When #metoo and #blacklivesmatter Collide
Readers will know I have been sympathetic with the animating goals, though not necessarily with the tactics and policy prescriptions, of Black Live Matter. I do believe there are problems with police accountability and violations of due process that disproportionately (though not exclusively) affect the black community. While we have come an extremely long way (I grew up in East Texas and saw a lot of bad sh*t), brown skin can still incur a presumption of guilt that simply should not be there in our justice system.
On the flip side I have sympathy with the animating goals of the Me Too movement, and have been utterly offended by stories like the ones about Matt Lauer's automatic door lock to trap women in his office (the same Matt Lauer NBC may have fired Megyn Kelly in order to bring back some day). And as in the case of BLM, while I am sympathetic to MeToo problems, I have not agreed with their tactics or policy prescriptions.
So despite having roughly the same reaction to both movements, why do I say that #blm and #metoo may be headed for a collision? Let's start with #metoo. This is basically a victim's rights movement -- lamenting that victims do not get a fair shake in the justice system. In many ways the movement is a direct descendent of movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish whose theme was that the justice system catered too much to criminals and gave criminals too many rights to the detriment of victims and society. MeToo argues that "women should always be believed," which in practice is interpreted as meaning that the presumption of innocence and due process for the accused should be dialed back or eliminated. These would be very familiar ideas to Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey. So much so that I am almost surprised no director has done a female #metoo version of Death Wish. Oh wait, Clint Eastwood already made that movie as part of the Dirty Harry series, it was called Sudden Impact.
In this context it is easy to see the potential train wreck that may be coming between MeToo and BLM. The BLM movement at its core is about people of color being treated as guilty -- by police, by the system, by society -- based on the color of their skin. BLM is about getting due process for the accused (or merely suspected) where it does not exist today. Metoo, on the other hand, wants to reduce due process rights of the accused. These two purposes almost have to come into conflict.
This should not come as a surprise, except perhaps to a generation who grew up in crappy public schools that no longer assign real books like, say, To Kill a Mockingbird. This literary classic, which in my day was a progressive icon but now is being pushed into the background, was about the trial of a white woman falsely accusing a black man of rape, and how this black man was barely saved in a town where everyone automatically believed the white woman.
But we don't just have to look in fiction for examples, we are seeing it today in universities. Universities are the one place in America that (due to the mandates of the Obama Department of Education) substantially reduced due process and presumption of innocence for men accused of a variety of sexual crimes by women. The College Fix is one of the many sites in my feed reader, and it has featured numerous cases of college men suing universities over their being railroaded out of school in kangaroo courts over dubious assault charges. And do you know what I have observed? A disproportionate number of these men who feel victimized by this system appear to me to be men of color and/or non-European foreigners (example from today). It should not be a surprise to our SJW friends -- I venture that it is zero surprise to BLM -- that these folks with the least power are hurt the most by the loss of due process rights.
Postscript: I have written before about where BLM and MeToo went wrong in what were originally good causes. Here is where I think BLM went wrong. I can't find where I have talked about MeToo going off the rails in one concise article, so here is a brief description of my view: For years, and I presume still in some cases today, women have gone to their university or police or employer and reported sexual harassment or sex crime and have sometimes been met with lethargy -- they get patted on the head and told to go away or worse they get blamed for the incident. But the net result is no serious investigation. In this context, "believe the woman" makes sense. A woman's accusations should be treated seriously and get a serious investigation without negative consequences for the woman who reported it. But for a variety of reasons that desire to have real due diligence in response to accusations has morphed into a desire that the accusation be the same as a conviction. So we went from a system with no investigation, though with a default to the accused to now a system with no investigation and a default to the accuser. Neither system makes sense or is consistent with individual liberties and the rule of law and the entire history of our justice system. "Treat every woman's accusations seriously" would have been a better motto (though maybe with an asterisk for women brought forward by Michael Avenatti).
As a disclosure, I once had a female ex-employee (who I never met face-to-face) accuse me of all kinds of crazy stuff. The campgrounds I ran were training camps for the Taliban, I was a narcotics dealer, I was harboring fugitives, etc. She posted these accusations on facebook, tried to sue me, wrote letters to the government, tried to get on the news, and even put up yard signs. She threatened me and my family with pictures of her holding her gun and we had to get a restraining order and a better security system. It was a nerve-wracking time, and if we had believed all women, I would probably be in Guantanamo now. By the way, I remember my wife really blasting me for this piece when I said how reluctant I am being alone with a young woman. I responded to her, "what if I had been alone with [lady described above] for any amount of time?" She thought for a second and said, "you would have been hosed - she would have accused you of rape for sure."
