A Letter to American Moderates in the Midst of a New Civil Rights Movement
I am writing to you, the American moderate, not to condemn you for your thoughts or your words or your actions. I understand that you pursue peace and good morals just as I do. I understand you desire in your heart a better world for all people. I understand you mean well. I am writing to you because I believe that in a turbulent era — in a fractured country — you turn to civility, law, and order as your respite from the storm, believing truly that it will be your salvation.
When I say “moderate,” I mean one who proclaims, “All Lives Matter,” who cries with indignation “Not All Cops,” who, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., is, “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’” I am writing to you because I contend your position draws you dangerously close to alliance with your oppressor. I want you to change your mind. I hope you will grant me charity to listen as I try to do so.
On Monday, April 25th, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was placed in police custody on suspicion of forgery. In the process, former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyds’ neck — while he was handcuffed and compliant — for nine minutes, an action which ended his life. You, the American moderate, were quick to condemn the actions of this officer. You called for Derek Chauvin’s termination from the MPD. You may have called for his arrest. George Floyd’s murder was a textbook model as far as police killings go; it was a blatantly excessive use of force against a clearly unarmed man — almost all of which was captured on video and shared rapidly throughout the country. There was little room for ambiguity, what-ifs, or victim-blaming. Democrats and Republicans alike decried the actions of Derek Chauvin. And yet, American moderates, I am willing to bet that at least some of you took issue with the wording of my first sentence. “Yes, what happened was a horrible tragedy,” you agree, “but does it matter that George Floyd was black?” It does matter. When a white cop takes a black man’s life, it speaks to the historical and systemic racism that plagues the modern institution of police in America. Black deaths matter.
A Brief History of Police in America
To understand the significance of George Floyd’s death, you must understand its significance in the history and legacy of American policing. In colonial America, volunteer watch-groups and civilian militias maintained the safety and order of colonists. Police history often traces a linear path from these origins, to the adoption of the British model in the mid-1800s, to the city police forces we see today. This history omits the insidious influence of organized slave-catchers in the 18th and 19th centuries. After their inception in the early 1700s, slave patrols became “the first publicly funded police agencies in the American South,” according to Carol A. Archbold’s Policing.
These patrols, with institutionalized slavery and the Fugitive Slave Acts as legal sanction, quashed the organization of enslaved people, managed race-based conflict, and returned runaways (often with brutal force) to uphold the capital interests of white enslavers. Slave Patrols were a dominant law enforcement body in the South until the end of the Civil War. During Reconstruction, the practices and responsibilities of defunct Slave Patrols were adopted by two main groups, local police agencies and the Klu Klux Klan.
Modern police, with their roots in the Slave Patrol system of law-enforcement, are enmeshed in a history of racism. And modern police continue to uphold a tradition of protecting property and the status quo at the expense of black lives. George Floyd was first approached as a suspect in a forgery case. His death was the result of a business owner’s 20-dollar loss. This is important. When a black man dies at the hands of a cop, it does matter that he was black and it does matter that he was a cop. All of these elements echo the Slave Patrol practices of brutalizing black bodies to protect white property. This racist history is indelibly marked on the American police institution.
The Changing Shape of Racism
I know that you, the white moderate, are not convinced. “Fine,” you sigh, “the police had some undesirable origins, but that says nothing about individual cops. Obviously, some cops are racist, but Not All Cops.” I can understand where this misunderstanding comes from. Elements of my 21st century education — taught by well-meaning moderates — seemed to suggest that racism was a historical phenomenon which ended in 1968. The racists cops of today (and all racists, for that matter) must have been, therefore, holdovers from a different time. Given this view of history, cries that all cops are racist seem bizarre and unfounded. But the history of racism is much more enveloping and persistent than the story we often hear.
In 2015, Dr. George Yancy penned, “Dear White America,” a letter imploring white people to, “open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you.” If that quote makes you feel uneasy, I encourage you to read the whole article. It is a short, but life-changing work. Its message is one of love, a black man bearing a gift to white people. The gift is an understanding that all white people, regardless of their own good will, “harbor racism,” and regardless of their own social status, “benefit from racism.” White people live in a country which was created with white as the default setting, which labels blackness as other, and which propagates cultural myths of blackness as dangerous, sexual, or stupid.
