sleeping drunk in his car, or this is just a guy that stole a pack of cigarettes, right, From a store and walked out with them, right? Or, you know, even in worse situations, right?

As soon as the threat, the real threat sort of dissipates time after time, the cop continues the interaction precisely to maintain control, precisely to affect an arrest when an arrest is not essential. If we think about Michael Brown, right? And Darren Wilson in Ferguson, let's just say Michael Brown reached into the car and tried to get the officer's weapon, and the officer discharged it twice and shot Michael Brown through the hand. Then Michael Brown ran away. It was the idea that the cop had that I can't let this person get away because that represents the failure of my performance of this job, the failure to maintain and achieve control, right?

I can't let him get away. Led to everything that happened after that. When. How hard is it to find a guy who's been shot through the hands, especially if the original context is he's being questioned for stealing a pack of cigarettes? If we do this kind of work. Not only would we perhaps think of something besides control as the task we need to accomplish, but we might begin to think of control itself. Less monolithically, we might begin to expand our notions of what counts as control.

32:38 Seth: I want to push a little bit on that, Phil, just because I thought the implication of everything we've been talking about and the discussion was that the cop's commitment to that principle of control seems to be very much tied. If so, and so is white and found sleeping in the car is the point at which they say, I don't want to be arrested. Do you see the same level of escalation with the white body versus a body of color? And I thought what we were kind of getting to was the answer is no. It's problematic that the mission that police are given and the training they're given and the way in which our entire society characterizes them and the militarization, all that stuff's definitely an issue.

But the way in which individual police officers manifest that in individual confrontations with people of color differs from the way they do it with white people. So there's a sense in which. I think this goes back to the ALS and what we were basically talking about, which is you're habituated to act in certain ways with certain individuals, and then in these moments of intense interpersonal interaction, you're essentially creating a world or a structure or a space where only certain possibilities present themselves. So in theory, given the training that police have, and in theory, given the context and the actions of individual actors, if all of that were taken into account, you would say whether you were white or black or brown, the interaction should take the same path.

There should be the same measured response, the same possible outcomes. But the reality is, it's not the possibilities for an interaction between a police officer and a person of color versus a police officer and a white person, even given exactly the same behaviors are just. Those possibilities don't exist. The way in which we've just described, you know, with habituation in the society and all of the various other things that we talked about. And so I wonder if we're talking about, yes, we can change policy, and we can change the mission of the police, and we can change training, but is there some sense in which something like Al-Saji's notion of hesitation, is there some room for that where in an interaction, and maybe the point you were driving at, Phil, is that the police have to be trained to take context into.

If we're talking about an armed bank robber, we're talking about a Guy who was selling cigarettes, you know, out of the back of a truck. Is there a point there that you can say maybe this person doesn't represent the threat simply by virtue of their actions right now in this moment. They don't represent the kind of threat that would necessitate a kind of violent force that I'm trained to interact with. I don't know if that's the kind of thing that she might be driving her out, if that's the kind of thing we suggest or if that's just hopelessly naive.

35:30 Phil: I appreciate you pushing back in that way because I think I formulated the position a bit simplistically there. I want to respond by saying that I don't think those things can be separated. I don't think we can tease out these sort of structural, institutional. I mean, I think that's what they're saying. I mean, they use that very language, right? They say that our habits of perception, right? Our habits of bodily comportment are historical and institutional, right? We build them through these institutionalized practices. And so I don't think we can sort of tease out that aspect of policing from what we might want to think of as policing that is racist, as if we could solve the racist policing problem but leave the other problem.

I think that those things are connected because police are set up in the first place to react to and act upon the civilian population in very particular ways. And then you add to that communal habits of perception that are going to read danger and threat differently based on the embodiment of the people that they're interacting with and the color of their skin, for instance, and other phenotypical markers, then what we're doing there is in some sense tacitly encouraging and simultaneously ignoring the fact that cops are paying attention to context, hey, this is a white dude in a suit.

