Fear of a Black Uprising
Confronting the white pathologies that shape racist policing
The New Republic
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/kimberle-williams-crenshaw>/August 13, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY KAYLA SALISBURY
The summer of 2020 will be recorded as a once-in-a-generation uprising
against police brutalization of Black people. The multiracial protests
that erupted in all 50 states seemed to break the embargo—at least
momentarily—against the official acknowledgment of the continuing legacy
of anti-Black racism in American policing. Fueled by thevideo-capture
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html>of
the casual hand-in-the-pocket–style murder of George Floyd, this mass
repudiation might be read as an expression of the humanitarian values
that the brutal slaying of Floyd flagrantly violated. But as the 24-hour
coverage and daily analysis of the uprising revealed, the regime that
produced Derek Chauvin and thestill-uncharged
<https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/890328388/no-arrests-or-charges-so-far-in-breonna-taylors-shooting-death>killers
of Breonna Taylor is not a broken one: It continues to work as it was
designed to.
The deeper functions of American policing were revealed every night that
breathless reporters told harrowing stories of protesters smashing
windows with considerably more urgency than they relayed news of police
officers smashing heads. Not even the frightening descent into a lawless
police state could trump the anxiety over a possible takeover from the
bottom. Cable TV viewers watching the commentary and recaps of the
president’s terroristic attack on peaceful protesters in front of the
White House by anunidentified national police force
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/politics/unidentified-police-protests.html>were
suddenly interrupted with the urgent story of a local drugstore break-in
on the other side of the country—the perpetrators having long since
departed from a scene that was miles from any active protests.
Not even the frightening descent into a lawless police state could trump
the anxiety over a possible takeover from the bottom.
The reflexive treatment of erratic outbreaks of looting as a more
ominous threat than the organized massing of state terror also speaks
volumes about the nation’s real civic priorities. Consternation over the
loss of goods rather than the incalculable loss of eyes, limbs, and
lives points to the bedrock realities on which modern policing is built.
It was not simply that the vicious response of police to the mass
protest (while the entire world was watching) was unexceptional. It was
the violence-enabling pearl-clutching about looming social disorder that
reminded us yet again that mainstream thinking is just as powerfully
organized around the fear of the bogeyman as the nightmares of childhood
are. This particular bogeyman is a phantom born of slavery, a fear
embedded in the DNA of post-slavery society grounded in the recognition
that orchestrated and professionalized violence might not be enough to
preserve the shaky foundations of racial hierarchy.
The fear of being outnumbered and overrun by the indignant and
unforgiving masses is that thing that goes bump in the night—the gnawing
insecurity that the paddy rollers in the antebellum countryside would
take care of while the misnamed keepers of the peace tucked in the
owners and the elites for the night. Generation after generation, they
do their work out of sight, as the descendants of the slaves and the
descendants of the guardians play the same unchanged roles, only
occasionally brought into unforgiving light by the dawn of freeze-frame
technology.
I saw firsthand how the white elite, stuck in the bogeyman nightmare,
gave their tacit approval to the ugly work of their guardians when a
white woman invited neighbors in a tony university neighborhood to hold
up a Black Lives Matter sign at the corner. All hell broke loose at the
very thought; local business owners closed their shops while their
landlord threatened to sue her for the loss of a day’s business. All
this for a sign expressing what should be the simple promise of living
an unterrorized life in twenty-first–century America.
Such episodes are all-too-vivid reminders that the hopeful talk about
the current reckoning may well return to its familiar and limited
outlines when the fundamental question is raised: How can we imagine a
better future without first contending with the darkness that underlies
the pervasive fear of Black people? In a white supremacist society, that
fear is like muscle memory. When the baseline of the social order is
slavery, when the freedom-seeking self-help behavior of running away was
called theft, how can any policing be anything more than fundamentally
racist—regardless of who is playing the role of the police?
In order to prevent yet another reversion to the status quo of white
moral panic, we need to prod the emerging new discourse around racial
justice and policing to engage the deeper question of how we might
reckon with, and finally dislodge, this toxic muscle memory that
continually disfigures our body politic.
Beneath the facade of law enforcement is a steady barrage of incidents
like the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in which the
police and the institutions that hold guns would rather sustain white
supremacy—whether it’s legal or not—than substantiate any anti-racism.
These episodes again reflect the original design of American policing,
and focus on its larger context and purpose.
