Dispatch #79 White Lesbian Age 68 Considers WS-Weaponized Police, Police Abolition & Ability to Stay Alive

September 16th 2020

Day1409 Post-Ascendency of White Supremacy & Misogyny 

Day 1336 Post-Installation of White-Supremacist-Misogynist-Pussy-Grabbing-Self-Aggrandizing-Demagogic-Bully-Illegitimate-PeeeOTUS & his White-Nationalist-Fascistic-Christian-Supremacist-Quislings

One Thousand Four Hundred and Nine Days since the majority of white Americans chose white supremacy and misogyny rather than elect a woman President.  We cannot forget how the toxic foundation of America enabled fascism and hate to rule. 

Forty-eight days until November 3^rd Election Day 2020. We must elect Democrats up and down the ballot without exception right NOW. And then we return to work for Justice & Equity.  

Our collective lens for identifying the actions required by Justice & Equity must acknowledge the enduring consequences of our American white supremacist patriarchal culture founded on slavery, genocide and misogyny.

On August 24, 2019 on a sidewalk in Aurora Colorado, the three police officers abruptly crowded around 140 lb Elijah McClain as McClain walked home listening to music and carrying an Arizona Iced Tea in a small paper bag. “I’m an introvert,” he cried out, “Please respect my boundaries.”  Here are Elijah’s last words recorded on the police body cams as the officers held him in a seizure-inducing chokehold for 15 minutes: 

I can’t breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That’s my house. I was just going home. I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I’ll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I’m a mood Gemini. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. (Crying) Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t trying to do that. I just can’t breathe correctly. (Vomiting) I can’t fix myself (Vomits again)  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elijah-mcclains-last-words/

If you can bear to see family pictures of this 23-year old black massage therapist playing the violin for cats at a local shelter to help them be calm, then go https://news.yahoo.com/im-just-different-the-family-of-elijah-mc-clain-a-23-yearold-black-man-killed-by-colorado-cops-090048258.html.  Kamala Harris called Elijah’s killing “absolutely crushing.”

Like so many killings that we know about, and so many killings that we will never know about, the police and local government routinely lied, dissembled, and covered up what actually happened. Only months of intensive organizing and community pressure finally revealed the truth about the killing of Elijah McClain.  To see the hard work it took to get some justice for Elijah, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elijah_McClain.

The through-line established by our white supremacist culture runs from the slave patrols and KKK vigilantes in the South to formal police departments in the North with the explicit authority to enforce control over and manage behavior of black people by any means necessary and with impunity. (Re-read Dispatch #71 June 18^th 2020)

We white people need to grasp this context so that we can understand and support the demands made for defunding the police and indeed, for abolishing the police in its current incarnation. This is not about individual bad apples.  We white people are brainwashed by white supremacy to see black people as dangerous and to believe our safety depends upon policing black-criminality.  Our institutionalized approach to policing reflects this view.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job. www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html

The current police abolition movement urges consideration of policies designed for community safety instead of policies premised on social control and oppression. Police abolitionists assert that policing in the United States is inherently flawed and so they disagree with police reformists that reforming the police is possible.  

Instead the police abolition movement insists that other measures can address community safety, such as employment at a living wage, safe and affordable housing, access to healthcare services, good public schools, affordable and accessible child care, parks, gardens and green spaces, thriving civic organizations, and safe water and air. 

When we consider these measures, we can see that community safety is really about creating and sustaining healthy communities, where everyone has their space and place, and the grace to live happy and productive lives. In healthy communities, restorative justice initiatives can thrive to manage violations of community norms. In such communities, what could/would be the role for a wholly different version of police?

White people from all walks of life predictably and understandably react very negatively to these movements. Yes, of course, we have our fascist-in-chief and his quislings whipping up white supremacist fears. 

But we white people must work to root out the fears planted deep in our psyches by our White Supremacist culture about black criminality and black otherness. Do we need the police to feel safe? The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year; data show that just about 4% of an average police officer’s time is spent on violent crime. 

As Dispatch readers will know, I find white privilege to be an inadequate term/tool in the fight to get white people committed to dismantling White Supremacy (Dispatch #74 July 4th 2020).  However, in a recent interview with The Guardian about her new publication Just Us: An American Conversation, renowned poet, playwright, and essayist Claudia Rankine described white privilege as the ability to stay alive.

“It’s about separating economic privilege from white privilege. Because what you actually get with whiteness is the ability to move freely, and to live. And people don’t understand that before they are negotiating economics, they have been given the right to just live in their poverty or their wealth. That’s the piece of the conversation that I think needs to be said more, because the minute they hear privilege they think money, and we’re not talking about money. Also, they can’t conceptualise it because none of us should have to conceptualise it. None of us should have to be living with the precarity of [thinking that] maybe if we leave our house, we will be shot for no reason at all simply because of the colour of our skin. They cannot comprehend that, because that should not exist. White people think when I say white privilege I mean economic privilege but I mean white living. The ability to stay alive.” www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/05/claudia-rankine-by-white-privilege-i-mean-the-ability-to-stay-alive  

Yeah, well, I think Claudia Rankine just about covers the extreme dangers for black people posed by police created and weaponized by a white supremacist culture.   Staying alive.  Thriving is another matter entirely.

NB: Claudia Rankine is a poet, playwright, essayist and adjunct professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. She was born in Jamaica and moved to the US as a child. The recipient of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry and a 2016 MacArthur “genius” fellowship, she is the author of five books, including the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric. Her new publication, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press; Illustrated Edition September 8, 2020) explores whiteness and white supremacy in a series of everyday conversations, at the airport, dinner party, theatre and voting booth.