Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
A vampire who is used to feeding on Black blood will not be too choosy when faced with an uncontrollable thirst for that life-sustaining body fluid. At a certain point, any ol’ neck will do. Such is the case for the unwieldy, comply-or-die, bloodthirsty force that is the modern-day version of the slave patrols.
Twitter users and media personalities have been (gleefully) reporting on the drop in White support for Black Lives Matter and for police reform. Recent poll results would seem to suggest that almost all of those who were previously blind, deaf, and dumb to the cries for justice prior to the public lynching of George Floyd have returned to that zone of indifference.
While polls after Floyd’s death show big increases in support for Black Lives Matter and a belief in systemic racism in American law enforcement, recent polls suggest things returning closer to the mean.
Perhaps most striking was, coincidentally, a poll in Wisconsin. The Marquette University Law School poll in mid-June showed residents supported the Black Lives Matter movement by a 61 percent to 38 percent margin. But by earlier this month, those numbers had evened out — 48-48.3
Members of the majority community really do think that cops are only spilling Black blood so they need not be concerned. “It’s their problem.” “The cops are operating on our behalf.” While it is true that Black and Indigenous people are generally treated with callous inhumanity and killed at a far greater rate — and with far more barbarity and far less provocation — in sheer numbers, as a block, more White people are killed every single year. People suffering from mental illnesses — mental illness affect all races and across all socioeconomic strata — are even more likely to be killed than Black and Native folks. Racism, you see, in this instance can be as injurious to the health and well-being of White folks as it is to Black folks. The Frankensteinian monster you created is devouring your children, your fathers, your brothers, your womenfolk, your cousins, your lovers at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the world outside of Brazil, Venezuela, and the Philippines.
Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups.
Per The Washington Post, since 2015, police have been killing over 900 people every single year and roughly half of those killed are white. Well, let’s get the actual numbers...
From The Washington Post database:
Police Killings
| year |
Whites |
Total |
| 2015 |
498 |
994 |
| 2016 |
470 |
962 |
| 2017 |
461 |
986 |
| 2018 |
456 |
990 |
| 2019 |
403 |
999 |
| 2020 Ytd |
249 |
694 |
Note that The Washington Post is by far the most conservative of all the sites keeping records on police killings. I personally preferred The Guardian and was sorry when they discontinued their “The Counted” series. For example, where Washington Post has 962 killings in 2016, The Guardian had the number for that year at 1136; Wikipedia has that year's total at 1326. Bear in mind too, that roughly 25% of people killed are classified as “unknown.”
Cops killed at least 2,537 white people since January 2015. During that same period, cops in Canada killed about 160 people in total. (They have nothing to boast about themselves. A lot of those killed were Native people.) In the UK, despite their anti-Black police culture, Bobbies killed 23 people from January 2015 to June of this year. Australian cops killed 22 of their citizens in six years. It is with absolute confidence and without fear of contradiction that I declare that the overwhelming majority of white people sent to early graves by police were killed unnecessarily — and that includes even those who were proven to be brandishing guns.
Take the case of 51-year-old Jeffrey Meyer who became the 694th person to be killed this year:
Authorities were dispatched to the Motel 6 at 3225 Adventureland Drive around 8:33 a.m. after receiving reports of a suspicious person with a weapon.
Upon arrival, officers said they found Meyer outside the motel with a gun in his hand.
The Altoona Police Department said Altoona police and Polk County Sheriff’s deputies began negotiations with him.
Police and witnesses said a verbal exchange continued between authorities and the man and that gunfire occurred around 9:08 a.m.
(my bold)
Note the vagueness of “gunfire occurred around 9:08 am. I, an untrained civilian, can think of any number of scenarios that would have resulted in Mr. Meyer still being here today. They chose to kill him. They had no more time to spare to talk him down. They had no time to get loved ones to help with de-escalation. They had no sharpshooter to get the gun out of his hand or even to get that hand — I’ve seen it done. They had nothing in their toolbox to distract and disarm. They didn’t attempt to shoot to injure rather than to kill. And so he was simply taken out and that’s that. What’s one more body to add to the heap...and he was white.
