Small Town and Suburban Racism Doesn't Cut it On College Teams or in Many Portions of the Workforce

 

One of the things that the Trump loving, Confederate flag waving racial epithet spouting white folks in small town America need to realize is that they are compromising the futures of their most talented young people

This fall at least five white athletes as schools ranging from Cornell to Marquette to Oregon State have been kicked off college teams when Instagram posts filled with white supremacist rhetoric that they made while still in high school were uncovered.

Openly racist language common at family dinners, house parties, and in locker rooms in all white towns and suburbs doesn't cut it when you go to college or enter the workplace, or even if you join the military. It can not only get your ass kicked if your Black teammates hear it, it can get you kicked off a team, deprived of a scholarship, or get you kicked out of school.

The proliferation of racist and white supremacist imagery and activity in the US is not only going to come back to haunt the people engaging it- getting them fired from their jobs if they unleash it in public places, it is going to compromise their children's futures.

This is a multiracial country becoming more so every day and the last gasp of militant whiteness is not going to end well for the people promoting it and spreading it

Why This Historic Moment Is Special: My Reflections on the Movements Sweeping the Nation

 

I am tremendously optimistic about the current historic moment because the Black Lives Matter movement has grown to proportions as large, or larger than any movement I have seen in my lifetime, including the anti-war movement of the 60's which it resembles most. What has been most astonishing has been the number of small towns that Black Lives Matter vigils have been held in, many of them in places where most people would have said protesters would fear for their safety. In Eastern Long Island, there have been BLM vigils not only in relatively liberal towns like Sag Harbor and Bridghampton, but in conservative enclaves like Montauk and Hampton Bays. Almost all of these protests have been led by young women, many of high school age. And this has taken place all over the US and in many parts of the world. At last count, my students and former students have participated in 51 BLM actions, more than half in small towns and suburbs. And these movements have forced long needed changes in police procedures and police funding in many states and
cities, and this in less than two months

. Now, the movements are also turning their attention to colleges and universities where racist practices have long been tolerated or been too difficult to challenge. What is most exciting is that for a significant number of protesters, this has been their first action which has put them in direct conflict with police, public officials and racist and white supremacist hecklers and goon squads and as far as I can tell it has made them firmer in their convictions and enthralled by the culture of resistance they have been part of. This can definitely have spill over consequences for other justice struggles such as defense of immigrants and, movements to freeze mortgage payments and rent

To me this uprising most resembles the protest movements of the Sixties where you had people who participated in civil rights actions soon joining the anti-war movement, and then, helped spawn the Black Power Movement, the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. We are also seeing energy spilling over into campaigns to elect progressive political'candidates. I think this movement has far greater depth and lasting power than anything I have seen since the 1960's. I am not sure I see too many analogues with the 1930's because this is a youth led, m

"Imagine" Thoughts on Reinventing Law Enforcement

In the spirit of John Lennon's "Imagine," here are my thoughts about reinventing law enforcement

Imagine:

If every dollar spent on armored vehicles, stun guns, and tear gas for urban police departments were invested in sports programs, music programs, and summer jobs for youth

If CompStat were eliminated and police officers were rewarded for resolving conflicts peacefully rather than chalking up arrests for non violent offenses like loitering, jaywalking, fare beating or selling goods on the street

If honest, justice seeking police officers were rewarded, rather than punished and ostracized, for exposing fellow officers who put everyone at risk by engaging in racial profiling, or using excessive force in vulnerable communities when making arrests.

Police do what they are asked to do by elected officials and the general public. If a cross section of our society wants police officers to conduct themselves like an occupying army in communities of color, that's what we are going to get

If we want a different form of law enforcement, we have to push long and hard to get it.

That is what is at stake in the current protests. 

NYPD At The Crossroads- Some Backround History

 

All over the nation, protesters are demanding that police budgets be cut and that the funds saved be invested in community development projects in working class neighborhoods, particularly those which have high concentrations of Black people.

As this movement spreads to NYC, it might be useful to review the history of police expansion and militarization in NYC, its surprising origins and unintended consequences.

Although most people don't know this, the first big expansion of the NYPD after its budget was cut during the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's took place under the Mayoralty of David Dinkins! The demand for this expansion came largely from the city's poorest neighborhoods, which were under siege as a result of crack related violence In neighborhoods where gun battles were taking place all hours of the day and night, making people afraid to go to work, go shopping, or send their children to school. In response to this, community organizations in the Bronx, East New York and other hard pressed areas began calling for more police and more arrests so that people they represented could go about their daily lives safely.( If you don't believe me, read Noel Wolfe's 2015 dissertation "A Community At War: The Bronx and Crack Cocaine") The Dinkins Administration responded to these pressures by expanding the NYPD, and deploying these officers near schools, churches, public transportation stops and business districts in the neighborhoods hardest hit by crack. Dinkins Police Commissioner, Lee Brown, won support for this approach by constant consultation with community groups in the city's Black and LatinX neighborhoods.

