Discredit Violence/Dump Defund Discourse
As the national conventions of the two major political parties unfolded these last two weeks the events surrounding the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin are the latest racial justice punch in the face this country has endured. In these pages, I’ve often advanced my thesis of America as two nations, one traditional and conservative, and the other progressive. And we all know two things: This election in November is the most important one in any of our lifetimes. And secondly, how the country comes down on the issue of race will be a central question in determining the outcome.
If the Biden/Harris ticket wins and Democrats can manage to regain control of the Senate, we have a chance to nudge the needle in the direction of the vision of progressivism. However, if Donald Trump wins, we face the specter of the wholesale trashing of our constitutional protections and outright fascism, a fate from which I fear the left will never recover.
Recent national polling from a number of organizations shows that, following the murder of George Floyd, a haymaker has landed squarely in the jaw of white America regarding race. Majorities of Americans now believe that policing needs to be reformed to achieve racial equity. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in June found that 95% of all Americans believe that police officers should be required to intervene when fellow officers use excessive force. This includes 97% of all Democrats, 96% of Independents and even 95% of Republicans.
During the same period A Monmouth University poll found “that 76% of Americans now say that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem in the United States. This includes 57% of conservatives, 71% of whites, and 69% of whites without college degrees. In both cases these data show significant shifts in white opinion regarding race from the period after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (See both polls in bibliography below). Part of the reason large swaths of white America are changing their views about “systemic racism” is also because of the data showing the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among POC.
But it is against this backdrop that we’ve seen Trump escalate tensions by sending federal forces into cities and reviving the old Nixon calls for “law and order.” Then we get the Blake shooting in Kenosha, and 17 year-old Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse crossing state lines from Illinois and killing two people in a misguided attempt to restore law and order. And we are now getting anecdotal reporting from Wisconsin (a key swing state) and elsewhere, that people in the suburbs are on the fence regarding the elections as they perceive chaos in the cities that Democratic politicians can’t seem to control.
But on Saturday morning we also saw overwhelmingly, “white Kenoshans” painting murals on walls near the Rittenhouse killings accompanied by “Black Lives Matter” slogans. So enough of white America is now “woke’ on the need for systemic racial changes. And in order to keep them in the fold and casting their votes against fascism in November, progressives led by the BLM movement must do three things.
First, peaceful protests must be separated from violent actions. In the first moments of outrage against yet another senseless police or vigilante killing, vandalism and clashes with the police are understandable. But over the days and weeks, outside observers and even residents of the impacted communities begin to wonder what is the point? What is the point in smashing windows and burning down businesses that serve the neighborhoods where the vandalism is occurring? In the 60s, after rounds of violent rebellion in 1967, and again in 1968 with the assassination of Marin Luther King, my neighborhood in Cincinnati was never the same. White merchants were pushed out, and despite the rhetoric about Black economic empowerment, nobody, black or white, made any serious investments to rebuild the community. It remains a low-income, rust-belt area that like so many others, is experiencing gentrification, which brings back services, but pushes the longstanding black residents out.
But in the context of the November elections, another “very important” reason to stop the violence is that while majorities of Americans recognize that police misconduct and broader racial discrimination are problems, most Americans don’ think the violence makes sense. Peaceful protest to end systemic racism gains public support. Uninstigated violent protest loses support. Some of those lost supporters will vote for Trump out of fear. We can’t risk that right now.
Secondly, I believe that most of the after dark violent protesters are white radicals who are alienated from the sterile white middle-class worlds they grew up in and relish this opportunity to “rage against the machine.” There have been some scenes where we see black leaders arguing with white anarchists about tactics, but not being able to control what those white activists do after dark. Black leaders of the movement must aggressively take charge, make it clear to the anarchists that violent actions, unless motivated by police action, are not welcome, and if necessary, publicly denounce those white radicals as not part of our movement!
White nationalists have also brought their violence into the fray in Portland, Kenosha and other locales. The BLM leaders must let the dueling white folks clash and even kill each other in the streets and turn to the media and say “these are not our peeps!”
Third, and this may be a hard sell, but the BLM movement must get off the “defund the police” discourse. The polls also show that most Americans want reform, but they still want police protection. And black communities are also divided on this issue, with many organizations in places like Seattle likewise, calling for reform, not for policing to go away (see Shapiro, 2020). Perhaps we should open a conversation about Re-Imagining Public Safety in which resources can be appropriately shifted into mental health and other social services, and stop scaring middle America with the language of defunding. This is especially urgent in Seattle in the wake of four shootings and two deaths during the life of the “self-governing” CHAZZ Commune.
Once again, like Frederick Douglas, like Martin, we must reach deeper in this critical period to show Americans who know the system is corrupt that we come in peace and in good will, and that we wish to work together to find solutions to these chronic systemic problems. If the movement doesn’t immediately take these steps, we get four more yours of Trump and the end of the American democratic experiment.
Kaiser Family Foundation
https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/report/kff-health-tracking-poll-june-2020/
Monmouth University Poll
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_060220.pdf/
Nina, Shapiro, “The future of policing in Seattle: How will we move forward?” Seattle Times, June
14, 2020, p. 1.
