I know it's being discussed in other threads, I just felt like we should have this thread too.
It's hard to pick a low point of what's going on in the world right now so I'm going to try to focus on work today instead of Twitter/News, but peace love and understanding to y'all.
I came to put this in the thread on racism, but I think it belongs here, thanks for making the thread.
Quote:
Multiple histories of US police violence against the Black community are being written this week. They’ve taken the form of tweet threads, news articles, blog posts, and conversations among friends, loved ones, and even strangers on the internet. Amidst these waves of information, we as historians want our readers to remember the following:
Police brutality against Black people is woven into the fabric of the history of policing in the US—and reflects the historical reality that white America benefits from police and state violence against the Black community. George Floyd’s murder and the brutal suppression of the ensuing protests are the latest in a long history of police brutality and excessive, extraordinary violence.
As historians like Edward Ayers and Sam Mitrani have established, the construct of American policing was formed between roughly 1840-1880 on the crest of two trends. First, rising population density in cities brought middle-class and wealthy white Americans into close contact with people they considered disruptive to their orderly world: sex workers, impoverished drunk people, Black residents, immigrants. Second, a spiralling urban trend towards wage labor for larger corporations that was itself a disruption in some of the institutions that had previously guarded local order, like families and close-knit neighborhoods.
From their establishment in the mid- to late-19th century, American police forces have depended on their mandate to keep or restore the white, wealthy ideal of order and the active support or tacit acceptance of this ongoing role by the majority of white Americans.
The history of lynching demonstrates this point with sickening clarity and is one we all should know. To highlight just one incident from the thousands that occured: a mob of white people dragged prosperous Black farmer Anthony Crawford from the Abbeville, South Carolina jail in full sight of the jailer and local sheriff on October 21, 1916. Crawford had been beaten and stabbed earlier that day; he was beaten again, possibly to death, hanged, and shot multiple times. His heinous crime? He accused a white man of trying to cheat him financially, and defended himself when a group of white men attacked him in response.
John Hammond Moore has offered that one motivation for the lynching was a rumor the sheriff was going to help Crawford escape and the white murderers believed the police presence was not doing its job of keeping order according to their definition of “order.” However, when the sheriff and jailer looked the other way, they delegated their role of keeping order to the mob, empowering them to act on their behalf.
In Crawford’s case, it is easy to connect the dots between white people affording police the responsibility to keep order, white people benefiting from white supremacy, and state participation in unjust violence, not least because of the direct involvement of white civilians. We can easily see Crawford’s lynching as part of an broader phenomenon, not just an individual, extraordinary event. In effect, the police did - and kept doing - what white people wanted. A decade later, the Illinois Crime Survey highlighted:
The wildly disproportionate rate at which Black suspects were killed by Chicago police officers in comparison to the percentage of Black residents in the city
That a suspect or criminal (of any race) is “a product of his surroundings in the slum areas in the same way in which the good citizen is a product of the lake front environment.” [PDF]
By the 1920s, research pioneered by women scholars at the University of Chicago was already highlighting how stereotypes around “slum environment” turned residents into perceived criminals. They observed that the Black neighborhoods defined as "slums" exhibited precisely the same "disorderly" characteristics that had spurred the creation of official police departments in the previous century. And they observed how these conditions were the result of pervasive, systemic white supremacy.
Additionally, social workers documented how school segregation and the massive underfunding of Black schools by city politicians contributed to those same conditions, creating a feedback loop; The disorder the police were approved to combat was created by the lack of funding and resources. The ideal of order that the majority of white Chicagoans found attractive, in other words, both justified and resulted from police violence against their Black neighbors.
The nature of a survey, like the Illinois Crime Survey, demonstrates the same thing we recognize in lynching: individual cases of state violence against Black Americans, whatever the specific circumstances, are part of a pattern. But while the specter of lynching haunts the fringes of American crime, the pattern of police brutality against the Black community has not let up. In 2015, Jamil Smith showed how the final moments of some many of those killed by police across the decades echoed each other, again and again.
