Another wild week
Sometimes, it's best to let other people speak
What a wild, careening, wrenching week.
Which is to say, it’s a year in a week of this accursed year 2020. I don’t even know where to begin. And I’ve got to be honest with you: I don’t have anything cogent to say. I know that sounds literally incredible in a week where the President basically demanded that the Republican Party he leads and represents basically become a neo-Confederate party, where the Covid-19 plague continues to scythe through this broken country in ever-increasing numbers, and where two men were almost assuredly lynched in the midst of rampant protests at the quotidian brutality visited upon Black people in America.
So here’s the thing: this year has taken a toll. I’m a single man living in New York City; I live with two other people, which hasn’t been exactly a rosy situation in a quarantine, but I’m mostly by myself. My mom fell sick in mid-March, just as the pandemic hit her home in Silver Spring, Maryland; it’s three months later, and she’s still recovering, but thankfully, she’s still here. Which makes me fortunate, and believe me, I am grateful.
I took my first day off this year on Friday, and I absolutely needed it. I shut down my computer, I disconnected all my work accounts, and I forced myself to just disconnect. I went into the city in the afternoon, and walking around Manhattan, I saw the sign above. I took its picture, thinking it appropriate to the moment.
I didn’t put out a newsletter on Friday, because I needed to disconnect, but the other thing is: I don’t like to comment on things unless I feel like I have something to add to the conversation. And this last week or so, I think it’s important for a whole lot of us who really, really like to have our say — to comment on things — to just shut the fuck up for once and listen.
And not just listen, but yield back the balance of our time; and not just yield back that balance of time, but yield and give away leadership positions that, honestly, we didn’t earn so much as lucked into, thanks to privileges we attained through the blood, sweat, and tears of others unlike ourselves.
Nowhere is that more presently clear as in the current “debate” over whether the demand to defund the police is, I don’t know, too “radical” or “scary”. You see people twisting themselves into knots trying to come up with a version of that demand that makes them comfortable; claiming that the demand to defund the police is somehow not clearly thought through; saying that it’s somehow a terrible slogan even though the last two weeks have seen the very idea go from the fringes of the obscure to the topic of daily conversation.
I think Mariame Kaba — who’s devoted her life to the work of prison abolition, and did so much of the work to make this moment possible — said it best in The New York Times, in an opinion piece titled Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police . It’s a goddamn masterpiece of clear, crisp communication; the kind you can only write when you’ve thought the problems through and through. I won’t excerpt it, but I will demand that you read it. There is no way you can read what she says, and then blithely say that she hasn’t answered your skepticism.
I'll fully acknowledge that saying "Defund the Police" can feel awkward and uncomfortable, especially if it’s something you’re seeing for the first time. I will fully admit that it made me uncomfortable. One of my older stepbrothers is a police officer; there were moments in my life when I might’ve become one; it was difficult for me to square the society I live in with one where the police don’t exist — or at least, exist in a manner we readily recognize.
And so I urge you to do what I do when faced with shit that makes me uncomfortable: sit and think about why it makes you uncomfortable, as opposed to coming up with increasingly baroque reasons for why folks saying that should stop saying “Defund the Police”, and instead say things that make you feel warm and fuzzy.
Defund the police means defund the police. It means what the words say they mean.
It’s not unclear. That other people bring their interpretations to that demand in order to make things salable or make people comfortable is on them, not the demand. The demand is clear.
That people aren’t comfortable with the demand, and therefore change it to something they’re comfortable with is also clear to me — but that’s not because the demand is unclear, it’s because those folks don’t want the world to change in a manner that makes them uncomfortable.
I’ve written too much. It’s time for me to shut the fuck up and keep listening.
FURTHER READING (which you should really, really, really do before popping off on social media; check thyself before wrecking thyself)
There’s a ton of literature out there on police abolition, and I highly encourage you to start reading it. People have done the work, and they have most assuredly thought this through.
Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, which came out in 2017, is a well-reviewed critique of modern policing. Verso, the book’s publisher, is offering the ebook version for free for a limited time, so you have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not reading this book. The Paris Review has an excerpt that addresses the difficulties with reforms (such as the #8cantwait initative, which I discussed in my last newsletter):
This does not mean that no one should articulate or fight for reforms. However, those reforms must be part of a larger vision that questions the basic role of police in society and asks whether coercive government action will bring more justice or less.
Too many of the reforms under discussion today fail to do that; many further empower the police and expand their role. Community policing, body cameras, and increased money for training reinforce a false sense of police legitimacy and expand the reach of the police into communities and private lives. More money, more technology, and more power and influence will not reduce the burden or increase the justness of policing.
Ending the War on Drugs, abolishing school police, ending broken-windows policing, developing robust mental health care, and creating low-income housing systems will do much more to reduce abusive policing. (broken into paragraphs for reading clarity)
MPD150, a grassroots organization working towards a police-free Minneapolis, has a bunch of resources on their website, including What are we talking about when we talk about “a police-free future?” and an 8-page FAQ zine for folks trying to get up to speed on police abolition.
Annie Lowrey makes a fiscal argument in Defund the Police in The Atlantic:
A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements. At the federal level, it spends twice as much on the Pentagon as on assistance programs, and eight times as much on defense as on education. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost something like $6 trillion and policing costs $100 billion a year.
But proposals to end homelessness ($20 billion a year), create a universal prekindergarten program ($26 billion a year), reduce the racial wealth gap through baby bonds ($60 billion a year), and eliminate poverty among families with children ($70 billion a year) somehow never get financed. All told, taxpayers spend $31,286 a year on each incarcerated person, and $12,201 a year on every primary- and secondary-school student.
The Marshall Project is maintaining a collection of links about police abolition.
I mean, for chrissakes, freakin’ Vox did a whole doggone podcast on What “abolish the police” means. From the transcript:
SEAN: And for the people who are worried about how this you know, how this might affect the way our society functions, like, let’s just say, you know, it’s a Friday night, 4th of July or something like that, like like the Fourth of July. That’s coming up real soon. And, you know, you’re worried about drunk drivers on the road. Who’s getting your back on drunk drivers?
BRANDON: You’re going to be able to call the police. The police are still going to be out there enforcing traffic violations, maybe not with weapons, though, maybe they have some other tools to de-escalate situations.
SEAN: And what about, like, you’re scared that this jilted ex lover of yours is going to come after you and kill you? Same situation?
BRANDON: You know, we can continue to go through these hypotheticals. I want to be very clear here. Police don’t listen to black women as it exists today. Black women are often the victims of sexual assault, sexual violence, and they are not listened to. They’re not deemed credible by police officers. So we’ve got to ask yourself, is policing working? Maybe it’s working for certain communities, white communities in particular. Now, police are going to be there when you call and say, hey, look, there’s someone harassing me. They’re going to have the better trained police officer come and diffuse the situation if the perpetrator is still there.
But perhaps the best take on What Defunding the Police All Means™ is this Twitter thread by the fantastic Josie Duffy Rice:
There’s so much stuff out there. The idea that people demanding that we defund the police haven’t thought about this is just absolutely specious. They have. And it’s okay to disagree with their conclusions, but let’s be clear that that’s what’s happening here — not some lack of clarity over what their demand is.
Here’s Dave Chappelle trenchantly discussing All This.
Anyway: I love y’all. I’m here for you. And if you need anything, please just hit reply.