However, with the election of Rudy Guiliani, the city's approach to policing took a very different turn. Whereas Dinkins major focus was making the city's poorest neighborhoods safer, Guilani's focus was to reduce violence and disorder in the entire city and make Manhattan a safe place for tourism and investment. To this end, he and his Police Commissioner, William Bratton introduced and approach called "Broken Windows Policing" which deployed the NYPD to arrest people en masse for non violent "quality of life crimes" such as panhandling on the subway, washing windows at busy intersections, turnstile jumping and fare beating, and drinking in public. The city's business leaders hailed this new approach because it dramatically changed the atmosphere in Manhattan's wealthiest business districts, sparking the gradual revival of NYC as a major focus of domestic and foreign investment

In Guiliani's second term, this approach was modified, in disastrous fashiong, by a new Commissioner with a military background, Howard Safir. Dispensing with the last vestiges of Community Policing, Safir deployed centrally controlled units to descend on the city's poorest neighborhoods to take guns and drugs off the street.The aggressive tactics they used led to one of the most shocking murders of an unarmed Black person in US History- the 41 shot execution of a Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo in a Bronx hallway.

Safir was ultimately forced to resign, and Guiliani left after two terms in office, but the new Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, expanded on the approach to policing Guiliani had pioneered. Not only did he keep expanding the NYPD, he introduced a computerized program CompStat, to make sure that every officer was making large numbers of quality of life arrests, and empowered officers to "stop and frisk" any person they thought might be suspicious. The result of this was that every Black man in the city found himself 'under suspicion" In Bloomberg's final year in office, there were more police stops and searches of Black men than there were Black men in New York City.

The Police Strategies of Guiliani and Bloomberg coincided to an economic boom in Manhattan marked by the constructions of tens of thousands of units of luxury housing, a huge increased in tourism, and the creation of a whole new array of upscale business districts in once decaying neighborhoods like SOHO. It
also fostered gentrification, first in Manhattan neighborhoods like the East Village and the Upper West Side, then in outer borough neighborhoods like Park Slope, Fort Greene, Williamsburgh and Astoria and finally in historically Black communities like Harlem and Bedford Stuyvestant

It also led to a simmering rage in the city's Black and LatinX neighborhoods, where daily police harassment became a reality for people going to work, going to school or going out of the house for recreational activity. Communities who had asked for more police during the height of the crack epidemic now saw police as a force to keep them intimidated and confined while New York attracted wealthy residents and investors from all over the world. The message they received from this kind of policing was loud and clear- "you are a danger to the city and we want you to leave."

Even after a term and a half of the DeBlasio Mayoralty, in which stop and frisk was allegedly ended, there is still a high level of resentment of the NYPD. The current crisis has brought those resentments to the surface.

As wealthy residents depart the city because of COVID-19, we may need to revisit now police are deployed, whose interests they serve, and what kind of atmosphere we want in the city's most popular commercial districts and tourist destinations.

A city where wealthy people from all over feel comfortable and poor people feel confined to their communities or pushed out of the city entirely may not longer be a tenable state of affairs.

My Top Three Policy Proposals for Getting Us Out of This Crisis

 

What this crisis tells us is that people have been pushed to the wall economically as well as victimized on the basis of their race. We have to deal with both issues to heal our wounded country. In response, I propose the following three initiatives

1. A New Deal Style jobs and public works program, modeled on the WPA and the CCC, that creates millions of jobs for unemployed people, particularly unemployed youth, rebuilding our infrastructure, repairing business districts damaged in the uprisings sweeping the nation and creating millions of units of affordable housing.

2. A demilitarization of urban police forces and an end to "broken windows policing" which targets people for non violent offenses and makes our cities safe for gentrification while making poor and working class people feel insecure in their own communities

3. A continuation of the national conversation on race, coupled with an effort to identify and remove open racists and white supremacists from our police forces, our military, and our schools. We need to restore confidence in the fairness of our most important government institutions.

There are obviously other reforms that could be envisioned but these are my top three.

The Rage of the Young at a Compromised Future Adds Fuel to the Flames

 

Let me be blunt, I am frightened by the level of violence that protests have attained in my own city, and in cities throughout the country.

But I am also acutely aware that I have little or no influence on the people out in the streets doing the worst damage. What we have going on here looks more and more like a generational uprising as well as a protest against police violence

It is why so many protesters are not listening to people like me who tell them that looting stores and firebombing cars undermines the moral force of their protests. Here is the argument I am hearing more and more.

"You are in no moral position to talk about looting. Your generation looted the country so much that all we have left is student debt, low paying, dangerous jobs, and a militarized police force to keep us under control in cities which have been handed over to the rich. You tossed our generation on the garbage heap and now it's time for payback."

If you look at the collective distribution of income wealth and opportunity in our society, can you really say this argument is wrong, especially since the Pandemic has given a fatal blow to the hopes of many already living precarious lives. There are millions of unemployed, out of school young people in this country who have nothing to lose and huge amount of anger at their position,

No one is organizing these protests. And their very spontaneity shows how deep rooted the grievances are.

Several months ago, I feared that we could be facing food riots and rent riots on a Depression scale when the government stimulus money ran out and there were mass evictions and disruptions to the food chain

I never thought they would come this early, or with this particular
spark

We are in deep deep trouble as a country. Years of impoverishing and marginalizing the poor, and handing our cities to the rich have brought us to this point.

If we view racist, militarized policing as an instrument used to enforce rising levels of inequality and gentrification in our major cities, then much of what we are seeing in these protests makes more sense