It would be easy to sit in judgment of Anthony and Rodney Thomas, Stop Snitchin’s creator, given the film’s ethos of violent vigilante justice, an ethos perhaps best captured by its corresponding slogan: “Snitches get stitches.” Except it is better captured by the actualization of the violence contained in those words:
“National examples of violence due to ‘snitching’ include Angela Dawson of Baltimore, who was killed along with her five children and husband on October 16, 2002, when their house was firebombed after she alerted police to illegal activities in her neighborhood. Another example is Terry Neely of Phoenix, Arizona, a 46-year-old man confined to a motorized wheelchair, who was tortured for days and then killed by Angela Simpson in August 2009. A third example is Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach, Florida, a 15-year-old who, in October 2009, was doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire after assailants yelled, ‘He's a snitch, he's a snitch.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Snitchin')
Easy to sit in judgment, that is, until one gets a sense of exactly how Stop Snitchin’s Pandora’s Box was first pried open. The history is laid out, point by point, in Tom Farrey’s excellent article for ESPN.com, and it is a story that begins, coincidentally, with another local basketball player. Farrey pieces together a narrative beginning with the fatal cocaine overdose of Maryland basketball star Len Bias shortly after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, a tragedy harnessed by Boston’s man in the US Congress, “Tip” O’Neill:
“As his constituents raged over the death of Bias, O'Neill sensed a political opportunity to make the Democrats look tough on drugs, according to Eric Sterling, a former counsel to the House judiciary committee, who explained the legislative machinations in a PBS Frontline report. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced, stripping judges of the ability to consider mitigating circumstances. Getting caught with five grams of crack (25 doses), for instance, meant five years behind bars, and that was that.” (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?id=2296590)
Unless, as Farrey goes on to explain, you “become a confidential informant. A snitch.” (ibid) The upshot of all of this was a) numberless Black men either incarcerated or otherwise bound up in the justice system, and b) a sub-population of Black men turned against their neighbors and neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to avoid hard time. Farrey’s article draws on the work of former Baltimore public defender turned law professor Alexandra Napatoff to summarize the end results thusly:
“The policy has helped fill up penitentiaries, while inducing a state of paranoia in high-crime neighborhoods that she (Napatoff) likens to the former East Germany under the secret police. On street corners and at family barbecues, anyone's a potential rat.”
Stop snitchin’, indeed. Except, of course, snitches get stitches. One seems caught between the rock and the hard place of either condoning state terrorism (i.e. the “war on drugs”) or vigilante terrorism (see the firebombing of Angela Dawson and her family).
It is all troubling enough to make the rush to judgment even more urgent, judgment establishing distance. If the violence, which is first institutional and then reactionary and then both all at once on every side, is endemic to the poor and the state that police’s them, then it isn’t my violence. It is precisely this logic that enables one to know that there are two to three hundred annual murders in Baltimore without thinking they actually happen. I am reminded of the time my old next door neighbor explained to me that “We don’t turn around in other people’s driveways in this neighborhood,” which, of course, is not the kind of thing one says in a neighborhood where people actually don’t turn around in one another’s driveways. (I was mature enough to 1) only think, and not say, “But I just did,” and 2) never turn around in her driveway again, maintaining a relationship that would ultimately prove to be of great comfort when my other next door neighbor repeatedly leaf-blowered his leaves into a pile in front of my house.)
The distance established by believing “Snitches don’t get stitches in this neighborhood” also reminds me of the stickers you used to see in driver side mirrors: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The comforting distance is pure illusion, and not just because the violence can erupt at any time and any place. (In my twenty years in Baltimore, most of which have been spent indoors, I have been robbed at gun point in a fast food drive thru lane in addition to walking from my car to my then-apartment only to see someone pull out a gun and start shooting, thankfully not at me, a block away.) The illusion is that Stop Snitchin’ is an ethos circumscribed by class and race, when, in fact, it is a national mythos that informs every station of society, from the very top to the very bottom, and everywhere in between.
To understand how “Snitches get stitches” operates outside of the environs with which it is explicitly associated, one must both recall that a) the pen is mightier than the sword, and b) there is more than one way to skin a cat. Combining them reminds us that there is more than one way to make a snitch bleed, most of them having to do with words. To wit, Edward Snowden. Whatever one makes of Snowden’s epoch making decision, it has resulted in at least two indelible outcomes. Before Snowden, everyone knew we lived in a surveillance state, we all just figured they were watching e.g. the vaguely ethnic guy who lives on the corner who smokes and never cuts his grass; now we all know they are watching each of us. Secondly, Snowden has left this plane, emerging as the Platonic form of 21st century American snitch the moment Secretary of State John Kerry branded him a “coward” and a “traitor,” (who knew the Platonic realm was in Russia?), making each of us Snowden’s flawed copy. “Each of us” because they are reading everyone’s email, i.e. we are all potential snitches, and “flawed” because, based on our collective non-reaction, we consider the NSA’s clinical filtering of our personal data on par with a “friend’s” perusal of our Facebook page.
Although it should be said that our collective non-reaction also functions to establish distance. If I say out loud to my kith and kin that I have nothing to hide and that if the NSA wants to waste its time reading my boring emails they are welcome to have at it, then I’ve used magical thinking to once again establish the illusion of comforting distance. It is the belief that by simply saying “Snitches don’t get snitches in this neighborhood,” one can prevent the NSA from ever showing up on one’s doorstep. All of which functions to repress the intolerable thought that they wouldn’t be reading one’s email if one weren’t already a suspect and, prima facie, a snitch.
But even if we grant that it is possible to keep one’s thoughts, words, and deeds pure enough not to raise any of the NSA’s red flags, perhaps by keeping every last online transaction linked in some way, shape, or form to one’s fantasy football team, one still has to make a living. Which, per a report last week in The Washington Post, increasingly involves “tak(ing) an unusual oath.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/workplace-secrecy-agreements-appear-to-violate-federal-whistleblower-laws/2014/06/29/d22c8f02-f7ba-11e3-8aa9-dad2ec039789_story.html) These oaths are “nondisclosure agreements” which, e.g., prevent “contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state… from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor.” (ibid)
And, it goes without saying, workplace snitches get stitches, too:
“Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement. ‘It was a gag order,’ said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. ‘The message was pretty clear: “Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.”’ ” (ibid)
In a strange echo of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” it is as if every employee is being required to declare “I am not a snitch,” precisely because, like Nixon, it is already an established fact that you actually are.
In the Salem Witch Trials, suspected witches had their hands and ankles tied together before being lowered into a lake. If they survived and floated to the surface it proved that they were witches, which meant that they were then put to death. If they sunk to the bottom and drowned, it proved that they weren’t witches after all. Just so, if there is one thing we can say about the Stop Snitchin’ world we find ourselves thrown into, it is this: All of us are gagged, and we all get stitches anyway.
The violence will end when there is nothing left to hide or when there is no one left to hide it. Which means the only path forward is truth and reconciliation, even, and especially, when the truth is irreconcilable; the only available future is an impossible one, which is a marginally better deal than the Salem witches got. I suggest we accept the offer, and, taking our cue from the old Master Card slogan, master the impossibilities.
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