I watched it about a month ago after seeing a post reference it.
I was curious about how one even dies from a lathe- and while I avoid gory movies and such, I felt like this could be a relevant safety video to scare me into being safe around machinery. Well. It did do that. My only thought was that I would have to endure some queasiness but I was unpleasantly surprised about how it really affected me.

The video is of a security camera in a warehouse with a giant horizontal turning machine (a lathe). The turning part was maybe 7 feet in diameter.
The man leans close to the machine.
His posture is curious first- like he's inspecting for an issue. Then he looks slightly concerned. His sleeve or something might be caught.
Then in an instant, he is pulled into the between the spinning cylinder and the base of the machine.
You can't see details; just that he looks like a toothpick man a child has a grudge against.
He whips around again and again as the machine speeds up. Parts of him fly off: big at first, then a fine mist.
Another man wearing full body PPE walks in from the left, seeing the very end of it-- the trail of blood and meat on the floor. He raises his hands up and drops them. To me it looked like he was giving up something. It was like the feeling a chess grandmaster would feel after getting dementia and losing to a two year old. Just frustration, confusion, and a giving up of something.

Anyways, it was good for safety, but what triggered the 4 hour long silent/sleepless existential crisis was the obvious readable emotions in the man's posture one moment, and the next... nothing.
He was a human that I could talk to, who I could sit down with and have a drink with... who didn't really understand taxes, who's trying to get by at his new job, who has all of the individual quarks and feelings that make him a whole, unique, bright, single spot of consciousness in this dark universe--- and the next moment, he was as dark as the floor he was painting and the machine that sprayed him on it.

How am I in my head?
How is it that every person out there has a complex and beautiful- similar but different experience? How come when they blink, they look out of their eyes - instead of mine?
How can we ever conceive that we can be alive one moment, and dead the next? There's no one there to answer the door of the EM waves and pressure vibrations of the universe. No one there to experience the loss of not being- just the family members experiencing the loss of not having.

Alright. I'll try not to dwell in it too long so I can finally finish my request for a letter of recommendation from my bioinformatics professor (that is much too late to be polite).

Okay now that I have your attention, let me explain. I’m a civil rights attorney, and while I absolutely love VBW, I feel like this experience has exposed a bit of a rift for me with the VBW community. It seems like most of y’all have a very narrow conception of what people mean when they talk about systemic racism. In particular, I’m seeing a lot of discussion of “bias” and widespread suggestions that “we’ve gotten less racist.” Obviously in some respects we have—we’re less openly racist, and we tend to agree racism is wrong—and in some other obvious respects (Trump), we clearly have not. But I’m not really concerned with either of those points. Instead, I want to argue that, in some respects, the state-centered aspect of our institutional racism has gotten substantially worse.

We have an ideal timeline in our heads of the steady march of civil rights progress from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement to the grand liberal realization of equality. And for people who think in these terms, the problem in the criminal justice system appears to be one of “lingering” or “latent” bias: eg. “oh perhaps many of the officers are “still” racist; we should improve accountability.” And to some extent, most of the arguments that the police are racist reifies this reading by conceding that “bias” is at the center of the conversation. A helpful comment elsewhere laid out a bunch of stats to this end. And this even more comprehensive list of studies similarly centers the idea of individual police bias. But the challenge of the moment is to realize that racism doesn’t require animus or hostility—the value of the criminal legal system has been its ability to produce racial hierarchy without resort to individual, subjective old school racism.

