Is It the Police or the People?
Black Lives Matter protest in DC May 21, 2020 - Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash
Let’s place this question in the form of a debate, the affirmative proposition being:
That “an institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished.”
from Colin Kaepernick’s article in Medium, The Demand for Abolition
The abolition he’s arguing for is the elimination of police and prisons, not simply ‘defunding’ them, however one chooses to define that. Kaepernick’s central argument for the affirmative is stated in the following:
“When the world witnessed the police choke Eric Garner to death as he gasped ‘I can’t breathe’—that is an act of terror. When a cop car pulled up to Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, and the cop shot him in less than two seconds—that is an act of terror. When police broke down 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston’s front door, unloaded 39 rounds, and left five bullets buried in her body—that is an act of terror. We recognize it as anti-Black violence and control while law enforcement and the injustice system see it as essential to the very nature of the job.”
from Colin Kaepernick’s article in Medium, The Demand for Abolition
Some stats say 50% of the country’s violent crime is black on black. [1] “The rate at which black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.” [2] However, if the police are confronting Blacks at a higher rate than Whites, statistical probability predicts a higher rate of bad encounters. So is the issue the police or the people?
It can’t be too difficult a leap to understand how the Black community might instinctively distrust the chief enforcement tool historically employed against them, namely the police. Though I sympathize with the beat cops struggling to compensate for the lack of employment, primary education, mental health care, even basic health care, when what they’re trained to do is stop the bad guys.
In 2015, The Washington Post initiated Fatal Force, a research project that’s been continuing yearly since. Statistical associations can be as easily coincidental as they can be causal, so reading the details is important. A follow up WP article in 2016 stated:
“As of Sunday, [July 11, 2016] 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. [± 18 months] Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).
“White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.”
from Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police–Yes but no by Wesley Lowery in the Washington Post, July 11, 2016
Missing from most discussions is the statistic that black on black crime correlates closely to white on white crime (90% for the former and 83% for the later) as well as the glaring fact that the great majority of cops killing anyone—regardless of race—involve armed victims or villains, the stats don’t tell. They ain’t gods or mystics, they’re just cops.
“Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29)—such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.—175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed [14%]. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed [11%].
From Aren’t more white people killed than black people killed by police—Yes but no by Wesley Lowery in the Washington Post, July 11, 2016
More than 85% of the young men killed by police were armed. So Black or White, caught up in the nation’s gun culture, these young men are dying. When folks argue they carry to protect themselves, they don’t stop to consider so is everyone else. Different subject? Not entirely. Fewer guns out and about equates to fewer ‘suicides by cops.’
I’m of the opinion that when the country at large catches a cold, the Black community gets pneumonia.
The article continues:
“Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.”
From Aren’t more white people killed than black people killed by police—Yes but no by Wesley Lowery in the Washington Post, July 11, 2016
Simply judging from the nightly news, too many violent crimes happen in Black communities inflicted by Blacks on their neighbors using whatever means, guns, knives and–less visibly–drugs. Poverty, unemployment, broken families, infant mortality, illiteracy, hunger, drugs, pile it all on, and any way you look at it, it’s a lethal concoction. Oh yeah, and racism.
It’s difficult to knit a social fabric of any strength around a pile like that.
Similar abscesses exist in White society, whose better protection is more wealth. Whites snort cocaine; Blacks like crack. I fail to see the distinction.
But… can we agree the entire country suffers when an historic segment of its people continues to suffer decade after dreary decade? That it’s sufficient reason to work harder on the problem? When a young black man steps outside his residence and his sphincter tightens just to face the world, cops aside, he might want to be packing a weapon. What if he was your son?
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” from Mathew 25.40
I’m going with Mathew.
We seem to practice Christianity when we want our neighbors to better behave, but when it comes to offering aid, we turn into free market champions. Harold Bloom, the literary critic not known as a social critic, likened it to the “American religion.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates says bring on the reparations. He’s declaring a moral obligation that’s hard to dispute on the facts, but will distributing cash just let us dismiss the rest of the problem and get back to playing golf?
