How to Explain How Modern Police Descend from Slave Catchers

  The issue of police terrorism (brutality) is an intense topic today in every part of the world.  Although most people within the U.S. probably see this primarily as a concern within the U.S., there is clear evidence that this issue has impacts in Europe, Australia, and throughout every corner of the world.  Supporters of police claim that the question is simply one of legality e.g. the police enforce existing laws and provided everyone follows those laws, in most instances, there would be no issues of police misconduct.  In other words, these people believe that instances that we would call police terrorism are just issues where if the people in question followed the direction of police officers, no problems would have occurred.  The purpose of this piece is to express that from a historical standpoint, the legality argument is obscenely untrue.

Specifically the position of "following the law" is especially flimsy.  The contradictions can be addressed in variable ways, but using the U.S. as an example, this country was founded on illegality.  This land was stolen from Indigenous peoples through naked violent terrorism.  Africans were violently kidnapped and brought here to provide free labor to build up the capitalist empire.  These practices were accompanied by the erection of settler colonial land trust laws that illegally and immorally took Indigenous and African people out of the equation e.g. prohibiting us from having the right to land.  Again, this was done through "legal" means as well as consistent brutal violence against us, meaning those of us who owned lands had it violently and illegally seized from us with full support from the state.  And, since land ownership is the major gateway to accumulating wealth in this society, the fact that we were denied access to land ownership for so long goes a long way in explaining the income inequality and resources gaps that exists between our communities and European people  today.  So, its clear that when white supremacist/capitalist society talks about "following the law" what they are really saying is following their rule, regardless of how lawless and immoral that is.  

Policing in this society is proof of this.  Over the last few years, especially since the release of books like "The New Jim Crow", etc., many people have become aware of the historical reality that the institution of police departments have direct ties to the institution of enslaving African people in this country.  The fact that "posses" were groups employed by Southern state plantation owners to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Africans into staying on plantations to pick cotton after the civil war concluded (and slavery as a "legal" institution was ended), and those posses were converted into the initial police departments across the country is undeniable.  Many people now know this critical history, but lots of people may still struggle to explain how this process continues to manifest itself on a daily basis in terms of day to day policing.  

The answer is up through the 1950s in the U.S., mass lynchings were a spectator sport.  We are talking about literally thousands of Africans who were brutally murdered while hundreds, even thousands of Europeans cheered and watched.  These events were often advertised.  Food was sold.  Tee shirts, balloons.  Everything you would expect at any sporting event.  Even the word "picnic" has been a source of contradiction.  Defenders and apologists of white supremacy/capitalism have been diligent in pointing out that the word picnic has origins that identify the word as having meaning related to social outings, meaning it has nothing to do with glamorizing events that terrorized African people.  Of course, we know that words have colloquial meaning - its historical and entomological meaning - and words also have popular culture usage.  An example is the word "cool" has a colloquial meaning related to the temperature of a thing, but the popular meaning of the word is completely different.  It means gauging something in terms of the positive way in which people wish to relate to it.  The word picnic has this contradiction because its popular meaning and usage during this period of popular lynching was to signify a social outing of picking a n - g and this clarifies for anyone just how much these "events" were ingrained in the day to day culture of this society.

And, the reasons why practically all of these thousands of Africans were lynched had absolutely nothing to do with them violating any "legalities" and those guilty of carrying out these brutal acts, as well as their supporters, fully understood this wasn't about legalities.  Instead, they simply used legality as a shield for their terrorist practices.  Examples are Africans were typically accused of the types of crimes that would best inflame sentiments such as violating the racial code against engaging European women.  So, alleged crimes such as rape or even just looking at or bumping into a European woman was enough to cause countless Africans to tragically lose their lives.  In truth, often, no reasons were even given and/or required for this terrorism and the fact countless numbers of African women were also viciously murdered for no reason is proof of this.  Even a slight investigation of these occurrences would reveal that the real reasons always were related to European (white) fears of African political/economic independence and had nothing to do with any transgressions against white society.  Examples are endless.  The Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S. 1921 massacre of 300 Africans occurred when an African shoe-shiner named Dirk Rowland was accused of assaulting a 17 year old white woman. Up to that point, Tulsa was a community of successful African business people which was destroyed after this white riot. The 1923 massacre of approximately 150 Africans in Rosewood, Florida, U.S., occurred after similar unfounded allegations against an African were made surrounding some white woman. Rosewood, like Tulsa, was another prosperous African community that was destroyed from white terrorism.  The 1947 grisly murder of 30 year old African businessman Elmore Bolling of Hayneville, Alabama, U.S., is another example.  Bolling owned a successful merchandise store as well as a hauling business.  His customer base included Europeans as well as Africans.  An economically depressed European neighbor of Bollings named Clarke Luckie, admitted pumping Bolling's body with dozens of buckshot and pistol rounds while also freely admitting that his initial charge that Bolling had insulted his wife over the telephone was untrue.  Of course, no justice was ever meted out for Bolling's murder or any of these horrific crimes, but an even more telling historical element from the Bolling killing is important.

