By Andrea Shorter–
George Floyd is now laid to rest in his hometown of Houston, Texas.
May he rest in peace knowing that while he was yet another in a bloody long line of thousands of black men in America killed by police brutality, the horrific and unnecessary ending of his life captured on video for all the world to see turned the world upside down, inside and out, and set it on fire in a righteous rage for justice by ending state sanctioned genocide against black lives.
May he rest in peace knowing that we will not martyrize him for a moment of ritual righteous rebellion in the streets for 3 weeks, speak his and other names as fashionable trend, and then waste the sacrifice of their lives by easing back into comforts and distractions that delay and deny real justice, real revolution, and real reform that stands to spare us all from the further pain and inhumanity of unnecessary loss of more black lives to police brutality.
The time for change and justice has for a long time always been now. Now is always the right time. Ending brutality and genocide is never congruent with right-timed historical context. Context is academic and political exercise. Generations upon generations of sanctioned brutality persists beyond context—it persists due to comfort, convenience, and complicity.
No more task forces, commissions, hashtag slogans, and waxing poetic by commentators and politicians on what to do. We know what to do and what must be done.
The brand of public policing in America that has brutalized and taken away countless lives of black people cannot and will not change until truth is spoken plainly and directly to the unspoken, tacit arrangement regarding public safety in America: policing black lives for white privilege protection.
There are two primary accounts of public safety in operation: aspirational public safety, and safe from the public.
Public safety is the idealized, aspirational version in which all citizens regardless of race, gender, age, religion, income, or zip code should be served and protected with equal respect and diligence by local and state police forces. It is the Sesame Street “officer friendly” version in which we imagine and expect familiar cops on the beat, providing a watchful eye over children playing safely in the park, helping the elderly safely cross a street, patrolling quiet neighborhood streets at night keeping potential intruders at bay, and only using sanctioned force of violence in justified pursuit or apprehension of evident criminal suspects who pose an immediate threat to the greater public safety, including said sworn peace officers.
Militarized to patrol, control, and manage the territorial physical and social boundaries between deserving, tax paying, primarily white skin privileged people in real or implied gated communities—those that do or aspire to be members of safe privatized living, private golf clubs, send their children to private schools, enjoy other privatized or near privatized public spaces—and the public—those dreadful undesirables who must attend public schools, live in public housing, depend on crowded public transit, use public hospitals, public assistance for food, etc. Or, just simply the self-entitled heirs to the privileges manifestly bestowed for just being born white—wealthy, poor, whatever. Compared to being otherwise, apparently just being white is enough to reap the societal blessings for not having been shamefully born non-white.
Safe from the public is the account by which state and local police are expected to act as vital agents to enforce racial and class segregation. This deeply invested and long held account and practice of policing to segregate has claimed the lives of Oscar Grant, Mario Woods, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sean Monterrosa, and likely numerous others in this past week alone.
With hundreds of years of constructing an Anglo-racial American history literally founded upon the carnage, enslavement, dehumanization, criminalization, denigration, institutional segregation, and where possible the elimination of indigenous and non-white people, segregationist policing is a perpetual necessity to maintain and prop up at all costs the sanctity of Anglo privilege, wealth, and superiority complex. The most feared consequence of the absence of real or implied segregationist policing isn’t anarchy; it is equality.
Racial segregation is not so simply rooted in skin prejudice, cultural differences, or redlining. It is rooted in both presumptive and materialized benefit of subjective power over others considered less equal to the beneficiary. In such a shortsighted calculation concerning maximizing the collective mind, creative, and spiritual power of the human species, power and equality cannot possibly hold the same space. One cannot be equal to those qualified as less human than them. The consequence of deconstructing, dismantling, and destroying the norms predicated on protecting and preserving the superiority and sanctity of whiteness above all others is tantamount to death for those truly invested in those beneficial constructs.
Beneficiary case-in-point: Amy Cooper should be arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, and false witness. Caught on video in late May, she knew exactly what she was doing as a white female in Central Park threatening to call and then actually calling the police presenting false claim that she was being menaced by an African American man named Christian Cooper (no relation to her) when he simply asked that she leash her rambunctious dog. He was birdwatching. No consequence in exploiting her white female privilege over his black male vulnerability to probable harm, brutality, injury, and maybe even death at the hands of the NYPD, right? That’s what the police are there for, right? To protect her white privilege no matter what—her word against that of his. Emmett Till, Emmett Till.
I am not anti-police. There are more good cops than bad, yes. We do need police, and I respect those officers whom I’ve come to know over the years who are truly committed or called to serve and protect with honor the communities in which they serve, especially those who have worked with community advocates and experts to shape, improve, reform and implement policies and best practices that better serve, protect, and save lives subjected to domestic and family violence, gun violence, and wasteful juvenile detention.
Simultaneously, as a Black woman in America, I know all too well the pain and suffering of losing black male relatives and friends to police brutality and needless use of force. In one case, I was standing across the street while a friend who was on his way to my home was gunned down by the police.
As a Black woman in America, I have no choice but to be invested in change and reform in policing that confront and require a very clear, unflinching understanding of how and why policing as an agent of segregation can and must end.
Beyond the policy regarding body cameras, chokeholds, and use of force, political and campaign reform must also be seriously resolved. Perhaps police unions should be prohibited from donating to district attorneys, mayors, and/or city and county governing bodies that oversee the policies by which they operate and shield them from accountability.
During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Larry Kramer taught us how to act up and fight back against the heteronormative white privilege that was literally killing thousands. Those invested in the status quo were not going to fight for the lives of the marginalized, the undesirable, the queers. It was those not invested in that toxic status quo who formed coalition, alliance, and resistance that demanded, forced, and forged real change to save lives.
Black lives, gay lives should matter most while we are living—not just in the ritual righteous resistance, memorial, and martyrdom of the dead. Yes, please speak often their names. In George’s, Breonna’s, Larry’s, and all their names: we are and must be better than this.
For the living, for the breathing—act-up, speak truth to power, and keep taking to the streets to end police brutality by ending policing for white privilege protection, now, because it is literally choking the life and soul out of us all.
Andrea Shorter is a Commissioner and the former President of the historic San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. She is a longtime advocate for criminal and juvenile justice reform, voter rights and marriage equality. A Co-Founder of the Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition, she was a 2009 David Bohnett LGBT Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Published on June 11, 2020
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