My "ah ha!" moment of the week
 | | Military police in Belem, Brazil in 2019.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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I am on vacation this week, feeling very grateful for some peaceful time with my family. I hope that all of you are able to find space to rest and recharge soon, too, whatever that might look like. |
I'll be back next week, but in the meantime, here are some things I've been reading lately that have helped me understand the world a little better, or just brought me joy. |
I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book by Yanilda Gonzalez, a political scientist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, since I started reading it a few weeks ago. |
Her thesis is essentially that even as Latin American countries democratized, their police forces continued to be islands of authoritarianism: |
"Even as formal national democratic institutions flourished, patterns of coercion in many Latin American democracies have been characterized by widespread extralegal use of lethal force, arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement of the law, rampant corruption and predation, and weak or nonexistent external accountability." |
One thing that this book does extremely well is to show how arbitrary and often false the division between the categories of "political violence" and "police violence" can be. Political violence, in the popular imagination, tends to be repression of dissidents, ordered from on high by a dictator or military junta. But Gonzalez shows how giving local and state-level police the latitude to abuse and kill citizens is also a political choice, with political benefits for even democratically elected leaders. It is itself a form of political violence, but one that gets treated as if it is below political notice or outrage. |
Her book is focused on Latin America, but it is difficult to read it without thinking about police violence in the United States, and how it parallels many of the patterns that Gonzalez describes. |
What I'm reading: Uvalde edition |
- And "All these brave men," Jessica Valenti's newsletter about the shooting, unpacks the conflict between the myth of male violence as a protection for the weak and the reality of police officers who are oriented toward protecting themselves, or the powerful.
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What I'm reading: Fiction edition |
- I spent many hours on planes during my recent trip to India, and whiled away the time by rereading "Tender is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I first read it when I was 15, in the midst of an intense effort to become a Fitzgerald completist, and found it kind of tough going. But this time around the prose struck me so much that I found myself highlighting half of every page.
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- I have been saving The Wych Elm, by Tana French, for a special occasion, so eagerly broke it out during this vacation … only to realize that a vacation with two small children is not the sort of week off that's conducive to reading. I've only managed the first 20 pages, but it seems good so far. High hopes.
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