That's a context. I'm going to interact with that white dude in a suit differently. When I was first a cop, very young cop, I used to always be looking for people driving while intoxicated, right? All the signs of that. This was before DUI became a big sort of cultural thing. But I, for whatever reason, thought it was a problem and I was going to solve it. And I pulled over a guy very clearly drunk while he was driving, right? A white guy in a suit. I asked him for his id, and he handed me his business card. He was an assistant district attorney for the city.

And being a young, naive cop, you know, I asked him to perform a sobriety test, which he failed miserably. And then I started arresting him, and my senior partner at the time stopped me, got in the squad car, called a supervisor, and that situation wound up with me driving that guy home. So, yeah, cops are very sensitive to context in some ways, right? What I think Al-Saji is trying to suggest is can we train them to see their seeing of context? Can we train them to see the way they see context this way and they see context that way, but then they ignore context in this way or they ignore context in this other way.

37:59 Seth: I think even if we were to suggest that as an appropriate action, there's problems with that. Again, with the militarized nature of policing and this. I'm not in the military. I wasn't in the military, but my understanding of the way military people get trained is very much to permit them to be flexible in hostile situations, but to act decisively. And if basically the structure of the interaction you're having with a person is characterized in your mind or elsewhere as a hostile conflict, where there's threat, I think there's just a limited set of possibilities available to you, and it's that much harder for you to stop and check the checklist, you know, and all those sorts of things. It's just going to be more difficult to do that.

38:45 Dylan: It goes directly to this bodily comportment thing. If you show up and you're geared out in a certain way, then that's going to frame how you participate in the interaction. That's not just true for, you know, if we take the case of that, there's going to be an effect if you show up as a militarized comportment in interaction. It's why you wear certain kinds of gear anyway. I mean, the fact that I would dress up for work or for class ends up changing my comportment and my relationship between my students and my colleagues just by wearing different clothes.

If I am going to go work on my motorcycle, my whole frame of reference changes because I put on my boots and my other gear, right? And this is where I think the analyses from Merleau-Ponty and Al-Saji and stuff really resonate, that there are these simple but hard things that we do that we have leverage to affect, but we are also subject to, which makes it also important to see our seeing with regards to our contextual bodily comportment, our physical arrangement, our habits of mind, and that by seeing our seeing, we can take some kind of proactive action to actually make it easier for us.

You know, we use the cognitive behavioral therapy, right? How you reframe your mind but, you know, the same kind of thing, frankly, just comes up with something like dieting, that if you want to not eat certain foods, if you just take the simple act of not having them in your house, it makes a huge difference. I'm not trying to diminish it. I'm just trying to. I'm trying to actually make it all the more obvious that the way in which we arrange our physical world affects the way we react both physically and cognitively.

40:30 Phil: There was nothing clear to me when I was a cop that I saw and interacted with people differently, depending whether I was on duty and in a uniform or off duty. Right. Just being in the world, it was a stark difference, 100%.

40:44 Dylan: So we have a problem in Madison, where, as far as I can tell from the news, it's groups of teenagers, but they are on the lookout for people's garage doors open, and they go and they steal cars. They either get in the house, like going through the garage door and find the keys hanging on the key ring, or they come in and take stuff out of garages. A couple weeks ago, a police officer was coming through my neighborhood. My garage door was open, and he came up and knocked on my door just to tell me, hey, your garage door is open. And, you know, we're just kind of going around letting people know. And this conversation makes me think about that interaction because he's in a uniform.

41:21 Seth: Right.

41:22 Dylan: So it was not an experience like my neighbor coming over to me and saying, hey, you know what? Your garage door's open, and the guy across the street had his house broken into exactly that way. Close your garage door. Or just, you know, heads up. It was a very different kind of interaction. One piece of it was the way in which I had to force myself to really understand the interaction is him just trying to be helpful, not being evaluative and judgmental. Right. Because I immediately. As soon as he's there, I immediately feel like I'm being judged.

