If We Apply a Critical Race Lens to 2020, What Do We Do?
Written by Gabrielle Langkilde for Map-Collective.com
In my last piece, I tried to clarify the connection between racial justice and climate justice by illustrating how police forces and the US military, in their “missions” and “operations” that often result in the terrorizing of BIPOC communities, contribute to the abuse of natural resources and the destruction of our natural environment. I argued that, without a critical race lens, it is impossible to see that climate justice is racial justice. It is impossible to see that climate justice is Black liberation. And that it is a world free from over policing and militarization.
And while a critical race lens allows us to see these connections, this vision means nothing without action. That then begs the question: now that a critical race lens has given us insight as to why collective liberation is essential in the fight for climate justice, what steps can we take towards achieving this collective liberation?
When trying to understand what actions we must take in fighting for the liberation of marginalized groups, we must always remember to listen, center, and amplify the voices of members within those said groups. With that in mind, in our efforts towards BIPOC liberation, and thus climate justice, we must hear and amplify the demands to abolish the police, which Black leaders have been calling for since long before 2020. But what does abolishing the police mean? What does it look like? How do we get there?
Defunding the police is the first step towards abolition, and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) has outlined exactly what they mean when they say #DefundThePolice. On their website, they’ve made clear that, “When we talk about defunding the police, we’re talking about making a major pivot in national priorities. We need to see a shift from massive spending on police that don’t keep us safe to a massive investment in a shared vision of community safety that actually works.” In 2020, most of the largest cities in the US are set to spend somewhere between 10–25% of their total city budgets on police. In Las Vegas, Nevada, almost 45% of their total city budget will go to police departments — an equivalent of $656 million dollars. Most try to justify this large amount of spending on policing as essential for crime prevention, but the positive relationship between more police and less crime has not been proven.
In fact, it has been disproven. The safest communities are not ones that are over-policed. Just take a look at America’s predominantly white suburban neighborhoods or other communities where there is easy access to healthcare, quality public education, and living wages. Instead of using this money to bulk up police forces, M4BL is demanding for the same investment in Black and brown communities and that police and military funding be shifted towards providing those same resources for low-income BIPOC communities.
The demands to defund and eventually abolish the police operate on the fundamental truth that the police do not keep us safe. There have been many proposals to reform how police operate, but this is not what BIPOC leaders are calling for. They are calling for the complete abolishing of the police because reforms have not worked. You cannot reform an institution that was born out of white supremacy for the sole purpose of the subjugation of Black communities and non-Black communities of color. With that said, while we must defund the police and reinvest in job opportunities, healthcare, and quality education for our low-income BIPOC communities, we must also contend with the systemic racism perpetuated in the workplace, in healthcare, in education, as well as other institutions. For example, stereotypes about Black womxn having a higher pain tolerance than other people have led to inadequate healthcare for Black womxn. Other stereotypes about BIPOC students being lazy and inherently less intelligent (with one’s intelligence being measured according to white Western ways of knowing) have led to BIPOC students left behind in the educational system and, in many cases, even landed them in juvenile detention.
So while at the same time we are calling to defund and gradually abolish the police, we must not overlook the ways that other systems such as healthcare and education have failed us. If we are truly invested in protecting our BIPOC communities, we cannot just stop at abolishing the police. We must be dedicated to uprooting white supremacy in every institution that harms our communities. This means a life-long dedication to, not only decolonizing institutions, but also decolonizing our own minds. Because only then will we be able to achieve collective liberation.