Racism presents a fact which is obvious to most people of color, but invisible to even the most well-meaning moderate. W.E.B. Du Bois calls the psychological challenge of racism “double consciousness.” He writes in The Souls of Black Folk:
The Negro is […] born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity [1].
Double-consciousness describes how a black individual views herself and her actions as they might be seen by a white majority which has relegated her entire self to a set of stereotypes and assumptions. The phenomenon undoubtedly exists today, more than a century after Du Bois proposed the idea. Meanwhile, white Americans experience a sense of double-unconsciousness; they fail to perceive institutional racism when they encounter it and they seldom gaze inside their own minds to meet the racist thoughts that hide there.
Know, moderates, that I do not blame you for the racism you harbor. Racism in individuals is not individually developed. Dominant racist attitudes reinforce policies and institutions which in turn reinforce racist attitudes. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the end of the Civil War, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” This statement embodies the battle between the persistent weight of American racism and the rise of black folks toward liberty. As racist structures are toppled and dismantled, they leave behind a foundation of racist thought. If racist thought is not confronted and removed, any new institution will share its predecessor’s cornerstone. As Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton wrote:
[Institutional racism] originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society. It relies on the active and pervasive operation of anti-black attitudes and practices. A sense of superior group position prevails: whites are ‘better’ than blacks and therefore blacks should be subordinated to whites. This is a racist attitude and it permeates society on both the individual and institutional level [2].
The American criminal justice system is one such institution.
After riots erupted in many U.S. cities in the mid 1960s, president Lyndon B. Johnson put together the 11-person Kerner Commission by executive order to investigate the social causes of and solutions to black unrest in America. The commission’s report makes one thing clear on the first page: “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” This is to say that the racist attitudes and actions of white institutions (police especially) uphold the unrest they purport to resolve in black communities.
The Johnson administration ignored the Kerner report. Subsequently, the president created a new commission which recommended, “sharp increases in federal spending on police weapons, training, and riot preparation” [3]. These solutions were readily taken up. The messaging there was clear; the Johnson administration refused to acknowledge and repair what white society and the police had wrought in black ghettoes. It refused to create jobs and housing in inner cities. Instead, LBJ reinforced the slave patrol roots of the police system, by funding and arming law-enforcement officers to protect white Americans from the “Negro problem” of their own creation.
The criminal justice system in the U.S. is inextricably linked to racism. Its police profile black and brown people as criminals. Its bail systems and sentencing inequalities guarantee the incarceration of poor people and people of color. Its results — that black men and women are incarcerated at higher rates than whites — are then used to reinforce racist myths of black criminality and racist cultural images of violent blacks. Police are complicit in this process. They serve an institution that unjustly targets and incarcerates people of color. They harbor implicit biases against black individuals which lead to racial profiling and an unequal response to crimes committed by and against black people.
The 1999 Macpherson Report, an inquiry into the Metropolitan Police Service’s mishandling of a black teenager’s murder case, established that even though no officers were overtly racist in their actions, institutional racism exists among police and played a role in their mishandling of the case. The conclusions of the Macpherson Report extend beyond the MPS and support the existence of unwitting, unconscious, and unintentional racism — existing beyond just a few bad apples — in the daily activities of American police officers. This is evident in the result of “random” stops-and-frisks. In New York in 2019, 59% of stops were black, 29% were Latinx, and only 9% were white, a major tell of police racial biases.
Traffic stops yield similar results. Using data from 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina, social scientists Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp, and Kelsey Shoub found that, “Blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average,” and “blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop,” even though they are, “less likely to be found with drugs, guns, alcohol or other forms of contraband” compared to whites. Most devastatingly, black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than whites to die at the hands of police. And white cops are not alone in upholding a racist system. Black cops are not any less likely than white cops to kill black suspects. This heavily suggests that police violence against black individuals and communities presents an institutional rather than a personal ill. George Floyd’s death was not the result of one maverick racist cop; it was the natural outcome of an institution that systemically prioritizes white capital above black lives — and has done so for centuries.
