BLACK POWER AS A FORCE FOR CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION
July 11, 2016
Today, as on WBUR’s “Here and
Now” (http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/07/11/summer-of-violence),
I hear many reminders of mass police violence against communities of color in
the summer of 1967, and the ensuing Kerner Commission report on police violence
as a product of institutional racism in 1968.
I might add that ensuing violence against often white and middle-class anti-war
protesters as President Nixon took office helped make excessive police violence
against people of color and political protesters give way, in many communities
black and white, to what came to be called “community policing.” Of course this recognition did not “solve”
problems of police violence and its underlying racism. But it did change police forces here and
there across the country, while in political backlash, law-n-order “broken-windows”
became institutionally, statistically, politically enshrined, with New York
City’s CompStat system leading the way.
Two generations after the Kerner
report, cell phone transmissions of overtly problematic police violence against
black people, including shooting deaths, readily make (inter)national news,
alongside coverage of the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas,
ironically a model of community policing, which ordinarily would be reported
all by itself. It is true of all
elements of cultural transformation of politically organized violence (down to
adult violence against children) that they are less visible, virtually silent
as compared to the alarm that violence sounds in our individual and collective
consciousness. Counter-intuitively, the
fact that we recognize and circulate news of police violence against people of color
signifies that culturally, we white folks especially are awakening to the
racism implicit in profiling and distinguishing “at-risk offenders” from
ourselves, and implicit in the notion that the first duty of police is to
control criminals. And wouldn’t you know
it: I hear that a Pew poll shows that while most whites report feeling race
relation are worse than ever, a majority of black respondents believe that the
nation as a whole has made progress in recognizing and dealing with racism. Today, President Obama is reported to have
said the same.
The cultural bottom line is that
as a whole, whites included, we recognize the racism inherent in policing as “law
enforcement” much more readily than we did as I entered the graduate study of
criminology in 1968. Cultural
transformation of political institutions of power over others into power
sharing rests on political awakening to the violence done especially by us—notably
established white men as it becomes noticeable in mass news media. That includes criminologists in my
sixties/early seventies generation who to some degree are institutionalized as “critical,”
who have proliferated as college and university teachers who have been teaching
about the racism, sexism and ageism underlying “criminal justice” as we know
it, for fifty years too. As someone who
seeks cultural transformation of the violence inherent in imbalances of
political/legal power over others, I see today’s alarm over police/black
violence as increased recognition that racism is our problem, an awareness that
so far as I can see has underlain cultural transformations that have been
undertaken here and there by police chiefs, which are also being noticed, as in
Dallas, Cincinnati, and Richmond, California.
May the force be with us. Love and
peace, hal
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