And what was interesting to me about the interaction is that he felt the same way. Right. I regretted not striking up small talk with him after he left because there was nothing about that interact that shouldn't have been just completely friendly. And I thanked him for coming by and telling me that, but it could have been a lot more friendly or

42:14 Phil: could it have been? Right. I mean, how much of that was sort of configured or inflected by those structural relations?

42:19 Dylan: Well, I think. I think that's probably true, but part of it is definitely informed. Maybe the uniform is just a sign of those structural things. But it definitely is a different kind of interaction.

42:30 Phil: This is one of the things that got me out of police work. A cop is always bad news. Always. You either don't want them there because you're doing something wrong and they will catch you, or you do want them there because something wrong has just happened and it's so wrong that you had to call the police about it. So there's never a case where the cop is like. I mean, I went into it, I wanted to be the good guy, right. I wanted to help people. And I quickly realized that anytime I'm there, there's a problem and I'm going to be attached to that.

So one of the things these thinkers are saying to us is not just that we build up these habits of perception or habits of action and they shape the way we see, but that our ways of seeing are shaped by our actions. And I mean, those habits get formed from activity in the world and our continued activity. Like when that activity, you are what you do. Yeah. And when what you do is negative, then that's going to affect both the way you see the world and the way you inhabit the world. And to connect to what Seth was saying about the militarization.

Right. The way that that connects to me, to what we've been reading, is that we do get a lot of ex soldiers, right. Who become police officers. And it is clear from studies that those veterans, the ones who have seen action, have more complaints lodged against them and are involved in more incidents of police violence. But as Seth pointed out earlier, soldiers get a lot of training. They get a lot of incredibly effective training. I mean, we have good soldiers. They function well. I'm just speaking as someone who was trained as a cop and who has consulted on training.

Now, police don't get good training. And the one thing they don't get good training about is how to overcome the training of a soldier. Right. If you get years of really good training as a soldier, there is nothing we do in police academies that will override, I think, any of that. And the way this connects to what we've been talking about is what is it about the way all of us see the world, all of us see this sort of task and function in the world that we think a soldier would be a good person to do it.

44:37 Mark: Rather than trying to answer that question, which is difficult, I want to make sure we bring in Al Saji's notion of critical ethical vision, because I really liked what this seemed to capture, is that it is, you know, so this is what we're shooting for. So it's critical on the one hand in the sense of like critical theory, you know, Marxist theory. It's sort of the deterministic aspect of it where if you're encountering. Correct me if this is not a good example, but what I thought she had in mind was you can't just evaluate. So if, say, if you're a police officer and based on your understanding of history, like, what is it that would have put this person in this situation and have sedimented my judgments about them in this situation, that is being critical about your own vision.

Right. We said we want to bring that vision to the surface. We want to be able to see that through hesitation. But the ethical part is the not seeing them as merely determined. Right. That they are not merely pawns of their social station, but that they are individual subjectivities and trying to engage them on that level. Have I captured those two aspects of accurately? It seems like it's the determinist part is the critical part and the freedom part is the ethical part.

45:48 Dylan: The reason I'm pausing is because I don't remember her even using the word freedom. And so I'm getting hung up on that part. To me, you know, hesitation was an embodiment of or mechanism for this critical ethical vision, which she says in 148. When hesitation is held open, the normative level according to which one sees can itself be transformed in response to unassimilable events. Perceptual and effective maps shift. One comes to see according to attachments that reflect hitherto repressed events and excluded others so that it may become possible with time to see and act differently. That to me is the doing. So if I think of the ethical part as the doing, that's what happens is you have the activity of hesitation as being the critical mechanism by which we reflect on our habits and our activities. But it also is the lever for us to alter our doing. That is the ethical part.

46:47 Phil: I agree with that. And although freedom is your word, Mark, I think that's what she's talking about when she says things like hold open. That she's wanting to talk about a kind of freedom that we retain. Maybe we want to use the word agency. Right? Because I think you can talk about all of this in a way that makes it feel like, wow, we've just sort of built what we are and that's what we are and that's what we're going to be. But that ignores the fact that this is dynamic. That's the word they keep using. This is A building, not a built and we can find ways to open ourselves up to and hold open the vector of, you know, our future building.

