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silver-and-ivory · 7 years

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Would you like to provide some links or examples as to how police favor white supremacists over black rights activists? No pressure to respond, of course, but if you do choose to, I'm not asking for anything exhaustive. Maybe a keyword or event or two so I can research it myself. Thanks.

Ha, this is not the ask I was expecting to get about that post!

Hm.

It’s possible that this article from the Atlantic about gun control has some relevant information, but it’s not comprehensive.

So here’s a summary of what I was referencing instead. When slavery was common in the South, there were gangs of white men who would search for runaway slaves and in general police black behavior. According to some sources, modern police forces are a direct descendant of these gangs.

After the Civil War, former plantation owners and so on tried to reestablish their power. Part of the way they did this was through arresting lots of innocent black people; slavery was - and is - still legal as long as the slaves were criminals. The police didn’t function as protectors or as enforcers of the law, but instead as the implements of white supremacy.

All of this was accompanied by racist policies whereby insurance companies would devalue districts where black or other nonwhite people lived, resulting in white flight and creating ghettoes. Also, job discrimination created poverty; government welfare programs after wars and in the New Deal weren’t applied equally to whites and blacks, so that the form of welfare that blacks got ended up being more stigmatized. (For example, WWII veteran benefits included a Nice Picket Fence in Suburbia. Black people did not get that benefit.)

Skip ahead a few years the criminalization of blackness (and other minorities) continues to be a Major Problem. The police consistently act as enforcers of e.g. segregation laws. The criminal “justice” system consistently fucks over black people and forgives white supremacists, like the murderers of Emmett Till. (A little known fact is that Emmett Till had had polio, which left him with a consistent stutter. He was taught to whistle so that it was easier for him to speak. The incident that lead to his death was him whistling at a white woman. This is kind of far out there but it seems as though there’s a natural connection between these two facts.)

(Police also served as enforcers of gender normativity- there were laws that women had to be wearing three articles of men’s clothing at a time, and vice versa; also, gay sex was sometimes criminalized. The police would arrest and rape queer people routinely. This is depicted in Stone Butch Blues very disturbingly and it is also probably relevant to this Amnesty International article, “Brutality in Blue”. It’s part of what caused the Stonewall Riots.

In addition to this, the police would ignore crimes committed against queer people, turning a blind eye to queers being assaulted or raped. This is called selective enforcement and it is Very Bad.

This all means that black trans women are (likely) at a higher risk of having bad stuff happen to them; for an example, see the CeCe McDonald case.)

At some point the school-to-prison pipeline became a thing as well. The policing of black people was also extended to Latinos.

It only gets worse with the War on Drugs, wherein President Nixon deliberately and explicitly decided to criminalize crack in order to hurt black people (and marijuana in order to hurt the anti-Vietnam counterculture). A particularly notorious example of the criminalization of [stuff black people do] is the massive disparity in crack versus powder cocaine sentencing. Crack is something poor black people tended (tend?) to use more; powder is something rich white people tend(ed) to use. So of course…

…people faced longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for offenses involving the same amount of powder cocaine – two forms of the same drug. Most disturbingly, because the majority of people arrested for crack offenses are African American, the 100:1 ratio resulted in vast racial disparities in the average length of sentences for comparable offenses. On average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses.

The disparity has since been reduced to a mere 18:1 ratio. Racial equality, eh?

This is a good time to mention that a good deal of Republican presidents, including Nixon and Our Good Friend Ronald Reagan, tried to pander to the South by being utter racists. They would deliberately say things like “welfare queens” or “thugs” or “law and order” or “states’ rights”, and the South would know that they really meant to say “fuck those uppity n-words, amirite?”. This was called the Southern Strategy. Internal records show that Nixon knew exactly what he was doing and that he was deliberately doing it; he summarizes his strategy in basically the same way I am.

At some point a narrative of black criminality started being common. Black people and black men especially were seen as threatening, thugs, brutes, less than human. They were threats to the beauty of the white women (as in Emmett Till’s case). This has also been applied to various other minorities (see: Donald Trump on Mexicans).

Unfortunately - somewhat similarly to their treatment of queers - , police are very bad at actually doing stuff about real crimes committed against black people- ie, the much vaunted black-on-black crime problem, which some people use to derail conversations about police brutality and abuses. The underpolicing of minority neighborhoods is actually an outgrowth of racism as well.

Partially due to a fear of blacks, and partially due to a neurotic fear of Communism, during the 70s or around that time, the FBI started keeping information on a lot of black activists, including the (radical! socialist!) Martin Luther King Jr. They assassinated or otherwise eliminated a lot of the black leadership. Here is a very emotional letter from James Baldwin to Angela Davis about her arrest, which is probably somewhat relevant. (Content warning for comparisons to the Holocaust.)

The media did not care about dead black people. The media did care when white college students, down in the South for Freedom Summer, started getting killed, by police forces. The involvement of white students, of course, was orchestrated by nonviolent black activists like King.

Another remarkable thing that King did was that he made going to prison a mark of prestige, rather than shame. This is really cool just on its own, but it’s even more clever when one considers the context.

Everyone knows about Martin Luther King Jr. Not everyone knows why he was so admirable, or so successful. Through nonviolence, he made clear what had been true for centuries- that the white supremacists were the initiators of violence and the breakers of peace. He actively worked against notions of black people as brutes or criminals.

Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson… thing… are reactions to hundreds of years of racist police enforcement and brutality. Conservative Republican reactions are, by and large, abysmal: whenever another black child gets murdered by the police people always try to justify it, claiming that the kid is Just A Thug. He stole cigarettes! He had his hand in his pocket. He was wearing a hoodie. He was so big and threatening. We had to tackle her to the ground because we were Just Scared. He was rude so we put him in a chokehold and ignored him saying he couldn’t breathe! They were just thugs.

As if these make someone less of a victim, or less worthy of care. As if this makes police officers less responsible for what they’ve done.

(Note that I’m not making specific claims about specific incidents- just, taken as a whole, it’s Very Very Damning.)

As a whole, the police force functions as an instrument of white supremacy. This is a disgusting perversion of the Lockean social contract and the rule of law.

And I don’t know how to solve it.

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