The Means Are Not Different From the Ends: Simone de Beauvoir and Black Lives Matter
While the protests in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s killings were too large and decentralized to have a single goal, it seems fair to say that one major locus was systemic police violence against people of color. The tactics used by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters to focus this issue were overwhelmingly peaceful, but the rare outbreaks of violence captivated the media and catalyzed a larger conversation on justified violent protest. One argument went something like this: systemic police brutality is violent. If the goal of protests is to end police brutality, and one way to end this institution is violent tactics, then violent tactics are justified by their peaceful goal. I believe that Simone de Beauvoir offers a different perspective on political violence that pushes past the binary between justified/unjustified towards a more rigorous ethical evaluation. Her arguments are relevant to BLM inasmuch as they preserve a space for political violence without giving a moral carte blanche.
My family spent March, April, and May driving between our house in Boston and a vacation home in the Outer Cape. The point of these trips was to diffuse the tension between me and my two sisters. We love each other very much, and our fights’ disturbing ferocity reflect these emotional bonds. It was the week after Floyd’s killing, and the three of us were wedged in the backseat of the car. Like most people in the country, we were talking about Floyd, police brutality, and the racism of America’s institutions. I was, at this time, submerged in the final readings for my Comparative Politics class which included MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Max Weber’s “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” and excerpts from James C. Scott’s seminal work Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Political Resistance. Needless to say, my head was buried in the sand of academic treatises on political violence. I lacked any clear resolution or opinion. My youngest sister was concerned that people were not empathizing with violent protest; racism is violent, she contended, thus violent responses were proportionate. It was an eye for an eye. I disagreed (more strongly, I should say, than was fair, especially considering my irresolute feelings). An argument ensued, feelings were hurt, and my parents eventually invoked the silence game.
Had I been a little smarter at the time, I could have invoked Beauvoir to respond to my sister. Now, I can only imagine what she might have said. Especially towards the end of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir crafts a response to different justifications of violence. In her estimation, the charge “the end justifies the means” is insufficient because “the means” define the end (134). The end must be continuously “disclosed” or “present” in the means used (135). This is why a democracy “which defends itself only by acts of oppression” in order to achieve the goal of democracy is “denying” democratic values (134). In order to resist seriousness (a condition where ready-made values are pursued at the expense of subjectivity), social movements must continuously locate their values or end through their actions.
Beauvoir is concerned that social movements which justify their actions based on a “mythical Historical end” hold onto an unintelligible view of the future (138). We can’t use this future to justify present means precisely because it is not the present. We can’t “expect anything of that time” towards which social movements work (138). Instead, Beauvoir argues that we must justify actions “in themselves,” as a “finished form” that derives meaning from the present (140).
Had Beauvoir intervened in the historical Anna/Rachel car battle of 2020, she would have interjected that ethics don’t give a “recipe” for determining answers (145). Perhaps we should have been less concerned with locating a “yes, violent protest is ok” or a “no, violent protest is not ok” response and instead focused on discussing the tactic in light of their goal. This is not to say that Beauvoir would not have strong feelings on violent BLM protests— I am of the opinion (at least for now) that she would feign serious skepticism. But as far as finding a guiding voice that frames violence in an interesting way, Beauvoir gives insight into the recent discourse on BLM.