From the Fugitive Slave Act to George Floyd, examples of police violence against Black Americans are endless, gruesome, and there for everyone to see and behold. In 1942, Private Thomas Foster was beaten and shot four times by Little Rock police officers after intervening to stop the assault of a fellow soldier. In 1967, a cab driver named John William Smith was savagely beaten by the Newark police. In 1984, New York City police officers shot Eleanor Bumpurs multiple times as they tried to evict her, making the call that getting her out of her apartment was more important than accommodating her mental health struggles. We could list hundreds, if not thousands, further such examples that illustrate this pattern.
But it’s not enough to say, “here are a bunch of examples of police officers brutalizing Black people.” The ability of individual officers to assault and kill Black Americans year after year, decade after decade, murder after murder, stems from the unwillingness of the white majority to step beyond protesting individual cases or do to more than stroke our chins and say, “Yes, I see a pattern.”
That pattern exists because despite every act of police brutality, and even despite protests following individual acts, white America’s preference for an "orderly" society has been a higher priority. From the inception of official police forces in the mid-19th century, to school truancy officers and border patrol, the American police have existed at the will of the white majority to keep and restore order, as defined by the white majority, using the "necessary" force, as defined by the mostly white police force and legal system.
When we come to write the history of the last few days, we need to remember this wider context and that it goes beyond any single member of the police. It is not that every officer is evil, but they do operate in a system which was designed to build and maintain white supremacy. Justice for the individual Black Americans killed by individual members of the police is necessary, but so is a long, hard look at - and action against - our understanding of societal order and how it must be upheld.
Exposing these structures has taken years of untold work and sacrifice on the part of Black communities, activists and historians. It is far past time that white Americans help rather than hinder this work.
If you aren't familiar with r askhistorians they are a heavily moderated forum on reddit that has a reputation for being fairly humorless. They also have a moratorium on talking about things that aren't 25 years old, and they make the case pretty eloquently for persistent racism in america and police violence.
click through for a thread and suggested readings.
Several of my Facebook "friends" are vehemently insisting that a.) there's no such thing as institutional racism in this country; we've long gotten past that, b.) Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization -- or at the very least, they hate Whites and want "special privileges" for themselves, and so BLM is an inherently racist institution, c. if Blacks are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be the victims of and perpetrators of crimes, and are more likely to be killed by the police -- it's because they're irresponsible and lazy, not because of institutional racism, and d.) they, themselves are not the least bit racist, but anyone who tries to draw attention to racism in this country is definitely a racist -- because only an actual racist would see any evidence of racism in any of this.
I've given up even trying to have any sort of discussion with these people. It's pointless; as someone once said in a similar circumstance, it would be like trying to give medicine to the dead.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
The online TV guide showed a "BLM" slot on one of the syndicated channels at 8pm for 10 minutes last night. Odd channel to put an awareness / "party political" broadcast on I thought, people will just flip channels. But it turned out that a good number of channels were all running it, they just hadn't told the programme guide - 8 minutes 46 seconds of a black screen, with the words I CAN'T BREATHE fading in and out, and a timer (a couple of channels had different text).
I was skeptical that President Obama could say anything that would give me hope, but he made a few really good points during this panel conversation that genuinely gave me optimism (e.g. pointing out the contrast between the broad coalition of protesters out there this week vs in the 60's). I recommend watching the whole discussion.
“In 1970, we gathered on Hollywood Boulevard to protest police brutality and oppression to our community,” said Estevan Montemayor, the organization’s president. “We will do that again this year, where it began, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.”
A peaceful protest march in response to racial injustice is planned for Sunday, June 14. It will begin at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland boulevards and proceed to West Hollywood, where the parade normally takes place, ending at Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards.
“We encourage all community members who believe that we must root out this racial injustice and stand in solidarity with the black community and fight for real reform and change in this country on all levels of government to join us in this peaceful protest, in this march for justice,” Montemayor said.
Over a thousand people at a BLM protest at the US embassy in Luxembourg.
In response to the protests today outside the United States Embassy in Luxembourg, Ambassador J. Randolph Evans issued the following statement:
“I heard you and I thank you for the peaceful protest so others could hear you as well. We, as Americans, must and will continue our efforts individually and as a nation to work toward a more perfect union, fulfilling the sacred commitments we have made to each other in our Constitution equally, fully, and completely.”
"This is a performative distraction from real policy changes. Bowser has consistently been on the wrong side of BLMDC history. This is to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands. Black Lives Matter means defund the police. @emilymbadger say it with us," the account tweeted.