47:22 Mark: I think the other reason I was using freedom is not my freedom as viewer, but about the freedom of the person I'm judging. So we haven't brought up this example that Al-Saji gives really to show us that we're still racist, which is Muslim veils, that she gives example this teacher who gets really irate with a student who is wearing a veil because you know, you might think very logically they see veils as something that is suppressing the freedom of women. It's a reaction not because, you know, I hate Muslims or something like it's a reaction. This teacher had this reaction because you know, from what we might think is a good place because she sees this as a symbol of oppression.

But of course, all sorts of racists, when they object to something, they object to it on what they think to be moral grounds. I have certain visions of what virtue is and those dirty invaders of whatever sort, they don't meet that. And so she's trying to bring up this case that is maybe still live for us in the west who think of ourselves as liberal and non racist, that she wants to actually say there's actually something very similar going on in that, that that is also a racist case reaction. Because what you're doing is the critical part is working right.

You're seeing critically in terms of you're trying to think about what is it about this person wearing a veil, what are the social forces that have brought her to that point. But you're not thinking about it in terms of her ethical agency. You know, Phil has elaborated, you know, the outlines of how she lays this out is this is something that was active in her family, that she has her mother, maybe her grandmother wear veils and that her husband is this liberal educator, you know, had that sort of anti veil reaction until he just lived around these people that actually wear veils, but yet they pretty evidently are not mere victims of circumstance.

They have moral agency, they make the decision to wear the veil. And you might still, there might still be reason to argue about that. You don't have to just say, oh, I just give up. I think that for sure veils are okay in all circumstances, but you're not having the ethical part of the critical ethical vision in place if you're merely seeing the person as a cog and a social machine.

49:31 Seth: There's another key point though in her example, which is in her family. Some do, some don't so it's not just the ethical agency of the individual and whether they understand how they're being violated and suppressed by the dominant norm. It's the fact that, oh shit, it's not homogenous. It's not like there's something called Islamic woman. And when you wear a veil, you represent Islamic woman and you represent. It's the fact that some do, some don't. Depends on where you're from, what your beliefs are. There's, there's a nuanced tapestry and I kind of wanted to get to this at some point.

While I express dismay and depression about whether real institutional change can happen, habituation happens with experience. And if you don't have a diversity of experience, you can expect to suffer from all of the negative effects of habituation and not reap nearly as many of the positive benefits. So it's a cliche, but like, you know, and I realize people's means are limited, but speaking to people outside of your immediate circle, traveling to other places and seeing other cultures and trying things like other people's going to see art on, trying to understand clothing and music and food and reading literature and poetry from, you know, just exposing yourself to different kinds of experiences that can simultaneously open possibilities and disrupt the ossification of the things that you are necessarily going to experience, you know, have repeated experiences with, is really, really critical.

And so, you know, you know, at the age that we all are, there was always the junior high school trip, right, where they send you to France or to England or something like that. And it was supposed to be a cultural thing or the year abroad was part of it was like something you had to do. And I feel like I'd like to go understand places, if there are any, where there's been a conscientious disruption of those ossified paths, whether it's community and police engagement sessions where people sit down together in a non confrontational, non bad thing has happened kind of way and just talk about moving things forward outside of the governmental process.

You know, I think about some kind of mediated conversation or just having people interact with each other on a personal level so that they come to start seeing people as people regardless of what they're, you know, like there are probably some established strategies that we know work. It's the question of how can I, as an individual citizen, anti racist, help participate and promulgate that?

52:06 Phil: Yeah, no, I think you've put that beautifully. I mean, I think that is a strategy that we need to adopt in a lot of different forms. And the Goal there is not to just see people as people, if that means sort of reducing everyone else to the same. And not to see that we're talking to a group of people who see the world very differently from us. And, okay, I'll tolerate that, right? As Wendy Brown says, toleration is disguised disgust. But that we see the world as being seen differently, which, as these people have been talking about, shows us that our seeing is a seeing, and that we can put those seeings in conversation and perhaps see more richly and see more deeply, or at least see sort of differently.

