My friend/poet Aaron Samuels said this, and I think is particularly relevant to how we are positioning a movement in Kalamazoo. I guess my biggest problem is that the issue is being framed as a police violence issue. This encourages people with cops in their family, or who have had good experiences with police to stand up for what they believe in and make sure both sides of the issue are being heard. However this is not about Police Violence. This is about state-sanctioned race-based violence in all forms: Housing discrimination and the ghettoization of black geographies, education inequality and a public school system that prepares POC for working class or prison labor, state sanctioned death penalties disproportionately applied to POC, and selectively harsher legal penalties for POC committing the same crimes as white folks, among others. This is violence. And the police have been used as a tool among many tools to perpetuate these violent systems. Just as there have been good teachers who are still used as a tool to perpetuate a class divide, and there have been good real estate agents who have been used to perpetuate housing segregation, there may be individual police officers who some may call good people. I dont dispute that. But that is not the point. The larger issue is that these systems are still violent, and they are designed in such a way to protect those who make it work. So when black people die at the hands of the system, the system finds itself not guilty. That is what I am angry about.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 03:31:32 +0000