Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races [but as] a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land... Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. — Martin Luther King, Jr., address at the conclusion of Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 In February 2021, Clyde Kerr III — a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and forty-three-year-old Black father — posted a series of videos delivering a searing critique of policing and our criminal justice system. He voiced deep sense of turmoil about his profession in the killings of Black people, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “I’ve had enough of all of this nonsense, serving a system that does not give a damn about me or people like me.” The videos served as an extended suicide note, at one point stating that his decision to take his life was an act of protest. Kerr took his life sitting in his patrol car outside the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Much earlier, in an 1960 essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” James Baldwin describes this collision at the heart of policing. He looks at the projects of Harlem and points to a deep inequality reflected in the geography of Fifth Avenue, the same street conjoining the opulent shopping corridors of midtown and the destitution of the Harlem ghetto uptown where police move “like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.” Baldwin draws particular attention to the damage this labor of occupation inflicts upon the police themselves who are tasked to manage the boundary dividing the different worlds along Fifth Avenue and throughout our country. The officer patrols the dividing line, and “he is not prepared for it [as] he is exposed as few white people are to the anguish of the black people around him.” How does he reconcile his purpose to serve and to protect with his daily work of ghetto containment? How does he manage the injustice of his occupation with the daily encounters of Black humanity that belie the underclass mythology of the inner-city poor as criminal, self-sabotaging, and unassimilable? How does the police officer live with himself? “He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction,” writes Baldwin, “into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.” And all the while, capitalist elites in midtown are less concerned with abolishing the conditions that policing has come to manage than with kneeling on the neck of protesters who threaten retail spaces, commercial real estate development, and capitalist interests of the market economy. Policing and mass incarceration have always existed to serve and protect the dominant capitalist economy and class structures developed through slavery, and to control “surplus populations” of the unemployed and unemployable, those pressed to commit survival crimes to earn a living, those superfluous to capitalist accumulation and so racialized, exploited, and targeted for police control. For in the often-misleading race-class debate, the class character of policing remains largely overlooked by the power and expediency of the racial justice narrative. But racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism. We forget that George Floyd was unemployed and allegedly using counterfeit money; that Eric Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes to earn a living; that Walter Scott was under warrant for delinquent child support payments; that Breonna Taylor, though not directly engaged in survival crimes, lived in gentrifying zones where police sweeps regularly cleared the neighborhood for real estate valuation. Countless fatal police encounters result from minor infractions like broken taillights or unpaid tickets, more symptoms of economic hardship than real threat to public safety. The fact that so many resorted to criminalized forms of work to make a living remains critically important for understanding the common class predicament of Americans who are overpoliced. The problem of structural unemployment and poverty are not exceptions to capitalist economy but outcomes of the exploitation at the heart of profit-making. Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power produced by capitalist class society, relentless in securing conditions for compounded growth. A singular focus on race only serves the interests of late capitalism by reducing the question of obscene inequality to skin color and identity politics while obviating discussions about healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. If all we have to do is expunge the racism in the hearts of police officers, or just reduce the number of racist patrol officers, we can forestall the question about poverty or at least pretend that class conflict and racialized police violence are two separate issues. But Stuart Hall famously described race as “the modality in which class is lived, the medium in which class relations are experienced.” What is needed is not the dismantling of police departments but the conditions that modern policing has come to manage. What is needed is not shoehorning our history of injustice into either race or class, but to see and engage more complexly, intersectionally, and courageously.
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Lia Rivamonte on behalf of the Beloved Community Communications Team In a recent peace circle conducted via Zoom about how we might transform policing, it struck me how difficult it is to communicate from one screen to another. Not being able to read people’s faces or body language, it’s hard to gauge how others in the group are feeling because awkwardness is built into the platform. It was helpful, of course, to have such skilled facilitators as Karen Hering and Maura Williams, who are experienced in soliciting responses in large group settings. What follows are some of the thoughts I have about my digital peace circle experience. They reflect some of my first impressions only—with the emphasis on my.
We were all asked, “What makes us feel safe?” It is the question at the heart of the change we seek. It is a basic need as human beings to feel protected, to trust that those around us care about our safety and well-being. That those of us who have willingly taken on the responsibility for keeping the larger community from harm must not predetermine who among us is worth protecting, while automatically ascribing criminality to whole groups or individuals based on the color of their skin. And while it may be simplistic to attribute the reflexive violence that members of our police force employ to answer our calls for help, it does seem that no other alternatives are considered. Especially when they show up armed. Have we given too much power to an institution that can too easily be corrupted? Probably. But an institution is comprised of individuals who also share our vulnerability as human beings. How do we make sure we all feel safe? Admittedly, the evening session was not what I had anticipated — I was expecting to hear and possibly to contribute some “solutions” about how we might transform policing in our community. However, when speaking to a friend about the evening, I realized that it was just the beginning we need. |
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Beloved Community ResourcesUnity Justice Database
Team Dynamics House of Intersectionality Anti-Racism Resources in the Unity Libraries Collection Creative Writers of Color in Unity Libraries The History of Race Relations and Unity Church, 1850-2005 Archives
September 2024
Beloved Community Staff TeamThe Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) strengthens and coordinates Unity’s antiracism and multicultural work, and provides opportunities for congregants and the church to grow into greater intercultural competency. We help the congregation ground itself in the understanding of antiracism and multiculturalism as a core part of faith formation. We support Unity’s efforts to expand our collective capacity to imagine and build the Beloved Community. Here, we share the stories of this journey — the struggles, the questions, and the collaborations — both at Unity and in the wider world.
The current members of the Beloved Community Staff Team include Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, Rev. KP Hong, Rev. Lara Cowtan, Drew Danielson, Laura Park, Lia Rivamonte and Angela Wilcox. |