Scholars like Robin D.G. Kelley have recently reminded us that American
policing is designed to protect property. In aninterview
<https://theintercept.com/2020/06/27/robin-dg-kelley-intercepted/>with
The Intercept, Kelley notes that original paddy rollers had one job: to
recapture any and all escaped Black people and to return them to the owner.
The deployment of paddy rollers—the corps of white vigilantes who are
etymologically and ideologicallytied
<https://lawenforcementmuseum.org/2019/07/10/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing/>to
modern police patrols—would rise and fall in concert with the paranoia
of white elites haunted by the bogey of a slave revolt, of the sort that
Toussaint Louverture led in Haiti in 1791. When the threat of revolt was
in abeyance, slave owners would seek to institute checks on the paddy
rollers’ violent and destructive excesses—until, that is, the fear of a
slave rebellion surfaced again. What many liberals unschooled in this
basic history are wholly unwilling to say now is that the core function
of the police isn’t to protect every person from a randomized form of
personal and property trespass but rather to protect white people
against the larger population of subordinated people.
My colleague Cheryl Harris laid out the property-protection foundations
of modern policing in her 1993 /Harvard Law Review/ article
<https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whiteness%20as%20Property_106HarvLRev-1.pdf>“Whiteness
as Property.” Its crucial insights show how current oppression remains
embedded in these formative and interconnected forces of American racism
and property ownership. According to Harris, property rights are
“contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race.” Today’s
policing is a remarkably sturdy and long-lived adaptation to this racist
social order, and still conforms to its fundamental directive—to protect
racialized American property. This mandate always transcends liberal
America’s cries for reform.
The long arm of white supremacy: a police officer subdues a protestor at
a June New York protest over the police killing of George Floyd.
MOSTFA BASSIM
In post-slavery—and post–policing-of-slavery—America, racist policing in
the American slavocracy was also tied to partnerships with the private
violence of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. That’s why lynchings
and other extralegal acts of white supremacy were reinforced by the firm
hand of the U.S. government, as in theTulsa Massacre
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/tulsa-greenwood-massacre.html>of
1921. It’s also why the legal system continues to forbear any serious
effort to confront lynching and other forms of extralegal violence to
the same extent that the state tries to police alleged trespasses within
anti-racist movements.
Indeed, white supremacist groups in America have never been subject to
the same crackdowns that are continually unleashed on anti-racist
groups. The clumsy and misguided initiative from the Trump
administration tolabel
<https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/20/trump-antifa-terrorist-organization-kkk-white-supremacy/>antifa
a terrorist organization may look at first like another burst of
flailing incompetence—but in fact it is grounded in the firmest of
American traditions: state intimidation of those fighting for equality.
From 1956 to 1971, the FBIran <https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro>a
Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) intending “to expose, disrupt,
misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of” civil
rights groups by engaging in tactics such as wiretaps, blackmail,
spreading disinformation, raiding offices and homes, fabrication of
evidence and perjury at trials, vandalism, and exposing targets to
violence and death.
Though COINTELPRO has ended, the FBI’s desire to destroy Black activism
has not. COINTELPRO operated under the guise of investigating radical
Black extremism and violent Black nationalism or separatism. The
FBIcontinued
<https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/discriminatory-profiling/manufacturing-black-separatist-threat-and-other>to
dedicate its resources to combating “Black separatism” long after
COINTELPRO was dissolved in scandal in 1971.
In 2017, the FBIcoined
<https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4067711/BIE-Redacted.pdf>the
term “Black Identity Extremism” (BIE) in direct response to increased
Black activism and the growing Black Lives Matter movement following the
killing of Michael Brown. By 2019, the threat previously described as
BIE wasgrouped
<https://tyt.com/stories/4vZLCHuQrYE4uKagy0oyMA/mnzAKMpdtiZ7AcYLd5cRR>with
White Supremacy Extremism (WSE) as two forms of the same kind of
violence—Racially Motivated Violent Extremism. These allegedly
equivalent tendencies were treated as a threat on par with ISIS,
justifying a major program of surveillance, investigation, and
infiltration.
Yet there is no similarly vigorous arrangement to interrogate the
underpinnings of the likes of Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh—white men
hell-bent on the production of whiteness-as-ideology–infused attacks on
dissenting and nonwhite Americans. Just between the two of them, Roof
and McVeigh claimed far more lives than any “BIE” has over the course of
half a century. In Roof’s case, he did so specifically in a Black church
in South Carolina. Hismassacre
<https://www.gq.com/story/dylann-roof-making-of-an-american-terrorist>was
targeted and lethal—and it has not been met with anything like the same
institutional force that has persecuted and injured peaceful Black
people advocating that their loved ones not be killed by police.