Renisha McBride, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Michelle Cusseaux, Laquan McDonald, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Mya Hall, Phillip White, Freddie Gray Jr., Sandra Bland, La’Vante Biggs, India Kager, Miguel Espinal, Bettie Jones, Janet Wilson, Mary Truxillo, Demarcus Semer, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Aiyana Jones, Botham Jean, Jonathan Tubby, Pamela Turner, Dominique Clayton, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Kionte Spencer, Darius Tarver, Elijah McClain, Manuel Ellis, Victor Duffy Jr., Lorenzo Dean, Breonna Taylor, William Green, Tony McDade, Jamel Floyd, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and more all fell victim to the same racist system.
Black Lives Matter
I hope you, the American moderate, are still listening to me with charity. I hope you can accept as fact the racism inherent in the police institution. I hope you have been reflective on your own racism and how you, if you are white, may benefit from a police force that serves you at the expense of black communities. Even reflecting on these truths as you are now, you may be hesitant to pledge yourself to the Black Lives Matter movement. You may view the very name as exclusionary and unwelcoming. I assure you this is not the case.
Black Lives Matter is a response to a socially ingrained mistreatment of black people. It is an assertion that:
A. Black lives have been historically devalued (through institutional racism, racist policies, police killings, and other means),
B. Black lives are uniquely devalued (as compared to whites or other people of color), and
C. Black lives deserve to be valued.
Without context, Black Lives Matter should be a statement of fact, a banal truism unworthy of a second glance. Only the systemic devaluation of black lives makes this statement revolutionary. And only from the oppressor perspective should this statement appear threatening; only one who benefits from black inferiority should fear black equality.
“All Lives Matter” is likewise no more than a banality when taken without context. But in the context of “Black Lives Matter,” it is counterproductive. It assumes the structure of Black Lives Matter without satisfying its assertions. Though all lives do deserve to be valued, it is not true that all lives have been historically devalued or that all lives have been uniquely devalued. White Lives Matter faces the same issues. Though white lives deserve to be valued and some white lives have been historically devalued (early Irish and Italian immigrants, the poor, LGBTQ whites), white lives have not been uniquely devalued to the level of black lives. White people are not murdered by police at the same rate as blacks, nor have they been incarcerated at the same rate as blacks.
Blue Lives Matter is an especially egregious affront to the message of Black Lives Matter. “Blue lives” have been historically celebrated, put on parade, and offered union protection, federal backing, and qualified immunity. Blue lives have not been uniquely devalued, though they actively engage in devaluing other lives. Killings by police far outnumber killings of police. Importantly, blue lives do not deserve to be valued because blue lives do not exist. It is so oft-Tweeted it is almost trite, but it bears repeating: police can take off their uniforms — people of color cannot take off their skin.
Those who say “All Lives Matter” are quick to resolve the perceived threat that their lives are being excluded from a slogan, but they are not so quick to respond to the actual threat to black lives in the world. This is not a new phenomenon. Any time black folks create rallying cries specific to their conditions, white moderates are quick to respond with what-abouts. In the 60’s, Black Power was charged with compromising White Power [4]. Black Pride has now instigated calls for White Pride. The slogans “Black Power,” “Black Pride,” and “Black Lives Matter” are each a call to specific action, but together they are simply an affirmation of black people.
In the history of America, black lives have been relegated to what Richard Wright calls the “frog perspective” [5]. Imagine looking up at a person from the level of her boot. She looks artificially grandiose from this view. That is the frog perspective. From the frog perspective, black Americans look up at the systems and persons who oppress them and develop a sense of their own inferiority, an idea that their lives do not matter, that they are not powerful, that their color should be a source of shame. From an objective evaluation, this inferiority is baseless. But by means of perspective, it positions black people as “less-than,” “other.”
From the frog perspective, black Americans may see whiteness as the positive to their black negative. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a young black girl wishes she too could have blue eyes, wishes that she could be more white [6]. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde recalls:
American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in america and the fact of american racism by never giving them a name, much less discussing their nature [7].
In these stories and more, both biographical and fictional, black people face with shame and humiliation the reality of being black in America. But the end of these stories is often the same: black self-acceptance, black triumph, and Black Power.
American moderate, before you decide to comment “All Lives Matter,” take the time to read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. For now, read this passage:
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance [8].