In my college years, I hung with a fascinating spread of free spirited–mostly white–hippie types, some who were clearly heading, one might say destined, for a steep economic decline if they weren’t already falling off the edge.
I wasn’t so far away from it myself, though I was a motivated witness. I attended all my college classes, sometimes studied, collected my degrees and found a job. Paid off the $700 loan from my mother for my ’67 VW Bug and moved to South Florida where the pot came in fresh off the boats. Whoa.
With luck and a loving mother, I avoided the worst of being underprivileged. But when a mother can’t get past eighth grade because her mother had her at fifteen and dropped out of school, because her mother was in prison–then follow the chain back–how can we expect her child of that handicap to succeed? Some do—and that speaks to guts and shear perseverance.
To the Black parents who work at raising their children in spite of where they themselves came from, the country owes a debt of gratitude for their holding together against huge odds.
To the teachers of Black children who daily work at overcoming the handicap those children are under, we owe as much. To all we owe a living wage, and to the children, we owe them their education.
Lest an appeal to better nature fails, the rest of the tract from Mathew concludes:
“Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
“Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
“And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”
from Mathew 25.45-47
Mathew knew of his audience’s self-interest.
We who are alive today owe the country the education of those who will follow–and particularly the ones at the bottom. It’s an absurdity to say ‘let them make it on their own’ when they are the next generation. The reason it’s a moral imperative is because it’s the most important investment we can make–so forget the altruism and just view it as in the country’s own best interest. Go ahead and stay a racist and still do the country some good.
We have the means to do it–we say we love our country, and we can’t afford not to.
All Politics Is Local
In my community of Fairfax, Thomas Jefferson H.S., known affectionately as “TJ” is the area’s best science and technology school. Ranks right up there, and I’m happy to say it’s a credit to Fairfax County, to whom we pay our taxes. But historically Thomas Jefferson H.S. has admitted Blacks as a bare 1% of its student body.
Is a puzzlement, as the King of Siam was wont to say.
The proposed solution is a lottery based on B+ grade average for applying eighth graders. OK, maybe. But what if the Blacks and other minorities were to receive a more intensive, better instructed education in elementary school, kindergarten, day care? Wouldn’t that better their odds?
To be clear, across the board we owe the country’s children better educations, White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, all of them.
Colin Kaepernick goes toward dismantling the nation’s police, pointing to it as The Problem. It is difficult to get beyond the statistics if they’re aimed at you, so I respect his argument. But if working class Blacks were in a more stable position economically, wouldn’t that help them defend themselves from the racism? Or at least give their communities better means to heal?
Growing up, I was surprised how many grownup men said they despised the Japanese, which I assumed was left over from World War II. And the general suspicion Whites held–still hold–against Asians is how we roll in this country. Which only confirms how keenly we measure these differences, literally skin deep.
Fall back into the unspoken past–who were they, how many days did they watch sunrise and sunset worrying about what was to come? Were they so different?
How about this supposition: Whites hate Blacks because they know where the entire species began–in the darkest of Africa. The genome doesn’t lie. We are the product of African bushmen, all of us. How do you like them apples?
I admire Colin Kaepernick. Instead of remaining on the sidelines, he’s taken his talents elsewhere. Though while I don’t agree dismantling the nation’s police is good policy–especially ahead of what we continue to need given our love of guns and violence.
George Floyd’s death at the hands of Derek Chauvin–we’re told assisted by J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao—may have done the country an unintended favor by showing the rest of us what Blacks have come to expect.
Is Racism the Country’s Original Sin?