Instead, Roof and others like him are labeled lone wolves, their
ideologies—much like Trump’s—dismissed as fringe.
These facts point us toward a troubling but essential fact: that the
behavior of police in the United States has hardly been about law
enforcement; it’s instead been about the protection of a very particular
status quo. And that status quo is tied directly to the maintenance of
the inferior status of Black people. It is a calculated legal
institutionalization of white dominance that’s been kept in place for
all of American history.
During World War II, many Black soldiers were sent across the world to
defend the lauded principles of this racially segmented nation. This was
supposed to be a great unifying national crusade—the flattening of
difference in the face of a true common enemy.
And yet, Black soldiers in Germany were tasked with cleaning the
latrines of German prisoners of war, they were asked to sleep at the
foot of flooded hills, and they were driven from German businesses by
white American military police. In this very publication, in 1945, a
Black soldierwrote
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/magazine/blacks-wwii-racism-germany.html>,
“You hear a lot of stuff about how homesick the overseas American
soldier is for the good old USA. But you don’t hear much of that from
the Negro soldier. Not the ones in Europe. Anyway, not the ones I know,
not the ones in the 41st Engineers. Hell, why should they be homesick?
Homesick for Jim Crow, for poll taxes and segregated slums? Homesick for
lynchings and race riots?”
When Trumpboosts references
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-white-power-tweet-set-off-a-scramble-inside-the-white-house--but-no-clear-condemnation/2020/06/29/6fd88c2c-ba21-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html>to
“white power”—and when we describe Trumpism as the politics of white
nationalism—we must collectively recognize that such a claim is grounded
in a layered history of coerced white superiority. And no matter the
context surrounding it, this obsessive focus on the preeminence of
whiteness remains central to the concept of America.
It’s clear that American government has mirrored the intersectionally
racist ills of society, and reinforced them at home and abroad. This
brutal form of social mimicry harks back to philosophical concerns of
Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote more than 200 years ago of her fears that
government would merely serve as the all-powerful arm of scalable
oppression. When we see the operations of the white supremacist state
from this vantage, it should be no surprise that theJune killing
<https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/23/steven-carrillo-boogaloo-associated-suspect-in-killing-of-two-ca-officers-has-first-court-appearance-in-federal-death-penalty-case/>of
a Black federal security officer in Oakland by Air Force Sgt. Steven
Carrillo has gotten little attention, whereas the fantasy threat of
antifa, Black “thugs,” and “identity extremists” remains central to the
entire political establishment’s discourse.
Carrillo has since been tied to the so-called boogaloo movement, and
officers found that his clothes were festooned with symbols—and that his
social media profiles actively engaged the claims of this
white-national–identity group. FBI Special Agent Jack Bennett says
Carrillo and his co-conspirator Robert A. Justus Jr.used
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/steven-carrillo-air-force-boogaloo.html>Black
Lives Matter protests as a cover for their plans to attack law
enforcement. In his getaway, Carrillo wrote—in his own blood—“BOOG” on
the hood of a hijacked car.
If the backlash to police reform were really about protecting the
police, this story would be shared by every Blue Lives Matter “advocate”
in the country. It would have warranted a robust response from
friend-of-the-police Donald Trump, and it would have brought about the
intensive, widespread response of federal law enforcement that the
specter of “looting” provoked in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.
But that’s not what the pro-police backlash is about. It’s about white
supremacy. So when the person doing the killing is a white supremacist,
it hardly prompts a response. And it certainly doesn’t spark any
law-and-order tweeting from the Oval Office, or anyoutraged yelling
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLgyJBUaNVg>from the Trump-aligned golf
carts in The Villages, Florida.
Again, the explanation here is painfully simple: The fear of marauding
Black masses undermining white people’s well-being, security, and lives
is more horrifying than actual terrorists conspiring to kill Black cops.
Until this undercurrent of alarm is ferreted out, and our racial
bogeymen confronted in their true and full profile in the light of day,
we cannot begin to untangle the close relationship between policing and
the white supremacist social structure that policing props up.
The call to defund the police might thus be framed more accurately, and
broadly, as the mandate to dismantle the hyper-militaristic, racist
functions of the police as the coercive power of white nationalism. In
other words, defunding the police needs to be a call for the
de-weaponizing of white supremacy.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/kimberle-williams-crenshaw>@sandylocks
<https://twitter.com/sandylocks>
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is the founder and executive director of the
African American Policy Forum.
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