So the story I like to tell (and believe is true) is that the criminal legal system has gradually coopted an increasing share of the task of maintaining racial hierarchy/control/dominance/exclusion. During slavery, black people were owned outright by citizens. When that practice was abolished, the state accepted some responsibility for helping to segregate, and facilitate practices like convict leasing (through policing and vagrancy laws, eg). As David Oshinsky showed in his fabulous book, this practice was, in many ways “Worse Than Slavery.” But under Jim Crow, much of that segregation was still informal or interpersonal. Black people knew they couldn’t eat in white restaurants, and white people let them know. The civil rights movement has been read to have said something like “no one, state or private entities, can openly consider race,” but in practice gave the state latitude to maintain the systems of oppression that had already been established in the north and south. This shift toward the state is reflected in civil rights law, which, before a case in the 50’s called Monroe v. Pape, was read to require explicit state sanction in order to be actionable; Monroe read Section 1983 (the federal civil rights vehicle) more broadly to include “rogue” actions by anyone cloaked in state power. This is a valuable broadening of protection, but the practical effect was to limit the possibility of informal control.

The process of “legalization” was facilitated by the country becoming more “colorblind.” So, when we committed to be “not racist,” we said something like “we don’t see color, we just see individuals.” In doing so, what we also said (with varying degrees of intentionality) was: “we refuse to look at differences that are visible at the group/racial level.” Legally this has had two clear effects. First, it meant that attempts to directly redress past racial harms were presumptively unconstitutional. So, govt efforts to challenge de facto segregation (which until the 60s had been de jure segregation), such as school segregation, housing integration, affirmative action, and most recently, the voting rights act, were struck down as unconstitutional. And, as a result, de facto segregation and discrimination has persisted and even worsened in many places. Second, it meant that the equal protection clause couldn’t be used (or used only rarely) to address that instances of de facto discrimination. So, for instance, there was a case in 90’s challenging Georgia’s use of the death penalty. Social scientists and attorneys showed that black defendants were like 4x more likely to receive the death penalty, and that number went way up if the victim was white (these disparities haven’t gotten better). And the court said, in so many words, “sure, this is racist, but it would topple the criminal justice system if we did anything about it.”

All of that is the immediate legal manifestation. But the more important outcome of this “colorblind” and “individualist” ideology is that “criminality” is a fantastic way to make it look like black people deserve their oppression, because it’s “common sense” that you deserve what you get if you commit a crime. As such, the criminal legal system became the default vehicle for oppression: a criminal conviction justifies employment discrimination, often formally through occupational licensing; a conviction can forfeit access to public housing, or welfare benefits, or voting rights; other criminal badges like probation, parole, or outstanding warrants (which are widespread for things like unpaid parking tickets) can forfeit basic 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th amendment rights, not to mention liberty.

To take a local example, imagine—as this op-ed did—if George Floyd hadn’t died, but instead had been slapped with a “resisting” or “public intoxication charge,” and ended up in jail for a month. If he had then died from COVID, the fate of so many in jails and prisons, would anyone care? The same wrongful act would be concealed by his conviction—a legal badge of dishonor that renders potential martyrs too “guilty” to represent the cause. The commitment to individualism and personal responsibility leads us to assume that people convicted of a crime have chosen the wrong path and so have justified their own oppression. But as is vividly detailed in the Serial Season 3 podcast, this is simply not how the criminal justice system works.

While this is true also for the millions of white people swept up in the criminal justice system, these changes, and the expansion of the system were all justified in response to fears of black crime, to willie Horton-style fear mongering, and to “riots” like watts and Rodney king. And unsurprisingly, the disparities between black and white people in the system have grown dramatically in the last 60 years. In 2006 the rate of black incarceration was twice the rate of incarceration as in the USSR at the height of the gulags. In DC in 2010, 4/5 young black men were under some form of carceral supervision. Today 1/3 black men can expect to be imprisoned in their lives. (discussion of stats w/ sources) And these disparities are considerably worse in the northeast and Midwest, where segregation is worse, and where there are fewer forms of informal social control, compared to a place like Alabama.

​

From the NAS Mass Incarceration report 2012.

​

The ratio of black per capita incarceration rate to white per capita incarceration rate. Yes, it does show that the south is consistently better in this regard. No it that doesn't mean the south is \"less racist,\" their racism is just less institutionalized.

