In this
week’s COVID-19 and Race Commentary, the fight for transformative justice,
Black liberation, and a nation that is healthy and equitable for all.
Issue No 8. June 1, 2020
We Hurt. We Mourn. We Fight For Transformative
Justice.
By Michael McAfee
We hurt because this nation
chooses to not value Black Lives. We mourn because George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and too many others are victims of
state-sanctioned murder. Too many of our revered leaders and their
institutions have routinized the ceremony of mourning Black death in
America. Their platitudes fall flat. There will be no peace or justice until
our nation atones for founding a country on stolen land and human bondage —
a nation that still steals from and binds millions of people in America to
a government and economy that oppresses them.
Since policing will always
threaten our most fundamental right — the right to live — it must be
abolished.
To silence justifiable
outrage, too many people selectively quote Dr. King’s messages of
non-violence without comprehending the meaning behind quotes like “riots are the language of the
unheard.” It’s time that we listen to those who are most
burdened by structural racism and have the courage to do what must be done
— abolish White supremacy, dismantle its institutions and systems, and
build new, liberating institutions and systems. It is time to remove the knee
of this nation’s oppressive laws, regulations, institutional practices, and
cultural representations off of the necks of Black people. There can be no
compromise. Even as we hurt and mourn, we fight for transformative justice
from a nation that must come to grips with the fact that its fate is
inextricably bound with Black America. It is time for a national effort to
remake this nation into one that is equitable for all.
If there is a silver lining
to this moment, it is a growing acknowledgment that traditional police
reform — like training and body cameras — does not increase community
safety and directs too many resources to bloated law enforcement budgets. Across
the country, more people are demanding that these valuable
public funds be invested in community infrastructure, services, and
programs that address the root causes of poverty and historical trauma. The
nation is waking up to the fact that — by design — policing is and will
always be violent and unaccountable to oppressed people, including Black,
Indigenous, and Latinx people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and Muslims and
other religious groups.
The project of abolition
involves more than eliminating the system — it means using our radical imagination to dream and create
the world that we want to live in. But there are things we can do now. We
must immediately defund from and reduce the harm of policing while we build the alternatives that can replace
it, such as those that could be developed through the CRISES Act in California. This is a
challenging mandate, but it is necessary and possible. Over the past four
years, PolicyLink has partnered with a large and growing number of
organizations, including those led by directly impacted communities, to
design and build a new system that will keep all communities safe and
healthy without criminalization, surveillance, or punishment.
Abolishing the structure of
policing is but one liberating act. There are others. To win on equity, we
must center the very people our systems and
institutions have treated as expendable — Black people. Acting with a consciousness in which we
see the interactive effects of discrimination, subjugation, and
disempowerment on the lives of Black people and how they are baked into our
policies, practices, and institutions. We must also stand in solidarity
with those seeking Black liberation and act on the demands of coalitions of
directly-impacted people, like the Movement for Black Lives.
Be disgusted at what you
see from the police. Be even more disgusted by the repeated, purposeful
refusal of our country to respond to what Brother Howard Thurman describes
as the demands of the disenfranchised, disinherited, and dispossessed. We
have reason to be hopeful if we heed Dr. King’s exhortation to break free
from the “intoxicating
drugs of white supremacy mixed with gradualism” and usher in an
era of Black Liberation.
- Michael McAfee is
President and CEO of PolicyLink
Highlights from the
News, Analysis, and Commentary
“Racism is an
ongoing public health crisis that needs our attention now,” Georges Benjamin, executive director
of the American Public Health Association, says in a statement responding to the killing of
George Floyd and a pandemic that has accelerated racial inequities in every
realm of life.
“The convergence of
these tragic events — a pandemic disproportionately killing Black people,
the failure of the state to protect Black people and the preying on Black
people by the police — has confirmed what most of us already know: If we
and those who stand with us do not mobilize in our own defense, then no
official entity ever will,”
Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor writes in a New York Times op-ed.
Please share with your
networks, send your ideas and feedback,
and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram using
hashtag #COVIDandRace.
We hope you find the
COVID-19 and Race Series an important tool for keeping up with news about
the virus and its impact on communities we serve. As a nonprofit
organization, PolicyLink is honored to provide resources to support the
needs of our nation's 100 million economically insecure individuals.
Generous partners like you make our work possible.
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment