On a week of cop killings and killing cops: But not really.
It’s not the police.
When it comes down to it, part of the problem with fixing the problem is we’re trying to fix the police, and that won’t help.
Because it’s not the police.
It’s every single last one of us. It’s White folks who know they have privilege and don’t know what to do with that information. It’s White folks who don’t know they have privilege and don’t know why this happens. It’s White folks who look around themselves and buy in to the idea that equality for others somehow hurts them, and react by holding their privilege ever so much tighter. It’s Black folks who don’t recognize the racism that’s been ingrained in themselves. It’s people of all colors who refuse to consider that we have made this situation we are in. It’s all of us who live where we live for any number of reasons and fail to recognize that our neighborhoods are segregated, our social lives are segregated, our religious lives are segregated, our cultural realities are segregated.
And that’s before we take into account the fact that Black and White are only two of the many failed and failing social constructs we have imposed upon our world view.
Our culture has failed to live up to the legal battles fought and won by our parents. Our parents, Black, White, Hispanic, fought side by side to turn this country’s legal ship around. But our parents also thought that was all they needed to do.
Yet here we are.
Seems it was all they could do. Or all they needed to do, then. But it was only one step, and a culture is a multi-generational thing. So now, it’s our turn to start doing what we need to do.
The police issue is a multivalent issue not only of race but of the progressive militarization of policing in this country over the last two decades. This militarization has not benefitted the police or the polity, it has benefited only two groups: The military-industrial complex has benefitted from the proliferation of weapons of war onto the streets of a supposedly civilized nation, and the hegemonic powers that try hard to produce the culture to meet their needs have benefitted in the ways that militarization has (yet again) allowed the culture to divide us, thus maintaining the status quo.
It’s clear in the narratives about the shootings over the last year. All of the shootings.
If a brown man shoots a large group of strangers for any reason, that man is a Radicalized Muslim ™ which actually means “terrorist.” Terrorists are the means by which our government terrorizes us. While terrorists are a very real phenomenon. While terrorists do, very truly, exist. They have become an excuse for all kinds of misbehavior by our so-called representatives in government. They have become the excuse for the abandonment of core principles of our culture. They have become the conduit for our government’s reach into our personal lives beyond anything we would deem reasonable were we not being kept in a constant state of fear and were they not able to point to the stateless, shape-shifting anger of Radicalized Islam ™ anytime they are questioned about such acts as wiretapping the entire population.
If a Black man shoots anyone for any reason, he’s just a thug. Interestingly, no Black man needs to shoot anyone to be a thug. Thuggery has been handed him by virtue of his birth. There’s no need to understand a thug. A thug simply is. He is both a threat and an inferior. A thug is only scary on a dark street, alone, and if you have yet to get your concealed carry permit. A thug is only scary because he’s not fully human. And thugs don’t live near you, so you needn’t concern yourself with them. Besides, when you do come in contact with a thug, you will be saved by the civility of your class and astute avoidance of “the ghetto.”
If, on the other hand, a White man enters a church on a Wednesday night during bible study and kills nine Black folks, or if he goes to an elementary school and kills more than twenty kids, then he must be mentally ill. Mental illness is the White man, lone shooter, narrative. Mental illness is the excuse. Because we still believe that mental illness is rare, and we still believe that it is violent, and we still believe it won’t happen in our home. And most importantly, because we need not question mental illness. We understand its deep pain. We can see that while this man has committed a heinous crime, it is a factor of a pathology, not a factor of his religion or his skin tone. We can therefore empathize with the victims without blaming ourselves, because we do not see him in the mirror despite his likeness to us.
Humans are meaning-making machines. We categorize and sort nearly instantly, all day long. We have to. It is how we are built, and it’s the reason we have become who we are. We have to look at any given situation and quickly decide on danger levels and action. This holds true for meeting up with a tiger or crossing a street or even surfing the Web. And so we are bio-chemically programmed to categorize, and then we get culturally programmed to use certain categories in certain ways. Categories like terrorist, thug, crazy person.
Or, for police, categories like victim, perpetrator, criminal, dangerous person, emotionally disturbed person (EDP).
These categories are important in policing because police are taught that every stop is a shooting waiting to happen. Every encounter can be dangerous. And that’s not untrue. But while every stop is a potential life-ender, not every life-ending stop is about race. Cops are shot by White people, too. Cops shoot White people as well.
And yet, when we take the categories of terrorist, thug and crazy person and cross them with categories like criminal, dangerous person, and EDP, then place them in the hands of an over-militarized, nervous police force, we have created a disaster in waiting. Our police drive tanks. They carry weapons. They train in military tactics, and then they hit the streets with harmful categories.
And, still, it’s not a police problem. It’s an all of us problem.
Because while categories are good and necessary, they are also necessarily limited. When our categories hurt us as a culture, it’s time to change them. Only by rewriting our culture can we rewrite the categories. Sadly, only by rewriting the categories, can we rewrite culture.
The benefits to our culture of truly integrating all members of our society are boundless. We will have the benefit of multiple points of view, we will have the benefit of a deeper, more truly mutli-cultural United States. We will gain a better understanding of ourselves and make better choices for ourselves. These choices will lead to better and more equal health, education, and economic realities
The cost of maintaining the status quo go far further than the intangible gains for us as a country. The costs range from creating a more deeply divided polity and a re-segregation on even legal grounds, to the growing income gap that is served by the divisions we have sown, and a militarized country in which the majority of the polity are militarily controlled. That future serves a handful of people. And it is the future we face. None of our lives will matter until Black Lives Matter.
When Dr. King and the millions of members of the civil rights movement chanted “No Justice; No Peace,” those who stood against them heard a threat. They heard, “You will give us what we ask or we will harm your peaceful world.” But the chant means something else entirely. No justice; no peace is a statement of reality. It is a creed of human truth. Where there is not justice for all, there can be no peace for any. When we do not fight for justice for all our brothers and sisters in culture, we create the culture in which they cannot fight for justice on our behalf.
I used to believe in the idea of “marching in the streets.” I used to think there would come a line beyond which none of us would allow matters to reach. I used to think that we would never become the oppressive states I held anathema. But now I realize I live in a culture that encourages and reinforces rape, racism, violence, and oppression. And we all know it. But we are all so thoroughly controlled by those whose interests lie in our complacency that we cannot march in the streets. We have to go to work. We all hang by a thread and have failed to realize that each thread, while fragile and easily broken, can be made part of a large textile that holds together and creates strength. Only if we weave our lives together, only if we recognize our inter-dependence can we stand together in the trust that doing so will better us all. The Corporate interests that control our lives will have to answer to us when we demand, en-masse, that they meet our needs. Until then, we will continue to serve under their control, and we will continue to meet their needs, and doing so will keep us divided in our neat little segregated categories, lives, religious practices and cultures.
It’s time to put down the surprise face masks White folks walk around with when Black folks are shot by police and look at the very real picture. Because it isn’t about the police. It’s about each individual who participates in this culture, willingly or not, and who helps make it what it is.
We are the police.
We are the polity.
And we need to start being the solution.