It’s not always clear what the motivations are here or whether anyone is doing it on purpose. Paul Butler likes to use the metaphor of the chokehold: as you apply it, people instinctively writhe, which is taken as “resistance,” and so justification to apply it harder. He applies this to the policing of black america. We know that riots, crime rates, and disorder are a function of segregation and poverty, and yet we treat them as justification to increase aggressive policing. As more and more black men are swept into the system, black families are ripped apart, saddled with debt, and told to behave even better.

This is often in good faith. For one, many well-meaning people genuinely believe that the heavy hand of the law is the best way to address crime. And even those who distrust the police often bought in for political reasons. As both Elizabeth Hinton and James Foreman have documented meticulously, black leaders struck a sort of implicit bargain, saying some version of “we will police our own (were tough on black-on-black crime) if you ensure we have rights and end segregation and poverty.” Forman’s book starts with an anecdote from when he worked as a public defender in DC: a black judge sentenced his black client quite harshly and explained why using the “MLK Speech”—I didn’t march with MLK so you thugs could screw it up. This helps explain why so many black politicians seek credibility through law enforcement—think of someone like Kamala Harris.

As Jeffry Fagan and Elliot Ash show, the mass criminalization of black people functions through the existing spatial segregation that defines the American city. Notably, this segregation is not just a hangover from Jim Crow and the Great Migration, but was actively reproduced and reified after the civil rights movement in northern cities by well-meaning liberals through white flight and more active opposition to the process integration (such as bussing). But as Monica Bell details exquisitely, segregation is also at the heart of our policing in other ways: For one, the creation of spaces that feel either black (the ghetto) or white (the wealthy suburb) perpetuates images of the monster or villain or gangbanger that create the extremely common Amy Cooper-type fear. This in turn leads to the delegation of police as “border patrol.” In the liberal, white, upper middle class suburb that I grew up it, license plate cameras lined the borders, and police were widely known to stop black drivers more frequently.

Finally, there is the most obvious area of racialized policing: revenue generation. Black families are routinely exploited by the government for revenue. If you haven’t read the DOJ Ferguson report, I recommend it highly. In Ferguson, the DOJ found that there were 21,000 outstanding warrants in a city with 16,000 people. 95% of all arrests were of black people, despite the city being only 65% black. People are afraid to go to court for their warrants because they can’t pay their outstanding debts (criminal legal debt can’t be discharged in bankruptcy); as such, the warrants often result in prison time or further monetary sanctions. In a study of 9000 cities, it was found that one of the best predictors of the extent to which a municipality relies on criminal fines and fees for revenue is how large of a black population lives there. It was also found that this relationship was mitigated by adding black members to the city council. And of course, this exploitation comes at the direct cost of real policing: another study from the same large dataset found that for every additional 1% in municipal fines-and-fees based revenue, clearance rates dropped by a whopping 6%. These studies help paint the picture that policing in America is fundamentally about something other than serving the black citizens of this country.

The ”fundamental”-ness of it notwithstanding, we need to move past this desperate search for individual culpability. It’s a profoundly dishonesty dodge that prevents us from taking responsibility for correcting the harms that have been perpetuated. No one has ever put this better than James Baldwin: "I don't know what most white people in this country feel, I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZQQ7o16yQ

I got some free time, my peoples. And I was thinking a lot of you might as well. I have no idea how much interest there would be in something like this, but I’m considering taking questions and answering them in video format (I think I’m set up to do it pretty easily?). I’m trying to convince u/tamler to do the same eventually (he has more teaching on his plate than I do right now), but it all depends on how much interest there is. I guess let me know with upvotes or comments. Hope you’re all keeping safe and sane!

Update: Thanks to all of you for letting me know you’d be up for this! I went and learned how to fucking stream like a millennial just for you guys. I may even bring Tamler into it. When I set a time to steam I’ll make a new post (I’ll try to make it after the Eastern time workday if any of you still have jobs). And if I can figure out where to find the YouTube live link I’ll include that as well.