And I think that's the real value of the example she gave with her husband, right? Is that not just some wore it and some didn't, but each person that wore it wore it for their own reasons. And those reasons were different from each other. I'll mention Patricia Williams again. She calls what you just described Seth crossing over into the wilderness, being willing to leave the safe circle. And she says we don't tend to do it naturally and that it is a lot of work, but that there's something we can gain from that work that we'll never gain from sitting by ourselves being sort of reflective and critical and trying to think, how might I not be seeing the world the way someone else sees the world?

Right. We have to actually engage. We have to live with and open ourselves up to other scenes.

53:28 Mark: I guess I want to end with briefly contemplating and maybe putting a feeler out to folks for what we should read in this regard. Just about how this sort of hesitation differs from other kinds of hesitation that we've maybe considered briefly in other episodes. You know, the idea just. You can just walk through life unreflectively, but through philosophy, you stop and you hesitate and you. So we talked about metastrophic reflection being in our interview with Peter Kanelos, about converting the known into the unknown, making the. What seems natural, problematic, philosophically worth investigating.

So that's sort of a just a fundamental thing for philosophy of know thyself, understand better things about the world. That's a little more abstract. It doesn't really necessarily say at any given time you should hesitate. We have. When Seth brought up the getting mad at somebody else in the other car interview, I was remembering, I think, in the Buddhist context. We talked about this before. I was trying to think how this differs from Buddhism. I'm really not totally sure. I know that it does differ from stoicism. Right. We've said here a little about, you know, don't just take the world as given.

Realize how much you are contributing to your perceptions of the world. How much. And so stoicism does that in, I think, a very formulaic way. You know, remember your stoic principles control what you. Only what you can control, and don't worry about the rest. What I like about Al Saji's hesitation is that it's an openness, as we're saying, that you're letting the outside inform you. You're just bringing doctrinaire, your stoic traditions to bear in. This is how I should act in this way. Whereas Buddhism, I think, might involve more of that openness and, you know, just really being keenly aware of what's going on around you.

55:08 Seth: Yeah. Not that I want to kick off that thread, but you're really inspiring me to say something, Mark, is that you said thinking of other kinds of hesitations. And really it's. What are all the various types of interruptive strategies that we've studied for how to interrupt your experience and make meaning out of it, or determine whether it's ethical or make decisions about how to proceed. And stoicism is a strategy for dealing with certain kinds of experiences. I think Buddhism's strategy is, you know, of compassion, at least if you take kind of the cliched Western version, you know, there's that.

But these are all strategies for trying to deal in some sense, with the same phenomenon. But stoicism and Buddhism do not explicitly acknowledge the racial and the gendered stuff that we've been talking about. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that that's not something you can just avoid and say, you know, well, theoretically it could apply here. You actually have to engage with it.

56:04 Dylan: I want to just point out, because we didn't talk so much about the multivalency of hesitation as we did about habit. But of course, hesitation operates in both ways. She brings up Fanon's discussion about hesitation and the way in which hesitation ends up not being a lever towards openness, but is actually a manifestation of the constraint of context in which you interact with the world hesitantly. And I think that's a nice distinction, that there's a difference between hesitation and being hesitant. That maybe is for another separate episode. But just like habit can be something that is ossified and is a sign of lack of flexibility and lack of openness, habit can also be turned towards a kind of openness, to revision, to revising and altering the sedimentation of one's life and one's context and one's history. Same thing is true with hesitation.

57:05 Phil: Let me add that. And this is going to Be a kind of flattering thing to say. So feel free to leave it in or take it out as you see fit. But I think you guys are modeling part of what we're talking about here.

57:15 Unknown speaker: Right.

