From The Morgue

I’ve realized that I’m not finished talking about the Bruce Emery conviction.
One of the main arguments back and forth about the Emery/Cameron case is whether Bruce Emery has benefited from privilege; that as a white middle-aged man from what is inexpertly called the middle class, he has been treated better by the justice system and by New Zealand than would have been the case for a different sort of person.
One of the things I’ve seen over and over in response to this is, “I’ve seen nothing that proves he was treated differently”. This question irritates me profoundly, and my immediate response is “Of course you haven’t! That’s the wrong starting point!”.
Privilege and prejudice in society don’t work in obvious ways. They can’t – anything that is obvious and indisputable gets challenged and purged from the system quickly. There isn’t ever going to be one clear moment of bias where patriachal/white/age-based privilege gets caught in the act, and demanding proof of one is setting the bar too high. Privilege can, and does, act in our society without ever meeting such a gross test of existence.
Instead, you need to look at the whole picture, the cumulative effect of many small points and angles. Indeed, to continue the analogy, you need to consider things outside of the picture too – how has this been framed, and what sits outside of the frame?
In the case of Bruce Emery, I don’t think there’s any question that the public view of the man and his crime reflects his privileged status in New Zealand’s culture. In the media coverage, similarly, I think this privilege comes through. In the trial itself and its outcome – well, the more specific you get, the harder it is to be definite, and I wasn’t at the trial so this can only be a guess – but a trial reflects and is part of the wider cultural conversation, so I think there’s likely to be some degree of privilege there as well.
The points and angles I’m talking about? There are plenty. Here’s a couple:
The main piece of media coverage from the NZ Herald, one of the most important articles about the case as it happened. Headline: The day Bruce Emery saw red. Just consider for a moment how that headline minimises what happened: a man grabbed a knife and chased some people down a street then stabbed one of them, and this amounts to “seeing red”. Consider now all the many other ways they could have headlined that article. WIthout even going beyond those six words you have a very particular framing that aligns perfectly with the expected effects of privilege. Would another man, a Maori or a Somali or a petty criminal like the exonerated David Dougherty, have been given that headline?
More: what about the widespread media coverage of Emery being denied the chance to spend Christmas with his family after being convicted of manslaughter? How often do we care about whether people convicted of serious crimes don’t get to go home for Christmas? Would the NZ media really have found this newsworthy if Emery wasn’t who he was? Would we get big pieces like this about the pain his family will suffer without him being there to open presents?
Specifically about the trial, another comment I’ve seen made frequently was that the stabbing happened under “disputed circumstances”. Which, of course, it did; the same is true of nearly every murder/manslaughter trial, because that’s how the adversarial system works. The prosecution and defence offer alternative versions of events and the jury and/or judge have to consider if they have reasonable doubt about guilt. The thing that sets these disputed circumstances apart is that one version is by a witness to what happened, and the other version is by the killer. Somehow, this close-up eyewitness account has been balanced by the killer’s own version, and somehow now the truth will never be known. If the eyewitness wasn’t a young brown tagger, would his story be given so little credibility against the killer’s version, not just in court but in the media coverage and the conversations in pubs and on blogs? If it was a white kid from the North Shore playing at being naughty, would his version somehow become more believable?
(Yes, of course there was physical evidence that the blow wasn’t deep, etc. That is hardly proof that Emery’s version is accurate.)
Consider Miri’s comments from a lawyer’s point of view about how far Emery was from meeting the legal criteria for self-defence or provocation; and yet how those two words drive the public conversation about him. If Emery were different, would these words have gained such purchase?
Consider the whole way the sentencing of Emery has been mixed up with the Cameron family’s parenting failures. That should be a completely separate conversation, but it’s being leveraged in because of who Emery is and who Cameron is, and it quietly shifts responsibility away from Emery. Would this really happen if Emery was someone different?
There’s plenty more, of course. This is the way privilege works; this is the kind of thing it does. It’s subtle, and up close any one instance of it can be argued either way. It’s a pattern, though, a consistent push in one direction over and over again. It can’t be put on a slide or proved in a blog post – if it could be demonstrated so easily it would not be allowed to happen. This means, however, that identifying it, being convinced of its existence, is about awareness of a big picture, about drawing inferences and conclusions. But you can’t start investigating those inferences without asking good questions, and checking expectations at the door.
(For those who don’t know me in real life: I’m a white, middle-class male. I operate in a sea of privilege and benefit from it every day; I’m hardly the best person to write about privilege. But what the heck.)

A year ago, Bruce Emery chased down a youth who was tagging his property, stabbed him to death, then went home, concealed the evidence and went to sleep. These facts were not in question. His trial just ended; he was sentenced to four years and three months for manslaughter. Cue a storm of argument about whether this sentence was sufficient, with the dead boy’s mother announcing her disgust.
I’m not a fan of prisons as a fundamental component of our criminal justice system. I am not a fan of throwing people away for longer to make society feel better. That said, I am invested in ensuring our criminal justice system is unbiased; that it does not systematically treat better or worse people of different kinds. That’s the essence of the charge against Emery’s sentence, that were he not a white middle-aged middle-class businessman then his sentence would have been greater.
A common theme in the discourse around the sentence (see, if you dare, the NZ Heralds’s “Your views” reader feedback section) is of understanding about Emery’s action, and of a willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt, to empathise: there but for the grace of god… This of course reaches its sickening nadir in a notice from the sickening hypocrites at the Sensible Sentencing Trust that Emery shouldn’t have been jailed at all, and the family deserves some blame for letting a 15 year old boy roam the streets.
Anita at Kiwipolitico brings a lot of this together in an interesting post suggesting that Emery received a reduced sentence because he is “one of us”.
I think that’s not quite right; I think a better frame is to say that people who aren’t Emery receive greater sentences than he because they aren’t one of us. In other words, I don’t think the problem is that we have collectively extended our understanding to Emery; I think it’s that fail to extend the same understanding to those who aren’t like Emery. There’s a general failure of empathy.
This NZ Herald coverage at the time of the trial emphasizes Emery’s “ordinariness”, particularly his physical ordinariness – fat and middle-aged. Unspoken, is his whiteness, but it is there in the text because the question begged is “whose ordinariness”? Is being a fat, white, middle-aged man really ordinary? Would the victim and his community see it that way? What does that make them?
The ordinariness of his behaviour became an issue in the case:

Did he react as an ordinary person would? Was he fired by anger that his home had been defaced again? How did anger influence what happened when he and the two taggers confronted each other in a neighbouring dead-end street 365 metres from Emery’s home?

But what about the ordinariness of the victim’s behaviour, getting stoned, tagging some fence; how is this not ordinary? Isn’t this extremely unremarkable stupid kid behaviour? That word “ordinary” is at work in this discourse, allowing empathy for Emery’s circumstances and behaviour, while at the same time excluding the victim.
When Emery killed Pihema, it fed into a general theme of youth fear, a cultural conversation we were having in our country about whether our young people were out of control. That conversation has lapsed in the last year, and is almost forgotten – no doubt because the election is over – and now the frame is about property, and pressure, and how sometimes you get pressed to breaking point and can’t we all understand that?
I can understand that. I don’t begrudge Emery his relatively light sentence; I hope he learns from it and is not destroyed by it. I only wish that the same empathy could somehow be offered more widely.