Drop a pin on any threadbare of our crises and you will find a thousand shifting layers of history folding in to form our social architecture. Over 100,000 U.S. residents and counting have now been snuffed out by a deadly combination of COVID-19 and an unrestrained dominance of racialized Neoliberal capitalism.1 Like so many diseases, Coronavirus is a threat, but it is the pre-existing conditions that make it so deadly. With blotted eyes and broken shoulders, rotted lungs, minds strung out of our gaslit sons, every organ in our social body aches in self-immolating class, gender, race.
Perhaps only these underlying pathologies of White Supremacy and greed could bring hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents into the streets during a pandemic. Shock, awe, disgust, condolence; the full range of human emotion paraded our hearts as police violently descended upon political protestors. By simply demanding that our country finally redress the racism circulating in the blood and ether of U.S institutions, the dissidents had breached the temper of the beast. Now, rhetoric of revolution flies freely about the country’s cities and for once they sound a little more believable. The revolution certainly would not have been televised by network elites benefitting from bigoted capitalism, but it might be recorded and tweeted by the popular witnesses of Police State violence.
Today, confusion percolates as mainstream U.S. institutions attempt to limp on without any resolution of the mistreatment of Black and Brown Americans. Such is the real story of a nation-state fundamentally crippled by racist imaginations. If we are one polity, we are one that has made no reparations or real efforts to end the Civil War; we kick our old paradigms down the road as rulers bury our histories. Even now, exacerbated by an atomistic culture, we hardly know each other. While the Coronavirus introduced an economic crisis to White America, Black Americans have been in economic crisis for 400 years. If we truly understood our neighbors, we could only be so thankful for the amount of love and tenderness coming out of the demonstrations of the oppressed.
Perhaps it is the raw affection and rationality that the brutal regime cannot stand most. The scenes of solidarity across historical racial divides were too beautiful, they had to be reddened and bruised. The signs in the throngs too rational, they had to be gassed and confused. Still, the light of a reckoning shines through, in spite of the warfare following suit, the call to defund police is where power finally meets truth.
Where the Police State perpetually fails to meet its secondary mission of preventing and addressing “crime,” it succeeds in meeting its primary mission of violently destroying Black and poor social networks. Pawns of destruction, police have been systematically placed at the frontlines of dismantling the familial and community infrastructure which might enable oppressed peoples to achieve an unconstrained quality of life. Facilitators of incarceration, police work an assembly line serving people in chains for the protection of a capital class that profits more from Black bondage than human liberation. From disparate glints to wide-eyed glances, George Floyd has shown us that the menace of our Domestic-Carceral-Complex is both imminent and insatiable. Moreover, I have no doubt that mainstream conceptions of U.S. police have rattled because White grandfathers and White daughters who so much as bristle against State-sanctioned domestic violence may too find themselves injured or dead.
Thus, we arrive at the blueprints of a Black New Deal. If there is to remain an American identity with moral virtue and welfare in the world then there must be transformative healing and full socioeconomic incorporation of Black Americans into the U.S. social democracy, lest the nation whither and crumble in her sickly disposition. How all the reparations should be invested, from healthcare and housing services to educational and employment opportunities, remain to be refined. Mere revival of traditional welfare-state institutions seems unlikely to feature as a defining element of a more progressive social paradigm which transcends our current inabilities to reduce poverty and strife. Wherever new socio-economies might emerge, it will be an arbiter of Black liberation if their seed money comes from police departments.
1 See generally David Harvey, The Ways of the World (2016); Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016).
Elijah Miller is a Ph.D. student in Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs where he is concentrating on Urban and Regional Studies. Elijah recently completed his Masters in Public Administration at Florida State University where he focused on civic engagement, community policing, and police reform. Now, he is leveraging critical race theory and urban ecological analyses in an effort to trace the policy and power-building practices needed to transcend histories of racial strife, class division, gender and identity-based oppression, and environmental degradation.