Toya Graham is either a national hero or a national villain, depending on whom you listen to and what they understand about basic ethics.
“I just lost it,” said the mother of sixteen-year-old son Michael, about the moment when she saw Michael throwing rocks at police, tracked him down, smacked him around in front of the cameras, and became an internet sensation. “You never want to see your child out there doing that,” she said, going on to denounce violence against the police. But Michael probably saw it another way. Who’s right?
Rule 3 says “who started it” is an important consideration. From Michael’s perspective, he may try to argue that the police started it by being violent to Freddie Gray, the man whose death at police hands sparked the riots. Michael would be wrong in this. Rule 3.3 says none of us belong to a hive-mind collective, so it is not justice to levy violent consequences on a vast group like “tha po-leece.” Even if Michael had identified the one policeman responsible for Gray’s death (which none of us reasonably believe he did), rock-throwing does not serve rule 3’s purpose of mitigating damage: it is a physical technique aimed purely at antagonization and escalation. He had no basis on which to claim ethical motivation.
His mother, on the other hand, responded, yes, with violence, but aimed only at one human being whose actions she had witnessed first-hand, and for whose training and civilization she was responsible. This is clearly within the bounds of rule 3 and its corollaries, so Toya gets the pass. She used her violence only in response to an already-extant act of violence, per rule 3.1, and only against the one person whose guilt she could clearly ascertain, in accordance with rule 3.3. So the ethical among us must agree with Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, who said he wished he had more parents who took charge of their kids, and with Graham, who said the situation wouldn’t have been as bad if there were more mothers out there monitoring their sons.
There are a lot of unethical editorialists weighing in on the subject. Salon.com author Joan Walsh called praise for Graham, “hideous white hypocrisy” and “clueless media applause.” Her editorial is rife with different standards set for people based on the color of their skin, in bold defiance of rule 1.2. “This page isn’t directed at them,” Walsh writes outright about black people who praised Graham’s ethical behavior. Apparently she doesn’t expect black people to understand her admonitions to white people. What a racist, unethical asshole.
An editorialist for theroot.com, Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, writes that she will not condemn Graham’s reaction, but continues, “I will point out the hypocrisy of people who applaud Graham and yet condemn Baltimore’s protesters, who have been called ‘thugs’ and ‘animals’… when their reactions and Graham’s are one and the same.”
They are not one and the same. Graham’s violence was directly aimed at a single clearly-guilty party for whom she was responsible, and was effective at removing him from the riot and preventing further violence by him. If the rioters could say the same, I would be supporting them too, but they can’t… and the only reason these writers can’t recognize the difference is because they are themselves blatantly ignorant of the ethics of violence as well.