The Purpose of Protest
I understand that you, the American moderates, may now feel yourselves torn. I have characterized moderates as a group of well-meaning individuals who want nothing more than peace and love for all people, regardless of color. So, to you, the prospect of a protest is threatening. You wish all social action would resolve itself to peace and a path to understanding through less disruptive channels. Frustrated, you ask, “Why can’t you all act peacefully, like Martin Luther King did?”
Moderates, know that the purpose of any protest is negotiation. Months after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, protesters are still in the streets across America negotiating for justice and reform. This is a campaign for sweeping social change, the likes of which cannot and has not been achieved through the piecemeal offerings of signed petitions and open mics at town halls. Politicians whose reelection does not depend on the black vote have been unlikely to listen to black voices. Police who are beholden to none but their own have had no reason to hear black cries. When activists fail to achieve their desired change through the built-in bureaucratic channels — and the change they pursue is necessary, just, and urgent — the only logical step is direct action. Direct action, in the form of protests and marches, challenges law and order as a bargaining chip to make change. Martin Luther King himself, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” wrote, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” Protesters hold peace and quiet hostage in their streets until their demands are met and negotiations can proceed on even ground.
Many moderates turn to Martin Luther King as a model of a man who created social change while upholding the moderate values of peace, law, and order. Through no fault of their own, they appeal to a Dr. King who never existed, a whitewashed version of the man invented to pacify the masses and make them think that substantial reform can happen without substantial unrest. The real, historical King engaged in protests that he knew would end in violence and social disorder. He wrote, “the purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” To protest federal and police forces which prevented black Americans from voting, Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other activist groups chose to campaign in Selma, Alabama. The leaders chose Selma because law enforcement there were known for their brutality. King anticipated Sheriff Jim Clark and his men would meet the nonviolent black protesters with violence. The media images of black bodies brutalized, men and women arrested or potentially killed, would shift national sympathies to the activists and force the hand of President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is exactly what happened.
I have seen you American moderates commenting, “play stupid games, get stupid prizes” on videos of protesters run down by cars in the street. I have seen you post images of protesters shaking hands, linking arms, kneeling with police. I have seen you follow all this with a black and white image of Martin Luther King captioned: “This is what real protests look like.” Moderates, MLK led thousands to occupy city streets. MLK did not lock arms with police in solidarity. Martin Luther King broke the law.
Civil disobedience is the act of disobeying, without violence, an unjust law or code. King wrote, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” So when you scorn protesters for breaking the laws which prevent them from marching in the streets, gathering in the night, or otherwise disrupting society to spread the word of their oppression, question whether those laws are just. When you cry for peace, question whether you pursue a “negative peace which is the absence of tension” or a “positive peace which is the presence of justice.” It may be the case that the tension you seek to dissuade is exactly the tension MLK wanted to create. Please, read the words of Martin Luther King before you find yourself unwittingly standing against him.
Violence
I believe many of you American moderates would not stand against Martin Luther King. But you, as he did for much of his life, feel violence is not the right path to change. Here, I can understand your view. You do not advocate for violence because you understand that any violent direct action can turn national sympathy against a just cause and discredit the righteousness of the movement. MLK’s nonviolence movement was so effective because it contrasted the horrors of police, government, and civilian violence with the stoic, unretaliating presence of peaceful protesters. By this reasoning, I understand your hesitation to endorse violence. But not endorsing and condemning are two very different actions. Recognize that condemning violence comes from a removed and privileged position. It is easy to proselytize about the dangers of political violence when you have never faced the danger of police violence. Consider that you may have been able to avoid violent action because authorities have been willing to listen to you. You may have always been heard. And as Martin Luther King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
To blame protesters for erupting in violence when they have been treated with violence for so long is to ignore the veracity of their condition. In an excerpt from The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, civil rights activist and prison-abolitionist Angela Davis answers a question on whether or not she supports violence. She tells the interviewer, “Because of the way the society’s organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions. You have to expect things like that as reactions.” Davis rightfully pivots to the violence and oppression black people regularly face to explain the pained response of violent protesters. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the phenomenon of violent racism in Between the World and Me; “Racism is a visceral experience,” he writes, “it dislodges brains, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth” [9]. So when you feel a gut tension seeing protesters acting violently, remember that they are fighting hate, and hate is a violent act.
