Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas
Linda Burnham - July 11, 2016
A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19th century.
Patty rollers were authorized to stop, question, search, harass and
summarily punish any Black person they encountered. The five- and
six-pointed badges many of them wore to symbolize their authority were
predecessors to those of today’s sheriffs and patrolmen. They regularly
entered the plantation living quarters of enslaved people, leaving
terror and grief in their wake. Together with the hunters of runaways,
these patrols had a crystal clear mandate: to constrain the enslaved
population to its role as the embodiment and producer of massive wealth
for whites and to forestall the possibility that labor subordinated to
the lash might rebel at the cost of white lives.
How
far have we come, really? Having extricated ourselves from a system of
bottomless and blatant cruelty we have evolved a system that depends on
the patty rollers of today to constrain and contain a population that,
while no longer enslaved, is ruthlessly exploited, criminally neglected
and justifiably aggrieved. Ruthlessly exploited by the low-wage
industries that depend on ample supplies of cheap labor, by the bottom
feeders of capital – pay-day loan companies and slumlords come to mind
– by the incarceration-for-profit industry, by the municipalities that
meet their budgets by preying on poor people, generating revenue by way
of broken taillights, lapsed vehicle registrations and failures to
signal.
Criminally
neglected by policy makers – 152 years’ worth and counting – at every
level of government. And so our education policy appears to be: starve
the public system until it collapses and to hell with the children whose
parents have no alternative. Housing policy stubbornly stacked against
the development and maintenance of low-income housing. Jobs policy that,
against an ideological backdrop that touts personal fulfillment and
prosperity through honest effort, reduces grown men to selling loosies
and cd’s on street corners to provide for their families.
Justifiably
aggrieved because we still must assert, against the relentless
accumulation of evidence to the contrary, that Black lives matter.
And all this on top of the foundational failure to financially repair or compensate the formerly enslaved or their descendants.
So
today’s patty rollers are expected to contain any overflow of
bitterness and anger on the part of the exploited, neglected and
aggrieved, maintaining order in a fundamentally – and racially –
disordered system. Their mandate is as clear as that of their
forefathers: to constrain a population whose designated role is to
absorb absurdly high rates of unemployment and make itself available for
low-wage, low-status work without complaint, much less rebellion. Those
who fear a spiraling descent into disorder, know this: we are merely
witnessing the periodic, explosive surfacing of entrenched disorders we
have refused to face or fix.
Our
narratives and debates about good cops and rogue cops, better training
and community policing are important but entirely insufficient. No doubt
the patty rollers of the 1850s could have been trained to reign in
their brutality. Given the gloriously diverse dispositions of our human
family, patrollers likely ranged from the breathtakingly cruel to the
queasily reluctant enforcers of patent injustice. All that is, at
bottom, beside the point. Whether cruel or kind, restrained or rogue,
their job was to police – and by policing, maintain – a barbaric system.
Today’s
police can be better trained to recognize implicit bias, to dial back
on aggression and deescalate tense encounters. All to the good, as far
as it goes. But none of it changes their core mandate in poor Black
communities: to control and contain, by any means necessary, a
population that has every reason to be restive and rebellious.
* * *
“Was
he colored?” That’s what my grandmother would say whenever she heard
news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator were
“colored” his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an
individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency.
Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist
or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I
imagine most Black families had a version of “Was he colored?” And I
wouldn’t be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent
expression today.
Untying the knot of individual culpability and the
consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as
it might seem.
I
was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off
the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back
pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left
the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the
action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was
“colored,” and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.
It
has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the
incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on
self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned
the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The
president’s intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions
by definitively asserting that the shooter’s action was not associated
with a political movement or a particular organization, that his
murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in
general. He struggled to shift the focus from “Was he colored?” to
“Clearly he was crazy, right?”
But
before boxing Micah Johnson up and setting him aside as deranged and
demented it’s worth asking a few questions. Honestly, good people, did
anybody in their right mind – that is, not troubled or demented – think
that the police could continue to pick off Black people at will and on
camera without producing a Micah Johnson? And is troubled and demented
shorthand for “traumatized by repeated exposure to the graphic depiction
of the murder of people who look just like me?” Or for “agonized by the
fact that the officers of the law who placed a handcuffed man in the
back of a van and snapped his spine in an intentionally “rough ride”
were neither held criminally accountable nor labeled troubled and
demented?” Or for “depressed beyond imagining and haunted by the ghosts
of the men and women whose lives were snatched by the side of the road,
down back alleyways, and in precinct stations from one end of the
country to the other before the era of cell phone video?” Or for
“pierced through the heart by the voice of four-year-old Dae’Anna,
comforting her mama?” Because if demented and troubled is shorthand for
any of that, then Micah Johnson may have been a lone gunman, but he is
far from alone.
That
whoosh you heard on Friday morning was the sound of people rushing to
condemn the Dallas shootings, or to extract condemnations from others.
There is, of course, no moral justification for gunning down police
officers. And, retaliatory violence aimed at the armed representatives
of the state, beyond being a suicidal provocation, also shuts down all
avenues for advancing the cause of racial justice. But there is a lot
of room for reflection between the cheap polarities of condemn or
condone.
So
here we are, once again, with calls from all quarters for dialogue
across the racial divide. But if the long years before the emergence of
the various movements for Black lives have taught us anything, it is
this: our purported partners in dialogue simply turn their backs and
leave the table as soon as the pressure is off. This moment calls for
the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest and the
intensification and elaboration of multiple movements for Black lives –
for the sake of our ancestors and the generations to come. And for the
sake of this country that is our home.
--------------------
Linda Burnham is the Research Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is the co-author of Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work.
Burnham was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, a national
organization that was an early advocate for the rights of women of
color. In 1990 she co-founded Women of Color Resource Center. She was
its Executive Director for 18 years. Burnham led large delegations of
women of color to the 1985 UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi, the
1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, and the 2001 United
Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.
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