Black Lives and Violent Minds Erin Sheley Abstract Matthew Levay’s account of how modernist authors deploy criminality and crime fiction to create forms of psychological representation is particularly valuable to our current crisis around structural racism in the twenty-first century. In exploring the relationships between modernist literary representation and the expressive difficulties inherent in accessing the subjective trauma of others, Levay offers important insights into how collective and individual trauma shapes our understanding of the criminal, the police, and society’s role as witness to criminal violence, while revealing the nature of the epistemological obstacles to integrated understanding. * * * In his conclusion to Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal, Matthew Levay describes modernism as “an unfinished project” with influence reverberating through twenty-first- century fiction.1 His literary example of this afterlife is Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remain- der, in which the anonymous narrator, disabled after an accident, finds enrichment through staging reenactments of neighborhood events, including the fatal shooting of a cyclist and, eventually, a robbery of a real bank.2 Levay argues that McCarthy dramatizes how “the modernist criminal event becomes a letting go of one’s individual characteristics, and an immersion in the larger material world that eliminates distinctions between person, place, and action.”3 This observation about twenty-first-century modernism is a postscript to a work primarily concerned with the role of criminality in modernist psychological represen- tation during the standard period of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, while reading Levay’s treatment of how modernist authors used crime fiction conventions to represent individual psychology in a society where attitudes toward both criminality and police were dramatically shifting, his entire work becomes immediately relevant to our pre- sent, twenty-first-century crisis. When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin smothered George Floyd to death on May 25, 2020 the whole nation bore witness to the double objectification of an unarmed Black father. First, the police identified him as presumptively criminal and placed him under Associate Professor, California Western School of Law. 1 Matthew Levay, Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal 215 (2019). 2 Id. at 218-19. 3 Id. at 220. ISSN 2291-9732 104 Critical Analysis of Law 7:2 (2020) arrest on the mere accusation that he passed a counterfeit bill.4 Second, he became the vic- tim of criminal violence, murdered by police with the visibly unjustified motivation that he was resisting arrest.5 Both of these objectifications—the racist construction of young Black men as criminal, and the criminal use of unlawful violence against their bodies by police— are all too familiar to our nation’s Black citizens. Yet the Floyd murder, and other recent police murders in the past six years, have engaged the attention of society more broadly, illuminating not only the specific problem of police violence against Black citizens, but also the ways in which such violence is only the most horrifying physical manifestation of how structural racism mediates subjective and objective identities. Against this backdrop, Levay’s insightful account of how modernist authors deploy criminality and crime fiction to create forms of psychological representation is particularly valuable. On one level, Levay is interested in how modernists used criminality, policing, and the generic conventions of crime fiction to structure the identities of their characters and show epistemological obstacles to an outside subject fully understanding those identities. Our current crisis over structural racism is the product of historical and social subordina- tion—a seemingly more outward-looking, collective problem than those raised by the texts Levay considers. Yet much of the discourse the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has generated relates to the relationship between criminality, violence, and identity, as well as to the impacts of collective and biographical trauma on individual experience of the world—all phenomena Levay identifies in modernism. Reading Violent Minds with these connections in mind, one discovers new relationships between modernist representation and the expressive difficulties we experience today in accessing the subjective trauma of others in a world of criminal and racial violence. While Levay’s treatment proceeds largely chronologically from late-nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century texts, this review will proceed conceptually. It identifies the work’s insights around three ideas in modernist con- text: the criminal, the police, and society as witness to criminal violence. I. The Criminal A polarizing, if arguably tangential, debate to emerge from the 2020 BLM protests con- cerned the expressive status of looters as either part of or separately motivated from the anti-racist political message of the protestors more broadly. President Donald Trump aligned himself rhetorically with the police, describing himself as “your president of law and order”6 and emphasizing the slippery continuity between protestors and criminals, a line he 4 Jemima McEvoy, New Transcripts Reveal How Suspicion Over Counterfeit Money Escalated Into the Death of George Floyd, Forbes (July 8, 2020) (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/08 /new-transcripts-reveal-how-suspicion-over-counterfeit-money-escalated-into-the-death-of-george- floyd/#2e38eb4346ba). 5 Id. 6 See Renuka Rayasam, “I Am Your President of Law and Order,” Politico (June 1, 2020) (https:// www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly-coronavirus-special-edition/2020/06/01/i-am-your-presi- dent-of-law-and-order-489390). Sheley — Black Lives 105 himself promised to police with violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”7 Such rhetoric situates the protestor as potentially both criminal subject and criminal object, as both author of and justifiable recipient of violence. It therefore creates equivalence be- tween the protestors and George Floyd himself, through a presumption that police violence and death await at the moment a state actor identifies the body in question as criminal. Republican Senator Mitt Romney implicitly challenged Trump’s characterizations in his statements on the protests, in which Romney himself marched. Tweeting a picture of his father, former Michigan Governor George Romney, participating in a Civil Rights march in the 1960s, Romney also quoted his father, saying, “Force alone will not eliminate riots. We must eliminate the problems from which they stem.”8 This sentiment, on the one hand, emphasizes that violent protests are criminal; they are to be “eliminated,” at least in part, by state-authorized force. Nonetheless, Romney also suggests that such criminality is not innate to the physical, criminal bodies to be suppressed, but the product of a historical trajectory of slavery and racism giving rise to systemic injustice. In another tweet, Romney stated that “[p]eaceful protests underscore the urgency of addressing injustices,” while “vi- olence drowns the message of the protesters and mocks the principles of justice.”9 Unlike Trump, who situates protestors and criminals along a continuum, Romney treats them as distinct opposites—the virtuous reformers and the counterproductive, violent offenders. Romney’s rhetoric seeks to normalize protest as a feature of citizenship, to be encouraged, rather than violently “othered” in the manner Trump attempts. Critics of the rhetorical distinction between the peaceful protestor and the violent looter have, however, pointed out the ways in which it can foster racist narratives as well. Writing about the looting associated with the Ferguson, Missouri protests of 2014 (which followed the shooting of another unarmed Black man, Michael Brown), Vicky Osterweil argues that “in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or be- tween ethical non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters,” such narratives reproduce the criminalization of Black youth.10 They delineate, Osterweil says, “[C]ertain kinds of black youth—those who loot versus those who protest. The effect of this discourse is to harden a permanent category of criminality on Black subjects who produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest.”11 Others have argued, in the context of the 2020 BLM protests, that even if such a distinction is justified at the level of the individual actor, media narratives have distracted from the goals of peaceful protestors by overemphasizing 7 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter (May 28, 2020, 9:53 PM) (https://twitter.com /realdonaldtrumpMitt/status/1266231100780744704). 8 Mitt Romney (@MittRomney), Twitter (June 6, 2020, 7:35 AM) (https://twitter.com/MittRomney /status/1269276783590989824). 9 Mitt Romney (@MittRomney), Twitter (May 30, 2020, 6:56 PM) (https://twitter.com/MittRomney /status/1266911462192287745). 10 Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting, The New Inquiry (Aug. 21, 2014) (https://thenewinquiry.com /in-defense-of-looting/). 11 Id. 106 Critical Analysis of Law 7:2 (2020) the occurrence of looting and violent rioting.12 These contemporary debates reveal the po- litical stakes of the very debate in modernist representation that lies at the heart of Violent Minds. Specifically: what is the relationship between the criminal-as-object, the subjective citizen-observer, and society generally? What forces