Ahmaud Arbery, Bothem Sean, Attatiana Jefferson, Jonathan Ferrell, Rehisha McBride, Stephen Clark, Jordan Edwards, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Aiyana Jones (7 yrs old) Tamir Rice (12 years old.), Corey Jones, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bell. This list could be tripled in sixty seconds by a twelve year old who could spell Google and indicates indisputably that the police have become the self-elected fist of the Establishment, hired (in their own minds at least) to keep the lower classes cowed. That may or may not be the intention of their employers, and the current protests for George Floyd are in part a demand to make the intentions of those employers clear. For African-American people continually punched in the face (and murdered) by that fist, it is only appropriate that those gloved hands be the concentration of their attention. Being a cultural minority (13%), seeking political change will require enlisting 38% of other allies to amass sufficient numbers to insure change. As Americans, our first priority should be to ensure that our fellow citizens are safe and defended. That is a base level concern, not a high bar, and should not be nearly enough.
Concern pressing me today is the alacrity with which major media and public dialogue has so narrowed the focus of argument to address only law and order reforms, at the expense of other concerns perhaps less immediate but equally lethal to my fellow citizens. To change the way policing is described, hired and trained, and to hold police to strict standards of unbiased performance; will be a step at overcoming the apparently boundless white toleration of injustice.
Regarded clearly, it is only against the back-drop of anti African-American brutality and discrimination that Caucasian people are generally privileged. While Caucasian don’t often die at the hands of the police, they have been no more able to protect unions and the National Labor Relations Board from being eviscerated, environmental regulations gutted leaving them vulnerable to poisons off-loaded at no cost by the manufacturing sector which does not want to bear the costs of their safe disposal. For all our privileges, Caucasian people have been to prevent their jobs from being shipped overseas by the very people we sent to Washington to protect us. American workers of ALL colors receive less money to be retrained for the “new economy” than citizens of any other industrialized country. Having our water, air, and soil poisoned, having no insurance and often no work, does not reek of privilege, it means only that the majority suffers growing poverty, disenfranchisement and powerlessness with many more comforts and less threats.
Until we stop thinking and designating one another as White and Black and Red and Brown we will remain Balkanized and ineffective. Either we are citizens, entitled to the guarantees of the Constitution or not. Full Stop. African-Americans should not have to depend on the goodwill of Caucasian people to enjoy the rights and protections enshrined in the Constitution. Full stop. Which is to say it is the toleration of such injustice on the part of Caucasians that puts them in league with the oppressors of our fellows.
I have many African-American friends. I don’t know one that I could accurately describe as ‘black.’ Dark coffee, coffee with milk, khaki, perhaps. I don’t know any humans the color of my toilet. My skin is not white. It is full of olive tones from Spanish and Asiatic ancestors. Designations white and black are political meme. They describe power-dynamics not human beings. If we are to ever all to be Americans in a nation we can be proud of, “citizen” should become, next to “human being”, all the designation required for full and equal participation in civil society.
All the police reform on earth, will not guarantee these rights. The central enemy of these rights is the entrenched power and political leverage afforded to personal and corporate wealth. No amount of law-and-order reform will end redlining, segregated and unequal school systems, the killing-zones of African-American communities which Caucasians would not tolerate for 10 minutes. Law and order reform will not end disparity of mortages and frozen capital for minority businesses. They will not put healthy produce in poor neighborhoods nor produce healthcare. Changing policing will not create modern infrastructure—highways, ports, mass-transit, modern airports, universal internet—the foundation of a thriving economy. Police reforms will not create the detox and hospital centers required to end the opiod pandemic. They will not shelter the homeless, nor raise the life span of resident in the Cancer-belt of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky, designated the cancer capital of the United States with a cancer rate of 521 per 100,000 and the highest cancer death rate in the Nation.
Two brilliant young economists, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote a readable analysis adressing this point. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, demonstrates the systematic proofs of how the Nation’s wealthiest people —the 1/10th of one percent—pay for all Federal elections in our country. Even my beloved President Obama raised only 40% of his campaign money from small donors. The remaining 60% came from people who should have been jailed in 2008 for ruining the economy. Not one of them paid a cent in fines, while millions of their fellow Americans had their possessions dragged out into the street by sheriffs each month. The United States Congress, whether willingly or unwillingly, has become a wholly owned subsidiary of entrenched wealth, forced to either beg and please donors, or make Draconian choices to stay in office. Focus groups inform them of which issues will win election, they repeat them to win enough votes to go to Congress (and get the keys to the public treasury)and then begin their real work, repaying their donors from the national treasury, usually through tax legislation invisible to the American people.
Protecting our neighbors from the threat of violence and death at the hands of police is an immediate priority, but let’s not let it distract us from the core dilemma that our Legislators do not work for us. To “get money out of politics” as so many blithely suggest, we need a plan. If that plan does not include Full Federal Funding of elections we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We the People must offer candidates equal amounts of money (and judge their creativity and resourcefulness by how they spend it) and ban all hard or in-kind donations from lobbyists and corporations. Let us attract to Congress men and women who truly want to serve, and support the ones there now who do as well. Let’s save them from the Draconian choices they must make with Big Capital to remain in office to do the good work that’s important to them.
Corporations are NOT people, no matter what the law may decree and allowing them to hide behind the Bill of Rights to foil investigators from has made disciplining them impossible. The Supreme Court needs to revisit Citizen’s United, which has effectively disenfranchised our citizen by opening up unlimited flows of money in our electoral system. It is as much in the interest of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Bothem Sean, Attatiana Jefferson and their families, as police reform. We should stay in the streets until they do.
The Three-card Monte hustlers are shifting our attention away from these universal concerns. Police-reform is a first-step, not the self-congratulatory enthusiasm of newly awakened upper-middle-class pundits. I urge my brothers and sister not to take their eyes off the prize: Full Citizenship, under the protections of Law and the control of the citizens.