I came across an article, George Packer Responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates’s earlier essay was The First White President, subtitled “The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy” published October 2017 in The Atlantic magazine. The essay is, as Packer writes:
“one of those pieces that grabs you with its first paragraph and never lets go. The argument keeps gathering force, building on the striking imagery (“Trump cracked the glowing amulet open”) and the caustic scouring of the polemics (opioids are treated as a sickness, crack was punished as a crime), to the very end. At its heart is the undeniable truth that racism remains fundamental in American politics.”
from George Packer Responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic magazine
Coates’s earlier essay, The Case for Reparations, anchored his book of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.
Coates is a sly dog–the eight years of the title refers to Civil War Reconstruction, not Obama’s two terms in the White House.
I’ve read Coates’s argument for slavery reparations, and he’s convincing on the facts: slavery has been officially illegal since the end of the war fought over it, [3] but the oppression of Blacks has continued well into the present era. Coates describes the FHA-endorsed red-lining that Chicago banks used, along with the “on-contract” mortgages offered Blacks. From 1934 to 1968, it was FHA policy to refuse backing mortgages in red-lined districts. The only mortgage Clyde Ross could get was “on contract.”
“Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller… had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.”
from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic magazine
White privilege? Is there such a thing? Wealth has privileges, certainly, and given the current income imbalance, one is virtually the same as the other. But Coates argues, if present disparities in wealth were only benign–albeit strung out–aftereffects of slavery, if racism wasn’t an active, ongoing enterprise, Blacks might climb out of poverty on their own. And he provides the evidence. The Case for Reparations is an uncomfortable read in its indictment.
It’s difficult to see how reparations could repair the damage of centuries. And I can see where the scattered descendants of the Indian nations might want to raise their hands–Mexicans might want Texas returned, and so on. However, might discussing the issue lead the country to a better place? If we can’t relive history, we could at least learn from it.
“John Conyers’s HR 40 [4] is the vehicle for that hearing [on reparations]. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”
from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic magazine
Moving to his article The First White President, Coates bases Trump’s election entirely on white racism. He, like Kaepernick, lays it all before the pedestal of America’s original sin, racism. Racism is in the mix when it comes to Trump, but Coates’s bitterness exaggerates it.
“… Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.”
From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The First White President in The Atlantic magazine
Coates has been writing on racism for years, so perhaps he should be forgiven the exasperation. Though one wonders where he’ll go from here. The election of Barack Obama will, in time, be seen as a turning point in our history, regardless of what followed. And so Packer calls him on his exaggerations:
“… the style of no-compromise sacrifices things that are too important for readers to surrender without a second thought. It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion. It brushes aside policy proposals as distractions, and politics itself as an immoral bargain. It weakens the liberal value of individual thought, and therefore individual responsibility, by subordinating thoughts and individuals to structures and groups. It begins with the essential point that race is an idea, and ends up just about making race an essence.”
from George Packer Responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic magazine
The entire Black Lives Matter summer has had more positive than negative effects, though it’s had both. Burning Portland will not abolish racism; nor will AR-15s and Confederate flags return working class jobs. A national discussion on reparations for slavery, might it excise the wound so it can heal, or tear it open again?
The country remains angry, that seems evident. And despite Coates’s claim that Whites from every economic class are angry at Blacks, by and large the working class whites are who wave the Confederate flag. Are they are saying what others are thinking?
So I return to a more modest suggestion: let’s work on getting the nation’s children better educated, make it our number one priority and hope for a future leader to emerge from that group. Not all of us are smart enough to become self educated like Abraham Lincoln.
Coate’s writing is the red hot fire, and Packer’s the reaction. It seems that while these two skilled writers go at each other’s theory of political history in America, the Proud Boys keep standing by.
[1] Channel4 Factcheck Black Americans Commit Crime
[2] Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police–yes but no
[3] To quote John C. Calhoun on the benefits of slavery: “ ‘Never before has the black race…from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,’ he asserted in Congress. ‘It came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions.’ “ from HistoryNet.com
[4] John Conyers introduced House Resolution HR 40 a proposal to “study” reparations for Blacks—every year until he died.