You may understand violence toward cop cars and police precincts by this justification, but you might still draw the line at damage to businesses. You may yet accuse protestors of destroying their own neighborhoods. In a viral video, author Kimberly Jones defends theft and property damage that occur in times of civil unrest. She explains that the looters among protest forces are victims of our economic system. Generational poverty has positioned them as a permanent societal underclass whose only opportunity to access both necessities and the material possessions that symbolize wealth is the circumstances of a riot. She contends that the economic system which enslaved-blacks built, and which impoverished black laborers maintain, created the social circumstance that precipitated looting — that looters are the victims, not the perpetrators, of a great injustice.
Before you blame BIPOC for destroying their own communities, listen to Kimberly Jones’ words. Remember that the history of America is the story of a country systematically stealing black labor and destroying black wealth. Since their arrival on American soil in 1619 until their emancipation, black Americans had everything they built brutally (but lawfully) taken from them. Slavery ended in 1865, after which time it proceeded for some 80 years longer under the name sharecropping, an institution that continued the growth of white wealth at the expense of black freedom.
Those who broke free from the institutional stranglehold on black labor, and managed to create their own business and wealth, faced destruction at the hands of white mobs. In 1898, a generation after the abolition of slavery, a band of white soldiers and citizens marched on the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. They destroyed black business and a black-operated newspaper. They overthrew the city’s duly elected, black-majority government. They murdered hundreds — all without consequence.
Decades later, when white supremacist riots were no longer overtly permissible, those who sought to damage black capital took a more covert approach. In the early 60s, Detroit’s Black Bottom Neighborhood, which had been a bustling center of black industry and entertainment for years, was classified as a slum and razed to build a freeway.
In the late 60s, before black protesters ever “destroyed their own communities,” organizations like the Citizens’ Councils in the South used economic pressure and the threat of shutdown to keep black business owners from protesting for voting rights or joining the NAACP [10].
Today, the two groups who have suffered the most at the hands of colonialism and enslavement, First Nations Peoples and Black Americans, are still this nation’s most impoverished. Employers still use tactics like wage theft to rob America’s underclass of its labor. And when workers are robbed in this fashion, they have no police they can call to advocate for their justice. Meanwhile, white America thrives on the economy that black labor built and which the police institution upholds. In the emotional words of Kimberly Jones, “It’s not ours! We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything!”
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” — Martin Luther King Jr.
Remember with anger that George Floyd’s death was the result of a business owner’s $20 loss. His murder serves as a reminder that police protect white capital at the expense of black lives. So, when protesters burn, smash, or take white property, it is a direct challenge to the system they protest. Returning to the idea of protests as a negotiation, you may picture activist rioters holding a lit match to a hundred-dollar bill, shouting, “save our lives or else.” If you respond to disdain the destruction of property while failing to condemn the taking of black lives, you implicitly reinforce the system and unknowingly adopt the perspective of the oppressor. If you decry the efforts of looters and vandals because you fear it will turn national sympathy against their cause, know that your voice is now one of those stratifying the movement. Angela Davis said, “The real content of any revolutionary thrust lies in the principles, in the goals that you strive for — not in the way you reach them.” If you stand in solidarity with the protesters, amplify the changes they demand; do not focus on the methods you dislike.
Copaganda
I know for many of you American moderates, there is a profound cognitive dissonance with which you evaluate the values you hold. You have denounced police violence. You understand that all cops are affected by institutional racism. But, you have friends who are cops. Maybe you are a cop. You know that good people enter the police force to protect and serve. You do not like the way protests have been carrying on, with people shouting obscenities at police, confronting them with hostility. You do not like seeing footage of cops committing horrific acts when you believe that the cops you know would never do the same. “Why are you treating good cops this way?” you ask. You defend the police. You share photos of police doing good deeds. You recount stories of cops treating you well.