With or without support, Black folks will keep on fighting for a sophisticated, empathetic, representative police force. We’ll keep on fighting as if our lives depend on it because we know that to be true. We’ll keep on fighting for a force where the only response to a naked Daniel Prude on a snowy March night would be to immediately think to get him a blanket to cover his nakedness and to protect him from the cold. A force where an agitated white man — who may be having a psychotic episode — is seen as a life worth spending a whole lot more than half an hour to save.
It is up to the majority community to decide whether they hate Black people more than they love their own.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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On Friday, a North Carolina court dramatically expanded the number of voters eligible to participate in the 2020 election. The state may not disenfranchise citizens who owe fines, fees, and other debts from a felony conviction, the Wake County Superior Court ruled on Friday. And while the court limited its order to those affected by wealth-based voter suppression, its reasoning portends a broader ruling in the near future that could restore voting rights to 70,000 more North Carolinians on probation or parole.
Many felon disenfranchisement rules, including North Carolina’s, are rooted in overt white supremacy. After Reconstruction, racist Democrats in the state sought to revoke Black citizens’ suffrage. They accomplished this task, in part, through vague criminal laws that stripped convicted felons of their civil rights—then enforced these laws disproportionately against Black people. North Carolina’s current statute is rooted in an 1877 law spearheaded by a representative who later presided over the lynching of three Black men. At the time, Democrats argued that felon disenfranchisement was necessary to stop “the honest vote of a white man” from being “off-set by the vote of some negro.” Its purpose, alongside other Jim Crow measures like the literacy test, was to “secure white supremacy.”
The law continues to work as intended, as documented in an expert report by University of North Carolina professor Frank R. Baumgartner. Today, Black North Carolinians represent 22 percent of adults and 42 percent of the disenfranchised. Black residents are denied the right to vote at three times the rate of white residents in 44 counties. The state’s disenfranchisement regime targets two groups of people: those on probation or parole, and those who’ve completed their full sentence but still owe court debt. Notably, judges may extend an individual’s probation or send them back to prison because they haven’t paid off these fines and fees.
Few do manage to pay off these debts. Like Florida, North Carolina practices cash register justice, funding its criminal system by extracting money from those who encounter it. Any person charged in district court is billed a minimum of $173. They must pay $25 for a criminal record check, $60 for a public defender, and $600 for lab analysis of evidence. Those sentenced to community service must pay $250; those placed under house arrest with electronic monitoring must pay $90 upfront, then $4.48 a day; those sentenced to a local jail must pay $40 a day—on top of the $10 a day they paid if detained before conviction. People on probation must pay $40 a month to fund their own supervision. Judges have authority to waive court debt. But they are also elected, and fearful of retribution at the polls if they’re deemed soft on criminals. In 2015, North Carolina Republicans passed legislation publicizing each judge’s annual waiver rate in an effort to shame them out of waiving fines and fees.
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white backlash is what Glickman identifies as “smoldering resentment, its belief that the movement [for Black rights is] proceeding ‘too fast,’ its demands for emotional and psychological sympathy, and its displacement of African Americans’ struggles with its own claims of grievance.” The Nation: The Whitelash Next Time
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Two months. That’s how long it took for white Americans’ support of Black Lives Matter—which climbed to an unprecedented peak in June after the brutal police murder of George Floyd—to tumble back toward preprotest levels. Over the same period, surveys show, declining numbers of white respondents cited anti-Black racism as a “big problem” in American society. An NPR/Ipsos poll from late August found white people are the racial group least likely to report taking even the most minor “actions to better understand racial issues in America” since protests began sweeping the country. Just half of white Americans concede “racism is built into the American economy, government, and educational systems.” And 49 percent believe America has already done enough “to give Black Americans equal rights with white Americans.”
It’s always true that most white folks are unbothered and unmoved by anti-Black discrimination and violence; the steadfast endurance of American institutional racism proves that. It is also clear from history that white anti-racism has always had a dangerously short shelf life. Ignore the barrels of digital ink spilled lately about white people’s new willingness to reckon with structural racism. When the pendulum swings toward Black equality and full citizenship, white supremacy mounts a counteroffensive.
