Dear friends,
It’s been a long week. Biden announced that he will withdraw the remaining US troops from Afghanistan. I was born in the early years of the US war in Vietnam, and when the Vietnamese regained control of Saigon and the last troops came home, I was in junior high. My own child was in first grade when the US went to war in Afghanistan. The texts we exchanged about the news this week reminded me of an uncomfortable fact.
When American-born children grow up in wartime, they experience it at a strange remove, unless their parents are in the military. That was not true, perhaps, during World War II, but I believe it has been true ever since then. We are shielded from the violence, death, and displacement of war. Even children in military families are ignorant of our nation’s foreign policy.
We grow up thinking that dead Americans are more significant than people who die elsewhere. When I tried to learn how many Afghans had died in the war we waged against them, this lesson came home clearly. Google repeatedly ‘corrected’ my search to “US deaths in afghanistan war.” Nonetheless, I learned that it is likely that 43,000 Afghan civilians died in the war. Millions more were displaced by the war.
The same remove — the distancing and othering — occurs within the United States when we talk about police killings. In the wake of Daunte Wright’s death at the hands of Officer Kim Potter, Fox News commentator, Greg Gutfield, ridiculed calls to defund the police:
No more police means no more disobeying police. So that problem is solved. But does it make sense? God, no. It's not supposed to. Out of the tens of millions of traffic stops a year, you get mistakes and tragedies. The only response to this now is amplification, magnification, and ruin.
With just 24 incidents out of millions of stops, we could still cover this chaos at least twice a month. When you ignore context, you have a lot of time to fill. It's the devil's slot machine. Sure, it hits a horrible jackpot every 10,000 pulls, but we aren't going to show you the other 9,999 outcomes. Who would sit through a 24/7 channel of safe traffic stops?
On Fox, it is still possible to see the tragic pattern of Black people killed by police as a fabrication of the media.
In the US, police violence is the sixth leading causing death for Black boys and men.
About 100 in 100,000 Black men and boys will be killed by police during their lives, while 39 white men and boys per 100,000 are killed by police. This means Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men.
“It’s a striking number,” said study co-author Michael Esposito, a postdoctoral researcher in the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “There have been arguments about how widespread of a problem this is. We didn’t have a good estimate about whether it’s a few cases that received a lot of media attention.
“This study shows us that police killings are deeply systematic, with race, gender and age patterning this excess cause of death.”
These numbers include police killings by “asphyxiation, beating, a chemical agent, a medical emergency, a Taser, or a gunshot.” Every day I feel gratitude that my child is not a likely target of police violence, but it is not enough. Everyone is somebody’s baby.
Even the Democrats’ response to the crisis, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, subscribes to the idea that ‘mistakes and tragedies’ and ‘bad apples’ account for the deaths of Black people at the hands of police. It fails to acknowledge the deeply systematic nature of the problem and instead funds the system that produces the violence.
Read the letter from M4BL about the shortcomings of the Justice in Policing Act.
Tell your Congressional Representative to support the BREATHE Act.
You can be forgiven for thinking that a bill named for George Floyd might “meet the moment.” But it’s our responsibility to read the fine print and convince our legislators to invest in communities instead of failed reforms.
Here in NYC, we need to watch out for opportunists who pretend to address our very real and urgent problems.
Finally, I will leave you with an inspiring, true story. In 2005, in Buffalo, an officer intervened to protect a man from a fellow officer, who was using a chokehold. One year from retirement, she lost her job and her pension. This week, a judge ruled that she will receive back pay and her pension, reversing an earlier decision. Officer Cariol Horne, the only ‘good apple’ I’ve ever heard of, never regretted saving the man’s life. She gets the last word:
"My vindication comes at a 15 year cost, but what has been gained could not be measured," she said. "I never wanted another Police Officer to go through what I had gone through for doing the right thing."
with love,
L