Racism & Police Violence

Trigger Warning: there are mentions of police brutality and police violence, as well as discrimination, oppression, slavery, lynching, historical trauma, etc.

I know I haven't blogged in a long time. I've been preoccupied with the many, many readings about social work that my U-M MSW program has assigned me. Those who know me know that I love learning, and I truly do believe this program is teaching me so many valuable things and important things for my career ahead, but I've found it hard to be able to take time to really register what it is I'm learning. It's been tough figuring out how to really take it all in. By the time I finish all the readings and assignments, there's little time to review, so here I am, on a sick day, ready to take on the topic that has really grabbed my attention from my SW 505 class. I want to reflect on all that I've learned from it, in hopes it can make someone else think about something in a different way or make me see things I didn't the first time I attempted to absorb the information.

I want to mention that throughout this, I want to encourage readers to read it through a hopeful lens. A lot of the history and reality of the awful brutality of people of color by police is hard to read and take in. It's all very sad and negative content, but I'm hoping to tell it in such a way that is anchored toward change, toward something better. I want to highlight people and movements such as Black Lives Matter and those who have participated in it that are actively working to create a better world for us. I also hope to inspire some of you to want to not just learn about this topic, but to find a way to actually act in your community. As a future social worker, I know it may seem like this is only for me and for people in my field. But these are human rights we are talking about, these are humans that are being oppressed through systems that we need to dismantle, and therefore I believe there's room and a need for everyone to take responsibility and to do something. The changes we want to see will benefit us all in a much more inclusive and kind and loving world. Before you read this, I ask you to think about what world it is you want to see. My hope is that by the end of this you will be able to see it more clearly, or if not, have the motivation to do whatever it takes to find a way to see it.

I also want to mention that being anti-racist looks different for everyone. I consider what I'm doing now an act. I'm not going to lie. There have been times before I got educated, before I was in the DEI Certificate Program, that I wasn't actively aware of my implicit biases and that words I was saying were unintentionally harmful. But I've come to learn that the impact does matter, no matter my intention, and even though we live in a world where I do fear my words will come out wrong, I feel like I'm in a place where I've learned about language and about these topics and learned from a variety of perspectives, that I feel comfortable writing about this today. I feel more uncomfortable not saying anything. I feel that if I don't write about these things in my novels and elsewhere then all it does is silence the voices who deserve to be listened to.

I also want to acknowledge the privilege that I have as a white woman who is talking about police brutality, something I have never had to experience and never will to the degree men and women of color have. Intersectionality is also at play and there are men and women of color with disabilities and with other social identities that also give them a unique experience. I want to acknowledge this and be real that I have benefitted from colonialism being on land that was taken from the Three Fires People who are the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Boodewadomi, along with their neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and the Wyandot nations. In addition to this, I will never truly know what it is like to be fearful of police and to be a victim of police brutality. I won't. I want to acknowledge that, and just like when I work with a client and discuss with them that my privilege and our differences in power may affect our work together, I want to acknowledge to readers that this is my own point of view based on what I've learned.

So, I want to start with George Floyd. His brutal murder led to many Black Lives Matter protests. It is sad thinking about the many who have died before him, including women of color whose narratives are often forgotten about, their names not written about as much on newspapers or spoken on TV, how they weren't enough to spark protests. I personally think one of the reasons why George Floyd's death kickstarted all of this is because he went viral. The graphic videos and images I think made it real for people.

