After a man was violently dragged from a United Airlines flight, there will no doubt be defences of the company along the lines of, “Well, if the man had obeyed he wouldn’t have been dragged off the plane.” In frank terms, this is [expletive].
The fear aboard United Express Flight 311 should alarm all thinking people about how the American mind has been trained to obey above all else. Obedience is a relentless message in the United States, drilled into the populace via education, business, government — and, of course, the threat and reality of police violence.
As George Carlin put it, the American ruling class doesn’t “want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking”. Rather, it wants “obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly [expletive] jobs.”
Was this was an act of racial violence? Let’s look at what we know.
The Chicago police department identifies the passenger as a “69-year-old Asian man”. There seems to be an unhealthy logic in thinking if that if he had refused to give up his seat, the appropriate response was violence. People tweeting “What would you have done?”, as if the only “choice” was unleashing law enforcement upon an elderly person, reveals how the American moral imagination dwells in what Get Out director Jordan Peele might call our collective “sunken place”.
Instilling a fear of disobedience
The same logic is often applied to black men who don’t survive encounters with the police: if he’d obeyed, he’d be alive. This message is meant to instill a fear of disobedience in the living and convince Americans that violence to facilitate commerce should be our first response.
The Chicago police department’s statement describes the passenger becoming “irate” when asked to disembark from the flight, then claims that he “fell”, striking an armrest “causing injuries to his face”.
That this so brazenly contradicts what we can all see on video speaks to the belief of American law enforcement that the public will obey it, regardless of what we can see with our own eyes.
Of course, the onus in this debacle was on United for overselling the flight, not on the person who bought the ticket. The United CEO’s technocratic statement of apology for having to “re-accommodate these customers” disgusts me, as does the defence that its employees “followed established procedures”. When your procedures wind up with a man drooling blood and saying “just kill me”, they’re not defensible.
I simply can’t believe a blonde white woman would have been yanked around by a cop in this way. She’d have threatened to sue, other passengers would have come to her aid, and the whole flight would have been deplaned before she’d been assaulted like that.
Was it the refusal from an Asian man that prompted such a violent response? I wouldn’t be surprised. Any possible Asian “model minority” status can be withdrawn at any time; refusal to defer to authority would quickly revoke that status. What message does this incident send to Asians and Asian Americans? It reinforces that they had better obey, or else.
There’s some deeply contextual US history behind a cop taking control of an Asian man’s body on behalf of a corporation. Asian bodies have been violently moved by the US and American corporations alike, from the use of Chinese immigrants for the dangerous work of building the transcontinental railroad after the American civil war, to their rejection via the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to Japanese internment during the Second World War.
Asian bodies are routinely erased from American history in our curriculum, as they are by way of whitewashing and yellowface in contemporary visual culture — for example in Ghost in the Shell, Doctor Strange, Aloha and The Great Wall. But thanks to United Airlines, an Asian body has been made visible in a way Hollywood couldn’t ever manage — as a subject of real-life state violence.
Why couldn’t United’s employees have mediated the situation, put their staff (who apparently needed seats people had paid for) on another flight, or simply waited? So much American violence could be mitigated by waiting.
This episode is reflective of the moral, intellectual and spiritual catastrophes the US routinely creates with its thirst for hasty “solutions” that ends in violence. Patience could have avoided the harm caused to this Asian man. Patience could have saved the lives of Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Sandra Bland or Eric Garner.
Recurring theme
American hegemony demands non-violence from protesters, but is quick to use violence against people who are peacefully not complying at UC Davis, Ferguson, Standing Rock — or even those who are just sitting in a plane seat. In every case, a lack of moral imagination, critical thinking and patience allowed a situation to reach a level of state violence, sometimes lethally, against people (mostly of colour).
A recurring concern for people of colour in the US is: who can touch and control my body? This fear is realised in many ways, from touching black women’s hair without permission, to denying abortion access to poor women of colour, to locking up about a million black men.
Fear of losing the control of one’s own non-white body has been visually dramatised by movies such as Get Out and horrific videos of people losing their lives at the hands of police.
And while we’ve long known about the dangers of driving while black, thanks to United Airlines, the aeroplane has become a new arena for these kinds of fears especially for people who are flying while Asian.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Steven W Thrasher is writer-at-large for the Guardian in the United States.
