Tuesday, June 02, 2020

So what do we actually want?

A friend of  mine recently posted on Facebook:
Since no revolutionary council or workers' soviet has issued any demands, I'm assuming that the police and anarchists will just keep punching people and smashing things until the punching and smashing stops.
To be fair to the protesters, this is not a problem unique to our current situation.  Very rarely in history (only 1 or 2 times?) have revolutionary organizations actually been in enough control of the protests to issue a list of demands.  Certainly no one was in control of the Watts Riot, for example.

And yet, his point is still well taken.  These protests are now an expression of outrage without a sense of direction.

The good news is, there at least seems to be broad societal consensus that:
*  Police killing black people is a legitimate problem
* It's an institutional problem, and not just a few bad apples
* The problem isn't going to be solved by just asking police to be nicer.  We need some sort of structural change.
4 years ago, all of these points were in dispute.  So the fact that we at least have consensus on all of these points is progress of a sort.

Now the question is: what do we want?
In my previous post, I suggested just getting rid of the police entirely.  And while this is the long term goal, this may not be politically realistic within our lifetimes.  So in the meantime, what new laws could alleviate the current situation?
This is a legitimate question.  I legitimately don't know.
So I threw the question out to my Facebook friends, and was impressed by the intelligence of some of the responses.  I'll quote some of the best responses down below:

Are you asking specifically for institutional racism in the law enforcement institution specifically or in our institutions generally?
I guess I'm asking for any proposed legislation that would make this situation better--general or institutionally specific. 
For institutions generally, likely not. The way in which structural racism operates in each of our institutions is sort of unique to the institution. The way it works in churches is different than schools is different than law enforcement is different in workplace, etc..
For law enforcement, specifically, I’m not sure you can legislate it (at least not federally), but the list of things is pretty long — training, education, policy/strategies (community policing vs Gates model), union overhaul, cultural overhaul, performance metric overhaul, etc.
The one thing you could legislate is to overhaul qualified immunity. That concept has been pushed to its limit. If LEOs actually had the spectre of liability for their conduct, that would push down a lot of change into training, policy, culture, metrics, etc.
My point re qualified immunity: https://twitter.com/kenjennings/status/1266903746027483136?s=21&fbclid=IwAR32suVgkQY7IcI7rLzu8VrPfwLNTcjyv0OgNCSP2hOWCc13cBYOrPaPkQs 
I heard Tim Wise speak on this a few years ago and I was compelled by the steps/recommendations he had for legislative changes. He has some books and a podcast where he explores these issues. Also Michelle Alexander’s work on the New Jim Crow digs into deep underlying systemic issues.


Also Rev William J. Barber, II and his Poor People’s Campaign is major in this work 

I learnt a lot from these books https://biblio-fiend.com/institutional-racism/ 

Have you ever heard of-- or even better tried-- one of Harvard's IATs? If not I'll put the link below, click through 'I wish to proceed' and select 'Race IAT'.
I bring this up because I think it's important, in thinking about this issue, to be very clear about the difference between intentionally malicious acts of racism and implicit bias.
In the States, we tend to think of people as being 'racist' or 'not-racist', all or nothing. And while there are, of course, people out there who are maliciously racist and know they're racist, they're obviously not the majority and not as much the cause of the problems in the US as we'd tend to think.
Tests like Harvard's Race IAT get more to the root of the matter, which is that we ALL to varying degrees, harbor implicit biases that color the way we see the world.
Interestingly, these biases have been shown to follow more cultural than 'racial' lines. What I mean by this is that Americans, in general, black or white, tend to share many of the same inclinations toward race, even in cases where these inclinations would seem self-loathing. This isn't so surprising when you think about it as we, as Americans, have all been raised on a diet of the same media, we've been educated in similar ways and we share many of the same values.
So in regard to how, specifically, can we legislate, well that's a problem. We can make laws to strongly disincentivize violent racists from doing racist things, But nine times out of ten, this is not what is resulting in black deaths. It's the sorts of implicit biases-- knee-jerk reactions/perceptions-- that average people who don't live very examined lives, just chalk up to having been 'the truth' of some given situation.
So seeing a black guy running down the street or a group of them congregating as vaguely criminal while seeing white people doing the same sorts of things as harmless is a byproduct of our culture. These initial reactions don't make one a terrible person, especially in instances where people have been taught to recognize their own bias-- people can't after all help where they come from or how they were raised-- but if you happen to be in a role where you have to make quick, life or death decisions then these initial reactions could result in people losing their lives. And the trouble is that you can't legislate any of that away.
If the US actually cared to change-- and I strongly doubt this to be the case, that place is awful-- rather than trying to make quick fix laws we'd need to adopt a more holistic approach. This might include establishing a task force to address the issue of systemic/institutional bias; implementing mandatory Implicit association testing and awareness programs for any job where a person makes critical decisions that affect the lives of others and making continued employment contingent on performance and participation in these programs; and removing lethal force as an option for civilian forces. As a culture we'd ultimately need to move away from the 'all or nothing' conception of racism and come to understand our actions as being motivated by biases that we are not even always aware of and that stem from attitudes and assumptions that are endemic to our culture.
To the degree that we could encourage folks to live more examined lives-- to question their own actions and motivations in their dealings with others-- we could incrementally change that culture, creating a better, safer and more inclusive society. And as a result fewer people would be murdered in the streets. But, as I said, I don't think any of this will actually happen in the States. At least not in my lifetime. Consideration for the feelings and perspective of others is almost antithetical to the American way of looking at the world. The US is the land of 'ME!'.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html 

I thought of your question when I saw this. Looks like this is what the NAACP is demanding

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