By Marjorie Cohn
That’s not a chip on my shoulder.
That’s your foot on my neck.
– Malcolm X
June 23, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - On May 25, a Minneapolis
police officer tortured George Floyd to death in what
his brother, Philonise Floyd,
called “a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.”
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in
all 50 states and Washington D.C.; the anti-racist
uprisings continue.
Why do a majority of people in this country now
support the Movement for Black Lives? Why have calls to
defund and abolish the police entered the mainstream
discourse? Why are people risking the deadly coronavirus
to join the protests? And why are we seeing what may be
the broadest popular movement in the history of the
United States?
More than 400 years after the first Africans were
kidnapped, forcibly brought to this country and
enslaved, White supremacy continues to infect our
society. Police murder Black people with impunity. Black
people are incarcerated at an unprecedented rate. And
White fragility keeps us in denial about our White skin
privilege.
In his
1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. said that racism must be exposed. He
wrote, “Like a boil that can never be cured so long as
it is covered up but must be opened with all its
ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light,
injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its
exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and
the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
When the shocking image of Officer Derek Chauvin
choking the life out of Floyd for 8 minutes and 46
seconds confronted us, we were forced to take sides.
People of all races and ages were collectively enraged.
“People are marching as a way of screaming, a way of
exhaling pain, as an enormous group catharsis,” Charles
Blow
wrote in The New York Times. “This isn’t only
about the pain of police brutality, it’s about all the
pain. This is about all the injustice and disrespect and
oppression. This is about ancestry and progeny.”
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The powerful video of Floyd’s lynching is
reminiscent of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement.
Televised images from Little Rock in 1957 “were so
forceful that they told their own truths and needed
virtually no narration,” David Halberstam wrote in
The Fifties. “It was hard for people
watching at home not to take sides: There they were,
sitting in their living rooms in front of their own
television sets watching orderly black children
behaving with great dignity, trying to obtain
nothing more than a decent education, the most
elemental of American birthrights, yet being
assaulted by a vicious mob of poor whites.”
Although white supremacy continues to permeate our
society, Donald Trump has unleashed the dogs of racism
in a frightening way. An early promoter of the Birther
movement, Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign
by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. When he said
there were “very fine people on both sides” in
Charlottesville, one side was the White supremacists.
In the face of massive protests throughout the
country, Trump announced on June 1 that he had
ordered federal troops to Washington, D.C., “to
protect the rights of law-abiding Americans,
including your Second Amendment rights.” This is
evidence of what Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director
of Operation Jackson, calls Trump’s “Brown Shirt Force.”
In a reference that evokes Bull Connor’s 1963 threats
against peaceful civil rights protesters with snarling
dogs, Trump tweeted he would use “vicious dogs” against
protesters who tried to breach the fence in front of the
White House. “Negro Dogs” were used to catch runaway
slaves and escaped prisoners during Jim Crow.
White supremacy is rooted in the belief that Black
people are inferior to White people. In 1900, Charles
Carroll, a polygenist minister in Missouri, wrote a rant
opposing miscegenation called
The Negro, a Beast;
or, “In the Image of God.” In it, he
portrays “The Negro, a beast, but created with
articulate speech and hands, that he may be of service
to his owner – the White Man.”
As revealed in my cousin Erika Cohn’s new
documentary, Belly
of the Beast, many people, particularly
women of color, in California women’s prisons have been
forcibly sterilized. Nineteen-year-old Kelli Dillon
began her 15-year sentence for killing her husband who
was trying to kill her. While undergoing a routine
procedure, Dillon was sterilized against her will.
During the 20th century, over 30 U.S. states passed laws
allowing forced sterilization. After World War II,
compulsory sterilizations primarily targeted non-white
women. From 1909-1979, California forcibly sterilized
more than 20,000 people, many labeled “defectives,”
including people of color.
The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865, is widely
regarded as abolishing slavery. It reads, “Neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
[emphasis added].
But Professor Dylan Rodriguez,
writing in the Harvard Law Review, describes
“the Thirteenth Amendment’s juridical translation of
slavery from a racial chattel institution to a criminal
justice function.” The amendment “in fact refurbished a
fundamental (racial) power relation mediated by the
racist state by recodifying the terms of bodily capture
and subjection (that is, enslavement by a state).” We
have what Rodriguez calls the “carceral-racial state.”
We Charge Genocide (WCG), the grassroots
organization based in Chicago, disagrees with the notion
that “police brutality” is exceptional rather than part
and parcel of systemic racism suffered by Black and
Brown people. WCG decries “systemic, institutionalized,
juridically condoned police torture, cruelty, inhumane
and degrading treatment, murder, harassment, and
unjustified detention,” Rodriguez writes.
Floyd’s murder galvanized calls for reforms such as
banning chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and the use of
military weapons against protesters; ending qualified
immunity for officers charged with using excessive
force; mandating body-worn cameras, and the creation of
a federal database of abusive officers.
In 2015, six cities including Minneapolis were part
of Barack Obama’s Justice Department’s new form of
policing program. But police brutality today is as
brutal as ever.
Maria Nieto Senour resigned after serving for four
years on the San Diego Community Review Board on Police
Practices. “Unfortunately, there are members of the CRB
who had such a pro-police bias that they did not
represent the broader community,” she told Jurist. The
board was provided with “a great deal of information
from the police perspective and relatively little from
the perspective of marginalized communities.” Senour
said that much of what the police do “would be better
done by mental health and/or social workers so funding
should be shifted away from police budgets and assigned
to other functions.”
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG)
supports 8 to Abolition’s demands to defund the
police, demilitarize communities, remove police from
schools, free people from prisons and jails, repeal laws
that criminalize survival, invest in community
self-governance, provide safe housing for everyone, and
invest in care, not cops. The NLG also
supports reparations for slavery and discrimination
against Africans and African descendants.
Rodriguez calls abolition “a fundamentally
creative force” in one of “those rare historical
moments when definitive destruction of oppressive
structures and power relations appears possible,
practical, and capable of catalyzing a (potentially)
radically different social form.” He advocates “a
radical reconfiguration of justice.”
This transformational moment is becoming a
transformational movement. The time to effect
revolutionary change is now.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas
Jefferson School of Law, former president of the
National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the
International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a
member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. -
"Source"
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This article was prepared for publication by
Brianna Bell, a JURIST Staff Editor. Please direct
any questions or comments to her at
commentary@jurist.org
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