It’s been four years since Colin Kaepernick first took a knee, and inspired a national conversation on racism. Back then, an eternity ago, white people argued momentarily on Facebook about how it “wasn’t the proper place or time or way to protest” and then went back to living their privileged white lives.
In August 2020, after global protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd were starting to fall from the headlines, the shocking video of Jacob Blake being shot seven times in the back by the Kenosha Police Department reignited national outrage. Now white people are finally paying attention to what was there all along: the systemic racist extrajudicial killing of Black people at the hands of US police.
This new focus on police behaviour has rolled back the rock to expose the rot beneath: untouchable police unions, unpunished police abuse of power, qualified immunity from prosecution, fear-based training combined with military-style weapons of war, and a force riddled with white supremacists. The concept that “good cops” can avoid being poisoned by a culture without accountability, drunk on its own power, is nonsensical.
For anyone who still buys into the NCIS, Law and Order bullshit Hollywood fantasy of benevolent guardians of the law we’ve been fed for decades — check out this thread. Greg Doucette, conservative criminal defense attorney, started a thread of recorded and filmed incidents of police brutality during the George Floyd protests. As of today, he’s at incident 891.
They are not the good guys. They are the blunt object wielded by successive governments of white men to maintain the dominant culture of white supremacy America was built on.
If we are serious about tackling American racism, we need a root and branch reform and defunding of American policing.
Carrie
August 27, 2020 at 11:38 pm
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-report