Cornell University historian Lawrence Glickman notes the word “backlash” gained circulation during the civil rights movement in 1963 as a shorthand for the “topsy-turvy rebellion in which white people with relative societal power perceived themselves as victimized by what they described as overly aggressive African Americans demanding equal rights.” The term summed up the most reliable white reaction to Black rights dating at least to Reconstruction, when the mere facts of Black emancipation and voter enfranchisement were construed as provocations for justifiable white racist terrorism. Between 1865—when six former Confederate soldiers founded the Ku Klux Klan—and 1950, nearly 6,500 Black men, women, and children were lynched for affronts that included bumping into a white woman and not using “Mister” when talking to a white man. “The more I studied the situation,” wrote Ida B. Wells, “the more I was convinced that the [white] Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.”
Donald Trump (L) George Wallace (R)
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The Republican Party began losing the Black vote around 1936. Since then, Republicans have commissioned reports, hired consultants, and spent huge sums of campaign dollars trying to win back Black voters. The project continues today: This year’s Republican National Convention presented a lineup of speakers far more diverse than the Republican Party itself, making the case for the “Party of Lincoln.” A third of African Americans, after all, self-identify as “conservative.” And yet, no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 15 percent of the Black vote since 1964 (many have received well under 10 percent).
Leah Wright Rigueur is a historian and public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican, a remarkable study of the distinctive ideologies woven through the Black conservative and Black Republican traditions. The book traces the history of why Black voters left the GOP and what the Republican Party has tried to do — and what it has refused to do — to win them back.
Rigueur has also spent the past decade teaching classes on racial protests, riots, and how they shaped American politics in the 20th century. We discuss the historical analogues for today’s protest movement, what’s different now than in 1968, the complex relationship between protesters and electoral politics, how these movements can lead to both lasting change and white backlash, and more on The Ezra Klein Show.
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On a friday afternoon in early june, educators from a community-education project called Abundant Beginnings held an online workshop for kids between the ages of 3 and 5 and their families. My own preschool-age child was 30 minutes away, at her grandmother’s house, but I tuned into the San Francisco Bay Area group’s Zoom call. This was a week after protests against police violence had spread from Minneapolis across the nation, and I needed help. I’d shown my daughter photos of protestors, but I struggled to answer the questions that came next about why the police had killed George Floyd. For that, I needed the guidance of skilled educators.
Early in the workshop, two facilitators used simple words to describe a protest scene. They were in conversation, modeling age-appropriate language. Soon, we were introduced to the “white-supremacy fairy.” This fairy, we were told, is known to land on shoulders, including, sometimes, those of police. “It’s telling them white people are better than other people,” one facilitator said. “They’re whispering into the police officer’s ear, and their boss’s ear, and their boss’s boss’s ear. That boss is called the system. And they’re telling them to do the wrong thing.
Across the country, young children are turning to the adults in their lives to help make sense of racism and policing. The uprisings sparked by Floyd’s death kicked off in May, when many schools had already shut down for the summer, and much of the work of explaining this movement has fallen to families. But as schools prepare to reopen, conversations about police violence may move to classrooms—both real and virtual.
Howard Stevenson, the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education at the University of Pennsylvania, helps educators and families address race with children. Families of color have long sought him out as they confront race-based inequities around discipline and curriculum at school, he says. But this summer’s protests have led to a significant uptick in requests from white families and educators. “Since George Floyd died there has not been a week yet when I haven’t spoken to a new school,” Stevenson told me in mid-August. “For us it’s been nonstop.” Adults often have to examine their own assumptions and biases before they can facilitate conversations about police violence, he said—especially given that 79 percent of public K–12 teachers are white.
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Lawyers for Paul Rusesabagina have called on a UN investigator to immediately intervene in the case of the human rights activist – and inspiration behind the film Hotel Rwanda – who is being detained in Rwanda and is alleged to face a “serious risk of torture”.
