One needs a very good explanation to excuse, let alone justify, the killing of four police offers. One needs even a better explanation to make sense of the claim that a person who has killed four police offers is a hero. Here is an explanation that would work: The person in question was protecting his family from police brutality. At the risk of offending feminists, perhaps, precisely what we expect a man to do is protect his family. It is an expectation that does not apply to women in the way that it applies to men. And I would expect a real man, as Dr. Laura Schlessinger would say, to stand up even to law enforcement officials in order to protect his family from police brutality.
Whatever color or ethnicity that might apply to a man who killed officers of the law in order to protected his family against police brutality, he would be none other than a hero in my book
The problem with calling Lovelle Mixon a hero is simply that the explanation for his killing 4 four police offers cannot in any way be construed as a form of moral excellence on his part. In killing the four officers, Mixon was not thereby standing up for a deep and fundamental moral principle.
Now, various discussions of the Lovelle Mixon event point to the racism that is commonly committed by police offers against black people. Indeed, some say that the number of blacks killed by police officers is rather close to the number of police officers killed by blacks. Let us concede for the sake of argument that this shows how careless police officers are when it comes to the lives of black people. Again, it is for the sake of argument that I am making this concession.
The problem, alas, is that even with this concession we do not have an explanation for how Mixon is a hero for killing four police officers—especially since it is not even remotely possible to interpret his behavior as a response to the injustices that police officers are said to have visited upon blacks. Mixon was not acting on behalf of a deep and egregious wrong that had been committed against this black and then another black. And so on.
It becomes all the more implausible to suppose that Mixon is a hero when one actually considers his background. This is a man who has been no stranger to legally inappropriate behavior. Worse, there appears to be significant evidence that he raped a 12 year old child.
So even if we concede for the sake of argument that police officers have routinely mistreated and killed blacks, this concession no more warrants calling Mixon a hero for killing four police officers than does the fact that a black can recite Martin Luther King’s “Free at Last” speech by heart warrants calling that black a genius.
I am reminded of the way in which the NAACP handled matters in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision which officially ended segregation in public schools. What was true, of course, is that every black regardless of the person’s intellectual abilities and family was entitled to attend the public schools of her or his community. But the NAACP did not just pick any black off the street as a test case for the decision. Quite the contrary, the NAACP picked a highly talented black child from a very admirable family background to use as a test case. This was done in order to prevent any unsavory sentiments about blacks from adversely affecting the decision.
Whatever our race or nationality or gender or sexual orientation or whatever might be: The simple truth of the matter is that we need to pick our heroes carefully. A hero must be a model of the kind person we would want to be or we would want others to be. Nay, a hero should be very much someone whom we would want our children to be like.
What a hero should not be is merely someone who serves as a flashpoint for our anger and grievances. And ethnic pride, as wonderful as it may be, does not justify calling a hero someone who is merely a flashpoint for anger. Indeed, doing so is very, very self-defeating.
Here is another way of pointing the point. If a member of a community is indeed a hero, then there ought to be a very straightforward sense in which that community would be better off if there were more people like that person in the community. There is no obvious respect in which the Oakland black community would be better off if more members of the community were like Lovelle Mixon.
Most of us will barely inspire anyone. But our heroes should. Most of us will never occasion hope in the life of another. But our heroes should. Most of us will not give anyone a reason to change her or his life for the better. But our heroes should. Lovelle Mixon was not a hero.
I have not denied the claim of injustice of which the police in California are accused. And Mixon’s death may be a most painful reminder of that reality. Alas, the world is full of painful reminders, from the crash of an airplane in which all the passengers die to the damage and deaths that come about as a result of a category-5 hurricane.
The mere fact that a person’s death is a painful reminder of the social injustice that a people or a community endures does thereby make the person a hero for dying. It is this simple truth that the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement has failed to grasp. And the movement does black people the world over an enormous disservice by declaring Lovell Mixon a hero. Let us try on for size the idea that Mixon is a hero: Nelson Mandela versus Lovell Mixon. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn versus Lovell Mixon. Martin Luther King, Jr. versus Lovell Mixon. Elie Wiesel versus Lovell Mixon.
In comparison to each of the above named individuals, Mixon’s life is so lacking in moral excellence that it is ludicrous at best and borders on moral genocide at worse to call Mixon a hero.
Was he Mixon a victim of racial injustice? Did he have to live through an intolerable hell the likes of which I am cannot even begin to imagine? I assume that both questions are to be answered affirmatively. A hero, though, is not merely someone for whom these claims are true. Rather, a hero is someone who with grace and majesty transcends this very reality. The hero is not someone who is merely carried along by the current of the cesspool of her or his reality. Rather, the hero rises above it. Lovell Mixon is not a hero. No amount of name calling or moral posturing will make it the case that he is.
