Let the Wookiee Win

So anyway, I read the following on the blog of someone I "know" online, who, it's safe to say, is something of a conservative. I've snipped it a bit, but not by much, as I'd like to coney the full point. And I'm not linking to it, although I know this robs it of some credibility, because I don't mean to call the author out, as I find him to be a genuinely thoughtful person, even if I don't always agree with him.

[... I]f we assume Kavanaugh is a rapist based on the evidence at hand, this is the message, I as a man, will receive:

How you behave doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you've accomplished or how you've treated women. If one woman comes forward and makes an accusation against you, no matter how vague or difficult to corroborate, we will believe her, and assume you are a rapist, assaulter, or abuser. There is no amount of goodwill you can bank that will protect you from this.

Maybe it's worth it. Maybe this is better or a just comeuppance for the fear women have had to live with.

But it is a real cost. And not all men will respond to this by being super-careful. We are removing an incentive to behave well. If I'm going to be considered a rapist anyway, why not? [...]

Now, I understand the logic here, and it makes sense. You could boil it down to "If I'm going to do the time, why not do the crime?" But where it doesn't work for me is in the fact that isn't generally how society looks at things. Imagine the following:

If we assume Black people are criminals based on popular prejudices, this is the message, I as a Black person, will receive:

How you behave doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you've accomplished or how you've treated other people. If a White person comes forward and makes an accusation against you, no matter how vague or difficult to corroborate, we will believe them, and assume you are a rapist, murderer or drug dealer. There is no amount of goodwill you can bank that will protect you from this.

Maybe it's worth it. Maybe this is better or a just comeuppance for our failure to constantly police one another.

But it is a real cost. And not all Black people will respond to this by being super-careful. We are removing an incentive to behave well. If I'm going to be considered a criminal anyway, why not?
While I dislike saying "you know how this would turn out," because that serves to hold people accountable for what I think they would think or do, rather than what they have done, when was the last time you heard someone say, "You know, maybe the criminality that we complain about in minority communities is triggered by the soft bigotry of our own low expectations, and if we stopped treating whole groups of people like criminals, they'd rise to our expectations"?

As much as I understand that there are a lot of factors that go into whether or not someone chooses to break the law in serious ways, the single largest factor tends to be choice. But even given that, societies do a lot to attempt to influence the cost-benefit analysis of breaking the rules. And the imperfections of the justice system often mean that while there's substantial overlap between the people who commit crimes and the people who are held accountable for them, the mapping isn't perfect. And it's generally understood that Black Americans are more likely to be treated as though they've committed a crime when they haven't than White people.

And if the logic is, in fact, sound, then why shouldn't this sort of thing be a general call to presume innocence until proven guilty?

Han Solo: Let him have it. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee.
C-3PO: But sir. Nobody worries about upsetting a droid.
Han Solo: That’s 'cause a droid don’t pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose. Wookiees are known to do that.
C-3PO: I see your point, sir. I suggest a new strategy, R2. Let the Wookiee win.

Although to be sure, Black people are often considered big and scary. It's just that firearms trump the ability to pull arms out of sockets. But the Star Wars quote does sort of touch on what I think part of the problem is. "If I'm going to be considered a rapist anyway, why not?" can be viewed as a low-level threat. And White men can make these sorts of veiled threats without threatening the mainstream of the established social order, because they're not threatening one another, and they are the mainstream of the social order. And the mainstream of the social order is always the Wookiee in the room, able to pull arms from sockets because there's no one bigger to stop them.

Chants of "no justice, no peace," come across as extortionate, because they are. But they're also aimed at the mainstream of the established social order from outside of it, and the social order, when it mobilizes to defend itself, pulls people's arms out of their sockets. And so the only notion of fairness, or sportsmanship, that it must take into account is its own. And so the withholding of innocent until proven guilty can be viewed as a theft, something that perpetrators risk being punished for by people who can decide that if they've already paid the invoice, they may as well have something to show for it. No one risks upsetting the droids, because the droids aren't the strongest people in the room.

Force, as it always does, dictates terms. The whole reason why the reckoning between Dr. Ford and now-Justice Kavanaugh has been so long in coming, the reason why the evidence is vague and difficult to corroborate is that back in the early eighties, when Dr. Ford was in high school (and I was too, for that matter), she was the droid. And whether or not the powers that be would have pulled her arms from their sockets, it was decided that the risk wasn't worth it. So she let the Wookiee win. Perhaps we would all have been better off if she'd stood her ground and risked dismemberment.

Maybe the backlash is worth it. Maybe all of the acrimony that surrounded this process is better than the alternative or a just comeuppance for what was arguably an act of cowardice. Maybe never seeking justice provides men on the margin of mistreating women with an incentive to behave.

Or maybe it just allows us to avoid reckoning with the reality of the world that we've created, one where the mainstream can be sore losers. Or maybe I'm simply a fool for playing by the rules; after all, it not like people don't already treat me like a criminal.