The letter to Nils Melzer, the special rapporteur on torture, comes one week after Rusesabagina, a prominent critic of the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, was revealed to have been brought to Kigali from Dubai in what his lawyers have called an illegal rendition.
Rusesabagina is a Belgian citizen and a permanent US resident, but his lawyer, Jared Genser, said he had not had contact with any of his own approved lawyers, Belgian diplomats, or his family since he was last seen paraded before television cameras last Monday in handcuffs and accused of terrorism-related offences.
“Given these serious human rights violations, and the Rwandan government’s long-standing prior persecution of Mr Rusesabagina, he is at immediate and serious risk of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” the letter said.
Paul Rusesabagina is detained and paraded in front of media in handcuffs in Rwandan capital, Kigali, on 31 August. Photograph: Clement Uwiringiyimana/Reuters
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In the past two decades Nigeria’s film industry has blossomed into a mighty national asset. Its romances, family sagas and tales of derring-do are lapped up by many millions of viewers at home, across the rest of Africa and in the African diaspora. It employs more than a million people and generates nearly $2bn a year from cinema tickets and dvd sales, tv rights, royalties and fees. Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and film hub, is said to produce more films than there are stars in the sky.
Films like “Ije”, “The Wedding Party” and “2 Weeks in Lagos” have premiered at the poshest international festivals, from Toronto to Cannes. Netflix has set up partnerships. In 2018 it released its first Nigerian film, “Lionheart”. In June it teamed up with EbonyLife Films, based in Lagos, to embark on a string of Netflix-branded projects. “Death and the King’s Horseman”, a play premiered in 1975 by Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Wole Soyinka, is to be adapted for the screen.
But covid-19 has given Nollywood a nasty viral knock. Emem Isong, a leading producer, laments the obstacles facing her latest tv series, “City Crimes”. She was only two weeks into her six-week filming schedule when a government-imposed lockdown forced her to stop. When production resumed in June, she had to cut her crew in half, buy protective equipment and contactless thermometers, expand accommodation (the crew normally share rooms) and disinfect her locations. The production took much longer. Her budget jumped by a third. She sorely wishes she had taken out an insurance policy.
Yet the pandemic may nudge the industry to tackle some of its shortcomings and improve its chaotic infrastructure. “Maybe this will motivate people to get their own production lots where you can accommodate artists and put all safety measures in place,” says Shaibu Husseini, a veteran film critic. There is a dearth of good film studios. Moses Babatope, who founded Filmhouse Cinema and FilmOne, a distribution and production company, looks forward to many “better practices”.
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Every Sunday for around a decade, beginning in 2009, Adam Bryant interviewed CEOs in his weekly “Corner Office” column for the New York Times. But he never asked about their companies, instead focusing instead on life lessons and pivot points. And, when he interviewed women and executives of color, Bryant asked himself another what-if: what if he never asked them questions about gender or race? “That was my approach,” he says, and it was a good one for the times, when many minority execs felt that such questions tokenized them, distracting from the universality of their achievements.
But just because CEOs of color don’t want to air their dirty laundry publicly doesn’t mean they don’t talk with one another about the obstacles they face. Rhonda Morris, a Chevron vice president and chief human resources officer, recalls the story of Aetna CEO Ron Williams, who was mistaken for a chauffeur by an airport employee. Morris herself doesn’t wear black clothing when she flies with United Airlines, because she routinely gets mistaken for a flight attendant. When a colleague expressed her disbelief, Morris responded: “When you see me, you see this, but I don’t have ‘Chevron executive’ tattooed onto my forehead when I walk on to a United flight.”
Telling these stories on a public platform used to be rare, but more executives of color are speaking out, which is to say the times have changed since Bryant’s “Corner Office” days. And so Bryant, who is white, and Morris, who is Black, have teamed up on a new project, “Leading in the B-Suite” (a riff on the C-suite but centered on Blackness). The series is using the moment created by the George Floyd protests to discuss race in corporate America by interviewing Black executives and publishing their stories on LinkedIn.
Rhonda Morris and Adam Bryant
LinkedIn
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