Again, I love the gesture and I have schadenfreude at how much it has to fuck with Trump, but we need real, substantive change.
I'm really pleased with the response so far from the company where I work. Our CEO sent a very genuine, compassionate email to the whole company. That was followed by a town hall event where he stated unequivocally that he (and our company) supports the cause, he took responsibility for having an mostly white male ELT and promised to change that, committed to starting various charitable programs (donation matching, supporting us in community outreach, etc) and so on. That was yesterday.
Today I participated in a group discussion about what our public statement will be and everyone was saying we need to say BLACK LIVES MATTER prominently in our statement or not say anything at all. Also it came up that companies that release boilerplate, hollow statements are getting eaten alive on social media so don't believe anyone who says venting on the internets doesn't change anything.
U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled on Friday night to block the use of chemicals like tear gas and non-lethal weapons like plastic bullets on protesters, saying that their right to free speech was more important than protecting buildings.
"If a store's windows must be broken to prevent a protester's facial bones from being broken or eye being permanently damaged, that is more than a fair trade," Jackson wrote in his page ruling," Reuters reported.
"If a building must be graffiti-ed to prevent the suppression of free speech, that is a fair trade. The threat to physical safety and free speech outweighs the threat to property."
Here's the entire interview with @kimlatricejones and David Jones Media. Take a second to watch the whole thing because she makes even greater points throughout the entire interview than she does in the viral clip that is circulating. Her Monopoly comparison is spot on. pic.twitter.com/klV5yxkqGu
— Matthew A. Cherry (@MatthewACherry) June 5, 2020
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Instructions unclear. "Take a second to watch the whole thing" but that meant I had to watch it at 405x normal speed (6:45 = 405s) and I didn't understand anything.
I finally started reading How To Be An Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. I bought it a year or two ago but I procrastinate. Something about this past week made me pick it up.
I suspect most people are like me and think "I don't need a whole book to explain to why I shouldn't treat people badly because of the color of their skin". To my surprise there's more to it than that! I'm only a couple chapters in but I've already learned a lot.
Here are some notes I've taken so far:
Definitions:
Racism: A marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities
Racial Inequity: When two or more racial groups aren't standing on approximately equal footing
Racist policy: Any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity. There is no such thing as a non-racist or race-neutral policy
Racist power: Racist policy and racist policymakers
Racist idea: Any idea that suggests that any racial group is inferior/superior to any other racial group in any way
People aren't racist or not-racist, they have (maybe act on) racist ideas or antiracist ideas
Ideas and policies are either racist or antiracist, there are no ideas/policies that are "not racist"
"Institutional", "Structural", "Systemic" Racism are all redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural and systemic.
There's nothing wrong with discrimination. If it leads to increased equity it's good, if it decreases equity it's bad.
"Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination"
I doubt many of us could even say. It seems pretty much unprecedented to me, but I'm hoping this will be a serious positive change, and I hope it spreads.
If you had asked me a week ago I would have said unlikely, but today, yeah I think it will not only stand but be the first of many.
The cops have so incredibly crapped themselves, and it couldn’t be at a worse time for them. They’ve been getting away with this because it’s been just out of view for most people and the media has helped keep it that way. The first version of BLM was powerful but also expertly nullified* so that they were screaming at either deaf ears or those that felt what they had was worth more than what they could lose. CoVid has fixed the second part by taking away what people had and freaking them out, and cops have fixed the first part by attacking anyone and everyone, while in plain view of everyone not there. The cops so had the majority of white people convinced that the helpful officer there at the white protest was the same officer who meets every protest and so these black people must be thugs, but now they’ve smashed that by giving everyone the black person treatment, right in front of all the white people who still believed they didn’t do that.
*In so many ways including the assassinations of Ferguson protest leaders once the spot light faded.
It's been killing me that I can't be at the Denver protests, but we're too old, and it's just too dangerous.
We live in a small, embarrassingly white city, but not as conservative as it used to be, and there's a walk scheduled here tomorrow. It'll be small enough to keep a distance from people, and if it were just about anything else, I wouldn't take the risk, but this is important enough that I can't not go. And I think it's important that even cities like ours are stepping up too.
So I made a couple signs today, and Matlock and I are going tomorrow. It's something, and we've got to do something.