The fact we've seen so many protests has been extremely hopeful, but after watching a video by The Atlantic, Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, pointed out that we've been here before and nothing came of it. It's not too late to do something, but we haven't yet made a new history. The 1960s had a lot of uprisings regarding police violence, ones addressing lynching for example. But what ended up happening in our history was Nixon, our "law and order President"; as a result of his presidency, not only were Black communities making up disproportionate numbers in incarceration, but according to Barker, Keller, and Eder, it was also a time where arbitration was born and police who committed such violent acts won disciplinary constraints; arbitrators reinstated half of the fired officers whose appeals they considered which meant policemen who were murdering innocent Black bodies were getting paid to leave and join another department. The fact this has been happening honestly makes me feel very defeated. Seeing so many people work so hard for their rights, only for policies to then work against them like these 1960s police unions' disciplinary constraints expanding into laws and contracts, it's hard to accept. What I try to tell myself is it's sadly a reality and all we can do is work to make it better. There has been policy in Oregon for example where departments and unions have to agree on discipline guidelines. But there's also been a lot of places where work still needs to be done. In Portland, Officer Frashour got away with murder. Even though sometimes it feels like we're going backwards or there's more bad policies than not, I try to think of the good policies that have been passed and I try to think about how we can continue that and build more of them. Every little win needs to be acknowledged.

The next thing I want to talk about is the three levels of police bias that the podcast The Gray Area with Sean Illing talks about talks about. Illing says there's an individual level, community, level, and city level. The individual level is the idea that a police officer may or may not exhibit bias. The community level though is saying that the individual officers aren't biased but the decision making and deployment patterns are biased. The same instruction is going to affect communities different than others because of spatial elements of communities, according to Illing. The city level is explained with the example of Philadelphia cops treating people more harshly than cops in Bridgeport because there are more people of color in Philadelphia and they tend to respond more harshly because of that. I really like what this podcast explores, and I learned a lot. I learned that crime and poverty are big predictors but not sufficient enough to explain racial disparities. Crime itself reflects racism in that we've used policy and redlining and segregation and disinvestment and all these other things to create more crime in Black communities. Also, self-reporting bad behaviors has been shown to have no correlation with actually getting in trouble with the law, yet contact with law enforcement predicted subsequent increases in self-reported criminal behavior. It seems contact with police is doing the opposite of its intent, and so I agree with the podcat that we should be looking at these things. We need more data on crime and what police are doing and we need to construct a plan. We need to find a way for minorities and those of color to have a voice in their communities of what exactly the role of police should be. If it's a predominantly white area, then it's not a surprise if they see their biggest safety risk as people of color that their law enforcement would be targeting those individuals. We need to change how community defines safety and empower the minority to be in charge of how it's policed. I stand by this idea. I also feel we have a responsibility in those "crime" areas to give them resources and cash and intervene because violence is almost always a police and personal failure, according to Illing. I wish that I was hearing more about this, and this podcast wasn't the first I've heard of it, but I like that it gives us specific places to start with on how to help this issue. These are things that make me feel more hopeful in change when we have plans to actually do something instead of just talking about it.

One final idea I wanted to bring up is the idea of the intersection of disability, race and police violence. What stuck out to me from this discussion and from hearing the stories is how we need to represent race and disability more. We often may talk about conflicts in other countries or within our own but we never view the people in those as disabled. The talk taught me about how oppression and exploitation through slavery and work, how they can lead to disability, and how hard it is to come out as disabled, since the consequences tend to be institutionalization and murder. Those who are low income, incarcerated, Black, they are all not represented in the media very much at all. We need to change this. We need to frame accommodations in such a way so it's known that everyone needs it, not just the individual. We all need it as well so we are able to understand and communicate with that individual. We need to make those who are disabled visible as well in movements such as Black Lives Matter. This is attending to disability justice. They need to have access to be able to participate in protests and movements. Also, those who are disabled and a person of color don't just have to fear police because of their race, which is the first thing people tend to see, but they also have to fear that if they move the wrong way or communicate the wrong way, that that could increase the likelihood of violence being acted upon them. It amplifies their fear and makes their experience unique. We need to all acknowledge that the US has always utilized labels of disability, race, and class to criminalize Black and/or people who are disabled.

I know this is all heavy stuff. The first time I learned all this information, I was overwhelmed and sad and disappointed in how little progress it seems we've made. But I do have hope. I can see a silver lining, but it can only grow bigger if other people can see it and start to act on it too. We all have to protest and we have to take all this knowledge and actually act on it. I can see a better world, I can see it.

Now you just have to ask yourself. Can you?