In an unsurprisingly confused New York Times op-ed, Kate Manne, assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University and writer on moral and feminist philosophy, seeks to explain the phenomenon of police treating protesters in Ferguson “like animals.”

On Sept. 26, two peaceful protesters were arrested in Ferguson, Mo. Watch this video (warning: includes profanity) and you will see two white officers arresting a young black woman who is wearing a red hoodie. One tackles her in a chokehold and yanks her hands behind her back. She whimpers, and they force her face down on the pavement. They then carry her off with one officer holding her by an arm, and the other holding her by a leg. Her body has gone limp; they dangle her between them carelessly. Why were these two men handling her “like an animal?” asks the protester recording the scene with her cellphone. It is a good question. And its answer is not obvious.

That her attention is drawn to the mistreatment of a protester, giving rise to her questioning why some human beings treat other human beings so callously, is good.  But as one commenter to the post notes, Manne blindly assumes that the analysis begins with race.

Manne has an agenda and plugs Ferguson into her favored paradigm.

One possibility is that people are treated brutally because those who mistreat them fail to grasp their common humanity — or, similarly, their personhood. The idea is that seeing another person as a fellow human being is not only a prerequisite for ethical relations with her, but also strongly disposes us to treat her as we ought to. In George Orwell’s experience, when you see another person as “visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, [then] you don’t feel like shooting at him.” (Or her — presumably.) Moreover, man’s inhumanity to man (and women, too) often stems from overlooking our shared human capacities, an appreciation of which would tend to give rise to empathy. Subordinated people are mistakenly viewed as brutes, subhuman, or even nonhuman animals.

While there are certainly elements of race and class (to a lesser extent, but still) involved in many instances of police abuse and misconduct, Manne’s focus on her own agenda gives rise to a glaring omission noted by a commenter to the post:

I think this piece is generally the right line of reasoning but throws too much attention on whiteness as opposed to, I don’t know, I guess the equivalent would be “copness.”

The problem here is not a straight line through racial tension: it’s not as though the whiteness of the cops is being threatened by black people’s challenges to authority and breaking from subordinate status. The cops are instead acting punitively towards the black community’s challenge to the authority, or rather the impunity, of the police.

One of the overarching questions posed by those who pay close attention to the police is why do so many people fail to appreciate that the problems arising from “the black community’s challenge to the authority, or rather the impunity, of the police” have more to do with the fact that these are cops, not just a bunch of white guys hanging around and arbitrarily eating donuts.

The humanist line on Ferguson is unduly optimistic, and rests on a psychologically dubious assumption. Namely, that when people who have historically enjoyed a dominant position in society (in this case white men) come to recognize historically subordinated people (racial minorities, women) as their moral and social equals, they will welcome the newcomers.  But seeing others as similar to ourselves can lead to hostility and resentment under certain conditions.

Ignoring Manne’s gratuitous inclusion of women in the mix, because opportunity to inject one’s personal pet peeve into every situation can’t be missed, she constructs her Ferguson hypothesis along the usual humanist line, where the newcomer appears to usurp the privilege of the old guard, giving rise to hostility and resentment rather than welcome.

The situation is different when it comes to white men’s perception of non-whites and women. Over time, as the fight for equality has allowed some advancement and social mobility for racial minorities, as well as for women, toward what we might call the inner circle of humanity, white men have experienced a relative loss of status.

This isn’t what happened in Ferguson, and to suggest that this was merely a racial conflagration between white and black not only obscures the critical point for the sake of arguing usual racial (with gender thrown in for fun), but affirmatively misleads.  Ferguson was cops versus blacks.  Ferguson was cops versus non-cops. What happened with Ferguson was about copness.

And the hierarchy assumes that we are all people — some of whom are more equal than others, naturally. This is the nature of domination and subordination relations, which have been theorized by Catharine MacKinnon and Sally Haslanger, among others. They require that there be people ranked above and/or beneath you. And it is important that we all know our place, if only tacitly.

That Manne refers to theories by MacKinnon and Haslanger is enough to make one’s head hurt as well as eliminate any vestige of credibility Manne might possess.  But the domination of relations between police and everyone else isn’t merely a matter of feminist theory, but a hard, cold reality that is explicitly taught to police (command presence), reinforced by the courts (police safety trumps all, particularly constitutional rights) and accepted by society generally.

The point is not that we do not remain mired in racism, but that this effort to explain the killing of Michael Brown, of Kajieme Powell and the treatment of Ferguson protesters as mere examples of how whites dehumanize blacks to defend against their loss of privileged status is to utterly misapprehend the problem.

The problem is that police dehumanize non-cops in order to subjugate them because that’s what they understand their authority to be and they can.  In the elevation of Copness, blacks fare far more poorly than whites, poor worse than wealthy, for the more generic reasons that apply to society at large.  But it’s cops.  To ignore this is wrong.