When I was eight years old, a police officer turned on his lights and pulled me over while I was riding my bike. He gave me a coupon for a free ice cream cone because I was being safe and wearing my helmet. It made my day. I’ve kept the memory of that officer’s kindness with me for more than a decade. I can hold onto that memory and still shout, “f*ck the police!” at my local protest because I remember the words of Martin Luther King: “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” Protesters in your city are advocating for the abolition, defunding, or reform of the present police system. They are marching against police violence and position themselves as anti-police. They shout expletives and hurl water bottles at the police. But they seldom hate individual police officers.
One can reject police as a whole without hating individuals because police violence is structural, not personal. This is evident in the individual police who talk to, march with, and kneel for the protesters in their city — but who, when the order comes, are still forced to tear gas, beat, and arrest their recent compatriots. These displays attempt to prove that not every cop is bad, but instead they reveal that all cops, together, are necessarily the same by virtue of the system they uphold. Those who respond to a growing anti-police movement with individual accounts of Good Cops victimize those officers by misconstruing the structural movement for a personal one. Accounts of police doing good appeal to the moderate mindset which desperately wants to see the humanity in all people. Images of police marching in solidarity with protesters calm those who desire King’s “peace without justice.” A cop who takes a knee and pronounces themself “one of the good ones” does not represent an understanding of and advocacy for what the protesters demand. Such an act is a statement that police violence is still just the result of a few bad apples. It denies the existence of structural police oppression.
Pablo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writes:
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source [11].
Freire was writing about labor, but the same principles apply to the relationship between police and citizens. Police will soften their power. They will generously march with protesters. They will generously leave them be. They will do so, so that they may continue to wield the power they possess. This is propaganda. Notice how the national conversation has shifted from arresting individual officers to defunding the police. Notice how shows of police solidarity have likewise turned to threatening resignation, claiming victimhood, or taking a “fend for yourself” stance. That is what desperation looks like.
An officer who truly stood in solidarity with police would quit the force, arrest fellow officers, or engage in a collective strike for reform, but very few do. We want to believe in the myth of good cops because it lends us the pleasant and simple solution that is firing bad cops. The reality — that my friend who is a cop, the cop who once gave me ice cream, and a cop like Derek Chauvin are all implicated in a massive, oppressive, and unjust system — is much more terrifying.
This is not to say that police do not deserve sympathy. Remember that the police themselves are also victims of the police institution. Their profession claims to be colorblind and therefore fails to differentiate how they approach culturally distant communities. They are trained to fear the people they serve. They are expected to respond to situations for which they lack the expertise to handle. As then Dallas Police Department Chief, David Brown said in 2016, “Every societal failure, we put it on the cops to solve,” citing mental health, school funding, and even animal control as tasks that police are called upon to resolve but which lie outside of their skill set. They are placed in environments that require a broad set of tools while the only tool they hold is a gun. They harbor racism just like the rest of us, but the responsibilities of their job launch them into situations where that racism can have deadly consequences. This system is untenable for police as well as their victims. It is our task to liberate them.
Defund the Police
You, the American moderates, boldly seeking change, have likely proposed a bevy of moderate solutions. You are fully behind making sure cops wear cameras. You are in favor of making it easier to fire bad cops. You support implicit bias training. But you firmly reject cries to abolish, defund, or even substantially reform the police. You wonder, “Who will protect us?” You imagine a world without police where lawlessness reigns and you fear for your life.
Moderate solutions have been proposed and implemented for decades — with little success. Much to the long-departed Jeremy Bentham’s dismay, the panoptic invention of body cameras does little to curb police violence. Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in broad daylight with a camera pointed directly at him. It is likewise unclear if implicit bias training can achieve significant results. Firing bad cops is necessary, but it presents a whack-a-mole dilemma. The racist police institution ensures that for every bad cop that loses their job, another bad cop and another instance of police brutality will pop up. As these moderate reforms fail, the once-radical ideal of defunding the police seems more and more like a valid option.
Defunding the police is not new. It is not a response to recent events. It is not a retaliation against police. It is a decades-old theory that shifting financial resources from heavily armed police forces to mental health, drug abuse, social work, and restorative justice services will present a better deterrent to crime. Remember that the Tough on Crime, War on Drugs, and Broken Window approaches to crime-deterrence are also just theories. Funding and Defunding the police are competing hypotheses. The former has been widely implemented for decades with meager results for crime-deterrence and disastrous results for human and civil rights. The latter has shown promise in small-scale testing within the existing framework.
