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Abstract
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We live in troubling times. As I write this article, the Russian Federation has invaded Ukraine, bringing the horrors of war, once again, to continental Europe. The world cheers Ukrainian resistance, and surrounding nations have opened their borders to receive the millions of refugees forced by terror to flee their homes. But in a reminder that we live in a world that fears and criminalizes the "other," holding them in disdain, African and Arab refugees have been plucked from trains and buses in their attempts to escape. They have been refused shelter in homes that welcomed their neighbors and made to know, in myriad ways, that they do not belong.1 This is unsurprising when considering the many moral panics about the danger of the foreign-born other. Refugees are often blamed for crime waves in the countries that receive them, despite there being little to no evidence of an actual spike in crime.2 Recent statements from the prime minister of Bulgaria explained the difference in treatment. "These are not the refugees we are used to," he said. "These people are Europeans" (Brito 2022).
The disdain for African and Arab people escaping violence on a similar scale is perhaps best captured in a video making the rounds on social media. An African refugee is forced to eat a banana by a couple at the Ukrainian border. After being struck in the face, the man pleads, "No problem, no problem," as he peels and then takes a bite. This is, of course, the universal symbol that this man is not a man at all. He is a brute, so says the banana. He must be treated as such. But Europe is not alone in its treatment of those it deems unworthy of full democratic participation. The US pledge to welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and its offer of moral, financial, and military support occurs against the backdrop of Texas Border Patrol agents on horseback rounding up Haitian asylum seekers (Sullivan and Kanno-Youngs 2021). And each year thousands of refugees escaping violence in South and Central America are processed at the US/Mexico border as "criminal aliens," not asylees. But the refugee is not the only brute. We make brutes out of US citizens.
While the horrors in Ukraine were unfolding, Naomi Osaka, one of the best-known tennis players in the world, was heckled at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. This seems like a small thing, but having lost the match in two straight sets, and in tears, she told the crowd that she could not stop replaying in her mind the treatment of Venus and Serena Williams at that same tournament 2 decades before. That "heckling" involved minutes of sustained boos directed at Serena, who was just 19 years old, from a crowd of mostly adult and mostly white Americans. The Williams sisters would experience years of ridicule, their dominance on the court explained by their muscular physique and some presumption of their preternatural strength, not their tennis technique or the many years it takes to hone and maintain skill at the level that they play. On occasion, the Williams sisters were even accused of cheating, evidenced by the number of random drug tests they were subjected to in comparison with their white counterparts.3 Tennis had found its brutes, its villains in need of a conquering hero, no matter how unlikely the Williams sisters' path to professional tennis may have been, and no matter whom they faced. But to be made a brute means much more than to be jeered and held in disdain. It is to be marked by the presumption of guilt and to be made subject to the weight of exclusion through law and in everyday life.
A week after Naomi Osaka's heckling, the hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court provided evidence of how the fear and disdain of the brute is marshaled through the law. Several senators raised objections to the judge's prior work as a federal defender representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Her supporters presented her work as exemplary. Judge Jackson was a zealous defender of constitutional values and a lawyer in the mold of John Adams, the founding father and American president who in his early years was the defense attorney for the redcoats involved in the infamous Boston Massacre. But what they did not mention was that Adams's defense relied on the specter of the brute. Adams recounts the Massacre in this way. Following a confrontation with an "unruly crowd," the British soldiers opened fire, killing five men. Among the dead were Crispus Attucks, a middle-aged escaped slave and sailor on his way to North Carolina. Attucks, the "stout mulatto," gave the soldiers reason to fear for their lives
Language: en |