57:15 Phil: Constantly. I think the best practice of philosophy models part of what we're talking about that we take up each of these thinkers. I mean, you guys take up a different thinker all the time. And certainly you come to those texts and their ideas with habits of perception and developed ideas of your own. But what I see you doing is practicing a kind of hesitation where you open up a space for yourself to see differently. You try to inhabit. You try to say, okay, how. How would the world look like if it looked like the way this thinker is describing?

And in what places does that way of looking depart or diverge from the ways I'm used to seeing it? And you guys do that pretty well. And the end result of that is you get richer and deeper, I would argue, understandings of the world and of yourself that you wouldn't get if you simply took up each of these texts to find where it's right or to find where it's wrong according to what you've already decided.

58:12 Mark: Hopefully we police each other or our audience polices us, at least after the fact that if we come as hammers in search of nails, like I have my own little agenda that I want to evaluate every new text in light of that. Somebody will call me on it. And, you know, so I think I've gotten much more flexible over the years. Everybody has their own way that they're proceeding on their intellectual journey, and the tools that they have, with great difficulty, with great labor built up to try to make sense of things. And so it's difficult sometimes to see whether we should be encouraging each other's use of these. You know, understand it in whatever the best way you can. Or, come on, you got too many hammers there, bud.

58:52 Seth: I hope that by doing this, it's a habituation and doesn't actually rely on me remembering all the stuff that we talk about and learn, because I certainly, as I get older, I don't remember half of the things we talk about once we're done with them.

59:07 Dylan: I'm really glad that Phil has that perception of what we're trying to do, because I feel like at our best, that's what we are trying to do.

59:15 Seth: Yeah, I agree.

59:17 Mark: Thank you, Phil, on so many levels, for so many reasons for joining us.

59:21 Dylan: It was great.

59:22 Phil: It's quite pleasurable. Thanks for inviting me.

59:24 Seth: Yeah.

59:25 Mark: Next time we're going to be talking about John Dewey's democracy and education and how we think. Come back for that. Please let us know what you thought of this conversation. I don't know how much of our time we are going to give to current issues like this, but whether you think this was a good way of treating it, a good balance of the practical current events stuff versus the deep philosophical obscurities. I don't think we gave a really adequate impression here of how much Al-Saji sounds like Heidegger, how her how difficult her writing really is.

So thank you, Phil, for connecting those dots by bringing something that is very difficult to something that's in every newspaper you read now. But I really like this as a model. I would love to do this kind of thing a little more often. We want to know what listeners think of it. You can respond to this@theblog partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the post relevant to this on Facebook, you can tweet at us. Email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com our closing song is by a guy named Dusty Wright. It's called Every Man's Burden. It is from a not yet released album called Can Anyone Hear me?

Coming out August 7th. I'm pleased to premiere this here and if you enjoy it, go look for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 87 where I interviewed Dusty at Nakedly ExaminedMusic.com thanks and good night.

1:00:40 Seth: Good night.

1:00:41 Dylan: Thanks everybody.

1:00:42 Phil: Thanks guys.

1:00:53 Unknown speaker: I am a brown man, Wasn't born a white man and I am a white man. I wasn't born a brown man. That's the way it is and I am a gay man. I wasn't born a straight man and I am a straight man may never be a gay man. That's the way it is, Just the way it is. You may think you know my anger, you may say you share my rage. You might even see my struggles but you'll never, no no ever, no no never feel my. And I am a poor man, I wasn't born a rich man and I am a rich man may never be a poor man. That's the way it is, Just the way it is. I am a good man, I try to be an honest man and I am a fair man.

But I'm not a perfect sick man. That's the way it is, Just the way it is. You may think you know my anger, you may say you share my rage. You might even see my struggles but you'll never, no no ever, no no never feel my pain. And everyone is every every man Cuz no one is a perfect man and everyone is every man Cuz no one is a perfect man and everyone is every man Cuz no one is a perfect man Everyone is every man Cause no one is a perfect man that's the way it is that's the way it is Just the way it is.