A 2009 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) examined interpersonal violence as a public health crisis and outlined seven preventative social measures to stop it. This study exemplified a growing attitude that crime, specifically violent crime, is the direct result of detrimental social and environmental circumstances. The U.S. criminal justice system operates on an alternative logic, built from a philosophically confusing puree of centuries of criminological theory which opine that criminals must face retribution as a soul-cleansing measure or must be psychologically rehabilitated until they are fit to follow the social standards of the day.
The function of U.S. prisons has therefore swayed between doling out retributive punishment for offenders and attempting to rehabilitate inmates. Both of these methods have placed the full responsibility for crimes and onus for change on the criminals themselves. High rates of offender recidivism show this is ineffective. The U.S.’s massive incarcerated population (over 2 million) proves this is unsustainable. Police are considered crime-deterrent — which they prove to be in some regard; a larger police presence may correlate to decreased instances of crime [12]. But they are more often simply carceral foot soldiers, rounding up citizens to be imprisoned, and doing nothing to aid the social circumstances that make these citizens criminal. At best, they serve an unjust justice system. At worst, they take justice into their own hands and act as vigilantes, murdering citizens before they have a chance to meet a jury.
Police disappearing those who disrupt society is not an acceptable approach to public health. Investing money and staff into programs which seek to raise the quality of life for society’s most in-need is a valid measure. Police department budgets are unconscionably bloated in almost every major American city while public welfare, social services, housing, mental healthcare, and drug addiction resources are massively overlooked. The WHO report on violence does not recommend more police; it proposes assistance for parents, social development programs for kids, alcohol addiction intervention, gender equality education, and advocacy programs for victims of crime. These are the services that will deter crime, not more police.
In the United States, a system of crime-deterrence — the results of which have been overstated, which achieves a shallow peace at the expense of liberty, and which continues to target, disrupt, and brutalize BIPOC communities — has nonetheless continued unchallenged by radical and imaginative reform since its inception [13]. Our failure to try new theories may simply be the result of our unwavering devotion to the status quo. Slavery persisted for centuries despite radical opposition from the start. Jim Crow had its objectors, but the gap between Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education still spanned more than half a century. Despite celebrating a national origin steeped in revolutionary attitudes, American culture despises extreme action. Martin Luther King wrote in 1963, “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?” Defunding and abolishing the police is extreme, but it is also the next step toward civil rights and liberation. It is the enslaved stepping into the sun. It is in the spirit of history.
Today, before the backdrop of a national recession and a global pandemic, a new Civil Rights movement marches on. Just this week — August 23rd, 2020 — Jacob Blake, a black father, was shot multiple times in the back by Kenosha Police in Wisconsin. He was unarmed. His children watched it happened from the backseat of his car. The challenges this movement faces are dire, but history proves that when dungeons shake, they lay bare the foundation for revolutionary change. America knows a change is needed. And yet, as James Baldwin writes, “people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger” [14]. Dear American moderates, I hope that I have in some way prepared you to face your personal danger. Now is the time to act, to be committed, to become an extremist for love, and to stand against hate. I ask you, the American Moderate, to rise up and meet this moment in history.
Texts Cited
[1] Washington, Booker T., Du Bois W. E. B., and James Weldon Johnson. Three Negro Classics. 6th ed. New York: Avon Books, 1969. pp. 214–15.
[2] Carmichael, Stokely, and Hamilton, Charles V. Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America, Penguin Books, 1967. pp. 20–21.
[3] Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2016. p. 405.
[4] Ibid. p. 396.
[5] Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957. p. 6.
[6] Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 2007.
[7] Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982. p. 69.
[8] Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York, , NY: Ballantine, 2015. p. 272.
[9] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017. p. 10.
[10] Gorn, Elliott J. Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. p. 50.
[11] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of The Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. p. 44.
[12] Blumstein, Alfred, and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America. 2nd ed. Cambridge Studies in Criminology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511616167.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Baldwin, James. “My Dungeon Shook.” Essay. In Baldwin: Collected Essays, 291–95. New York: Library of America, 1998. p. 294.
