“Thank You For Your Sacrifice” is a Cop Out for Neoliberal Passivity
The “polite liberal” is alive and well – and they thank you for your sacrifice.
On April 20, 2021, a jury handed down three guilty verdicts for disgraced police officer Derek Chauvin, finding Chauvin guilty for murdering George Floyd.
The verdict came almost a full year after the murder, and after about a month of court testimony about a video that the whole world could plainly see was as callous as manslaughter can be.
On my Facebook and Twitter echo chambers the response was best described as relief. Some seemed to celebrate that at least in this one case, justice seems to have been served.
One response stood out to me.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said in a presser, “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.”
The response to her response was widespread mockery, but I think it’s very telling that her response was to thank George Floyd, a murdered man, for his “sacrifice.”
It’s as though Pelosi saw this as an arranged spectacle, like George Floyd chose to go out and be murdered by Derek Chauvin. As though George Floyd was the main actor in his own death (which was the defense’s case). Like instead of self-immolating to raise awareness for Tibet, he allowed a police officer to murder him in broad daylight.
Unfortunately, I think that there are many people, very comfortable in their circumstances, who nodded in agreement with the sentiment.
These are the good neoliberals. Their knee-jerk reaction to any tragedy is not to question the circumstances surrounding the tragedy – but instead to thank the victims, because the circumstances surrounding the tragedy represents “normalcy,” and “order.”
These are the same people who go out of their way to thank veterans for their sacrifice, never questioning why we demand so many young men and women to potentially “sacrifice” their lives just for an opportunity to leave their Rust Belt towns or to escape the dearth of opportunities in their urban neighborhoods.
They thank our troops without questioning the justice of the warzones that our tax dollars support around the world, often for corporate interests masquerading as “national security”.
So, here’s some more individuals and groups that should perhaps be thanked for their sacrifice.
Maybe, someday, the market will make it profitable for someone to build new pipes in Flint, Michigan and to provide healthcare for the poisoned children. But until then, thank you to the children who suffer from lead poisoning in Flint: thank you for your sacrifice of being a child in Flint, and for raising awareness about environmental injustice. Someday, maybe one of you will die so publicly that your GoFundMe for funeral expenses can go viral.
To the families of miners who died from black lung and without their pensions: thank you for your sacrifice at the altar of cheap fossil fuels. We hope that someday we can tweak some environmental laws to protect your children – but maybe not until someone livestreams a miner choking to death on their own blood in their own home.
To the families of patients who rely on GoFundMe to afford medications and treatments: thank you for your sacrifice. Because when you die, we will be able to acknowledge your death as a necessary sacrifice to protect the profits of our healthcare system. Perhaps you will be able to pressure UnitedHealthcare to name a charity endowment after your dead relative, if it gets enough attention and United gets enough blame.
To the women who have been sexually assaulted in their workplaces, at their homes, in public and in private: thank you for your sacrifice. Whenever a predator is found guilty because of your re-traumatization and testimony, we thank you and celebrate that we don’t have to address misogyny and patriarchy in our culture head on, because justice will have been served in a public trial.
To LGTBQ+ children who endure bullying and contemplate suicide, and to anyone who has ever been assaulted because of who they are or who they love: thank you for your sacrifices, which raised awareness that homophobia and general other-ing is still a problem. Someday perhaps one of your assaults will be so public that we can all breathe a sigh of relief when your attackers are found guilty on live TV. Then, justice will have been served.
Thank you, all victims, for raising awareness about your plights. We see you, and in your death, we acknowledge that justice will have been achieved.
The more publicly you die or are killed, the better.
Because for neoliberals, hyper-public individual sacrifice is the greatest sacrifice, because individual sacrifice is the kind of sacrifice that best preserves the system.
Individual sacrifice allows us, as a society, to focus on victims as though they are martyrs, and to see injustices as though they are rare exceptions in an otherwise just system.
When we can make a single martyr, we can dismiss whole movements.
When we can make a single martyr, we can dismiss systemic injustices.
When we can make a single martyr, we can have a single trial in the court of public opinion and then good neoliberals can move on with their lives.
The good neoliberal is the more diverse 21st century equivalent of the “white liberal” that Martin Luther King Jr. warned of:
A leading voice in the chorus of social transition belongs to the white liberal…. Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquility to equality….
The White liberal must see that the Negro needs not only love, but justice. It is not enough to say, “We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends.” They must demand justice for Negroes. Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would love for a pet. Love at its best is justice concretized. Love is unconditional. It is not conditional upon one’s staying in his place or watering down his demands in order to be considered respectable….
The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice.”
“Thank you for your sacrifice” sets the speaker apart from the victim whom they are thanking – it distances and sanitizes and sets victims of injustice on a revered pedestal – and in doing so it removes the speaker from any potential action and places the injustice as an exception to an otherwise just system.
Unfortunately, it is not enough that one police officer was found guilty in one circumstance in one state – and we cannot allow ourselves to believe that this verdict is the end of a story, or even a turning point.
To do so would be to accept a quick return to injustice in the form of “order” and “normalcy” at the expense of a more just future.