Today is the one year anniversary of Sandra Bland’s death. Another bloody year later and with so many more lives stolen, it’s way past time for white Americans to join in resistance to our police force -- an institution designed from its inception to protect white supremacy by brutalizing Black bodies.
Sandra Bland died after a Texas police officer who pulled her over for a traffic stop decided she was too free, too defiant, and she needed to be taught a lesson. Three days after her needless arrest, on July 13, 2015, the young activist was found dead in her jail cell. Sandra Bland became a reminder to our nation that Black women also experience police brutality, a rallying cry for the #SayHerName movement as well as a symbol for the broader fight against anti-Black police violence.
As we mark one year since her death, painfully little has changed. Last week we bore witness to the brutal police killings of two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Unarmed Alton paid the price of his life for selling bootlegged CDs, and Philando was shot point blank as he attempted to comply with the officer’s request to hand over his license and registration. Philando’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live streamed his death on Facebook, and the world could see her daughter sitting in the backseat and telling Diamond, “It’s ok Mommy... I’m right here with you.” White supremacy forced a little girl to comfort her mother as the two of them watched a loved one bleed to death.
Even in the face of unbearable grief and unimaginable danger, Black activists continue to battle for the recognition of their humanity, while white Americans too often remain on the sidelines.
It’s time for white Americans to acknowledge that a central tenant of the systemic robbing of Black lives taking place in our country is our police system itself. This is a system that was created to police the boundaries of race, class and gender. Many police forces across the country originated as slave patrols, and were legally empowered to return slaves to their masters by laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act. Then, following the formal abolishment of slavery, police enforced the morally bankrupt Jim Crow system of segregation and inequality until the laws were struck down by the Civil Rights Movement victories of the 1960s.
Racial inequality today is at similar levels or worse than the 1960s. In 2015, Black Americans were at least 2.5 times as likely to be shot by police officers as white Americans and more likely to be unarmed when shot (and this does not include other forms of police brutality outside of shootings). There is no reason to think that the fundamental purpose of our police system has changed. When police officers have killed at least 136 Black people so far in 2016, we cannot deny that this is an institution still fundamentally at odds with the notion that Black Lives Matter.
As white people, it’s our responsibility to be part of fighting against an institution that was created to protect our perceived way of life. We built it, so we should be part of razing it.
We need to take an intersectional approach that recognizes that in the end, a system that enforces strict categories of race, gender, class and sexuality is bad for most of us. As a woman, the reality is that I am more likely to be shamed and blamed if I try to report a sexual assault to the police than I am to be protected or vindicated by our justice system. This is not to create false equivalencies between experiences, but rather to call attention to the reality that when a society systematically dehumanizes a large segment of the population, that results in a less humane society for all of us. And that hurts everyone who don’t fit into the extremely narrow category of individuals who our society is structured to aid and abet -- straight, cis, wealthy white men.
What can white people do to combat police brutality, to reach a point in American history where our institutions behave as if Black lives matter? I wish I had the answers. But I feel like the least we can do at this point is reject the premise that rampant anti-Black police brutality is the result of a few “bad apples.” We need to acknowledge that the entire barrel is made of rotten, poisonous wood. As the population that the police system was designed to protect, white folks need to be active in efforts to dismantle it and completely reimagine what public safety should look like in the United States.