Reading the news of the latest police murders of African Americans in this country, I’ve been wondering how much state violence American elites believe African Americans are supposed to tolerate before they take matters into their own hands.

I suspect most officials, intellectuals, and journalists don’t think much, if at all, about that question. Back in the 1960s, they did. From the Kerner Commission to Hugh Graham’s and Ted Gurr’s lengthy two-volume study Violence in America, which was a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

Michael Walzer’s essay, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” which first appeared in Commentary in 1970, is an interesting document in this regard.

For two reasons.

First, Walzer’s description of African Americans as an oppressed minority in the 1960s features many of the elements you might expect: pervasive discrimination; limited economic power; social marginalization and exclusion; and continuously frustrated political action. Blacks, in Walzer’s treatment, are the victims of a white majority in a putatively free liberal democracy. That combination of systemic unfreedom and inequality, for the minority, amid relative freedom and equality, for the majority, is what characterizes their oppression as a minority.

But one element of their oppression does not appear in Walzer’s account: rampant extra-judicial murder by the state. Why it’s not there I’m not sure. Writing in 1970, as a participant-observer in the Civil Rights Movement, Walzer is certainly sensitive to the multiple dimensions of the oppression of black Americans and would have been aware of police brutality. But for whatever reason, police murder is not part of the story. Instead, what Walzer is interested in is the ways in which blacks are “the victims of popular oppression.” That is, blacks as the victims of whites as citizens, who constitute a democratic majority in a democratic state.

That gives Walzer’s story a particular spin, for contesting the more or less nonviolent modes of oppression that are inflicted through the mechanisms of a more or less democratic state imposes, Walzer claims, a specific set of constraints on that oppressed minority that a more straightforward situation of oppression—say, slavery—would not. As Walzer writes, “slaves owe nothing to their masters and nothing again to the ruling committee of their masters.” But democratic citizens in a democratic state, even if they are oppressed democratic citizens, have to negotiate a more complicated path.

But the police force of large or small city, even when the political leadership of that city is African-American, even when the police officers in question are African-American, poses an altogether different kind of challenge. For theirs is a mode of power that is especially unaccountable to citizens, whether majorities or minorities; theirs is a mode of power that is, for a multiplicity of reasons, highly protected against democratic challenge and rule.

The philosopher John Drabinski made an interesting observation today on his Facebook page:

In my corner of the world, I keep seeing the phrase “extra-judicial killing” over the last couple of days. Like, I’m seeing it a lot a lot. Everywhere. I find this to be a really interesting and important phrase. Technically or by strict definition, that’s exactly what these police murders of Black people are: killings by the state without the adjudication of guilt or innocence, killing outside the law without consequences for that killing. But rhetorically, for me anyway, the phrase “extra-judicial killing” is the way we used to characterize military and militaristic dictatorships in 1980s and 1990s Latin America. … But I think we have to start associating extra-judicial killing and its broader (lack of) meaning with the notion of a military dictatorship. Think about it: what support is there, nationally, for continued presence in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or support for intervention in Syria? Do any of us, except those who read targeted stuff about that part of the world, really even know the extent of our presence, expenditure, death toll, and so on? No, of course we don’t. Because that’s the point: the military works (and has been for a very long time, maybe since the beginning) completely autonomously, bearing little if any relationship to the democratic arm of the state. And who would ever question that autonomy? No one does. The police operate with that autonomy, absolutely. Not unlike the paramilitary forces I associate with the phrase “extra-judicial killing.”

Which got me to thinking, with Walzer, about the obligations of an oppressed minority that is not only the victim of a popular majority and all the relatively non-violent ways in which that popular majority rules, but that is also the victim of a more specified kind of military dictatorship, which operates with relative impunity, murdering black Americans without accountability or remedy or justice at all.

Second, despite having defined the question of African-American oppression without reference to state violence, Walzer asks a fairly radical question:

What obligations can they [oppressed minorities such as African Americans] be possibly said to owe the (more or less) democratic state?

His answer is stark:

On this issue, liberal and democratic theorists have had very little to say, but what they have said is clear enough and, it must be admitted, very radical. They have argued, in effect, that oppressed minorities have no obligation at all within the political system.

Walzer takes that—”when justice is not done, there is no legitimate state and no obligation to obey”—as the premise of his essay. He proceeds to qualify and hedge that premise in all sorts of ways (I can’t do justice here to the richness and care of his argument), but what’s interesting to note, again, is that the oppression he had in mind did not include the open possibility, on any given day, that the oppressed minority in question could become, as the African-American congressman Keith Ellison put it so memorably today, a “hashtag.”

Every one of us on this stage knows that all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then our name is a hashtag. — Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) July 7, 2016

As Walzer suggests, the most basic texts of the liberal tradition are quite radical on this topic.

So let me close with the most liberal—and arguably radical—of them all, Locke’s Second Treatise.

Two passages seem relevant to me.

First, this, from the third chapter, on “The State of War”:

…nay, where an appeal to the law, and constituted judges, lies open, but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice, and a barefaced wresting of the laws to protect or indemnify the violence or injuries of some men, or party of men, there it is hard to imagine any thing but a state of war: for wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law,…

And, then, this, from the fourteenth chapter, on “Prerogative”:

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven [Locke’s frequently used term for the right to rebel], whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven. And this judgment they cannot part with, it being out of a man’s power so to submit himself to another, as to give him a liberty to destroy him; God and nature never allowing a man so to abandon himself, as to neglect his own preservation: and since he cannot take away his own life, neither can he give another power to take it.

As I finish this post, just past midnight, I take a quick glance at the news, and see that three police officers were killed, and seven others were wounded, tonight in Dallas during a demonstration against the recent police killings.

It has begun.

I pray, fervently pray, that we can step back from the abyss and resolve this issue without more killing; I have no taste, desire, or relish for violence. But that’s on all of us—citizens, elites, journalists, who must find the pressure points to eliminate this pervasive condition where a portion of us cannot feel safe on the streets.

Update (12:45 am)

Several people on Twitter have pointed out to me that we have no idea at this point who killed these police officers, what any of it means. It’s irresponsible for me to suggest that we do know what it means, without further information, and to jump to the conclusion that this was African Americans fighting back. My critics on Twitter are right. I shouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion. My apologies. I had just been writing, and thinking about this issue, for a good part of the night, and then was shocked by the news that I was seeing—which was, literally, a three-sentence article in the New York Times, with no mention of snipers, assassins, or anything like that—and put the two things together in my head. We’ll have to wait to find out more.

I should probably add—I didn’t think I needed to say this, given my last paragraph, but now I see, given tonight’s events, that I should clarify—that this post is in no way a call or endorsement or celebration of violence. As I said above, that is not my vision. What I am raising here is a different question that has been on my mind, and that I raised in the first paragraph: how long do we think this situation can go on like this, without the victims of police brutality fighting back, and what do some of our most mainstream traditions and voices, from the past and present, have to say about that question?