Up through the mid 50s, this spectator sport of controlling African lives through violent mass brutality began to be challenged by the more visionary elements of white supremacist communities.   Intensified pressure from anti-lynching activities led by courageous people like Ms. Ida B. Wells and others, brought this issue into the public eye, even on an international level.  The federal government, wary of being perceived as an oppressor nation against its efforts to portray this country as the beacon of freedom and democracy, began to place some pressure on Southern U.S. states to crack down on lynching efforts.  Please recognize that placing pressure has nothing to do with eliminating the terror against African people.  Instead, the focus was on eliminating the pubic spectacle of this oppression.  Instead, Southern states began to discourage public lynchings.  The terror was migrated to the newly emerged police departments because this cover could always be explained away as the police enforcing the law.  And, since from that time through current day, police and active, violent white supremacists groups have run in the exact same circles, it became easy for police to do the initial arrests in order to then turn those Africans detained over to indiscriminate violence out of the public eye.  Outstanding examples of this were the vicious murder of Tuskegee student Sammy Younge and of course, the kidnapping and murder of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, U.S. in 1964.  In each case, the initial contacts were made by police and this connection can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of violent encounters with African people.  So much for legalities.  

Police extended this work to providing intel on civil rights activists to violent white supremacists.  This intel included license plate numbers, addresses, job locations, etc.  Africans who dared register to vote in the 60s were routinely subjected to late night visits by racists.  Due to the intensity of racist oppression, African communities and organizing circles tended to be small and pretty tight so the absolute only way those night riders could know those people's identities would be with the cooperation of police and other government agencies.  Again, so much for legalities.

The model of police being the primary vehicle for repression eliminated the need for the appearance of separation between the state and violent white supremacy.  Today, the exact same practices from police dominate interactions of oppression with the African masses.  And, nothing has changed including the fact these interactions are ruled by ill-legalities while supporters of police continue to claim the problem is us not following "the law."  Police routinely summarize events together after a shooting in order to organize their stories to protect themselves.  This happened after the Eric Garner killing in New York, the Walter Scott killing in North Carolina (where an African police officer helped the European killer cop plant the fake gun against Scott).  Portland, Oregon, U.S., where police met at a local diner to collaborate their stories on why and how 100 pound Kendra James needed to be shot and killed by police.  Since these contradictions are public knowledge, its useless for these supporters of brutality against us to continue to try and convince us we are being brutalized for "not following the law."  This was a lie in 1921 and its not true in 2020.  In reality, we are brutalized whether we are quiet and mindful, like the residents of Rosewood, and/or Mr. Bolling, or whether we take bold public stances against white supremacy/capitalism, like the Black Panthers, so what that should tell us is this system is going to oppress us and lie about it whatever we do so we should just release any pretensions and fight uncompromisingly for our freedom, regardless of what our enemies say about us. 

Of course, we know that there are always people who think they are being smart by suggesting "what about those Africans who are arrested committing actual so-called crimes?"  Even that is a lie because as a well meaning white person pointed out in a meme recently, white suburbs are filled with people doing and selling illegal drugs as much as the inner cities.  The suburbs are filled with the same types of crimes that accompany any communities with drug issues e.g. burglaries, assault, etc., but the difference is police agencies aren't choosing to target white suburbs like they do African and other brown communities so again, this isn't about legalities.  Its about white supremacy/capitalism.

When I was 17, an elder told me that the Ku Klux Klan existed to terrorize Africans who dared move to the suburbs because "the police exist to terrorize us who live in the cities."  This statement was more prophetic than possibly that elder even realized because it summarizes organized and systemic terror against African people for the last several decades.  I was listening recently to an interview with Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) when he was the 24 year old newly elected chairperson for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1966.  Ture was being interviewed on a panel with then American Nazi Party Chair George Lincoln Rockwell and other racists.  Rockwell and the other racists, attempted to create false talking points that Africans (who rebelled against oppression in the inner cities) were the real instigators of violence against police.  Brother Kwame, young, but courageous and convicted, refused to accept those talking points and when asked point blank if he supported police, Kwame responded with a resounding no.  This of course sent the others into a tailspin.  You can imagine being on a talk show today.  All you have to do is look at the trash surrounding the perfectly tame and legitimate protest by Colin Kaepernick, etc, to see that saying no to police is just as controversial today as ever.  You can just imagine how controversial it was for a 24 year old African 50+ years ago.  What this should tell us is basing our convictions on the morality of these people is a complete waste of our time and energies.  Its certainly past time for us to be helping them by continuing to uphold this myth.  Police are not here to protect us and that's true whether your father, brother, sister, aunt, mother, and/or non-gender binary relative, friend, lover, neighbor, or whatever is the police.  The existence of your loved ones in those institutions has done zero to prevent them from terrorizing us so it makes no sense for people to keep bringing that up as if its factor in this discussion.  Those institutions are here for one reason and that is to uphold white supremacy/capitalism.  And, make no mistake about it.  Their function is to uphold those systems through force of violence.  Doing that is the only law that matters to these people.  Anyone who says our resistance to this oppression is unlawful is just gaming you.  

We as a proud people have to move past this slave consciousness of feeling like we have to explain and justify our existence to the system that oppresses us and the people who support that system.  Taking that approach is such a slap in the face to our proud people who have stood up for us against injustice.  Yes, we pay taxes, but those taxes do not serve our interests when they go to supporting violent white supremacy/capitalism domestically and internationally.  This issue never has been about following the law.  500+ years ago it was about white supremacy/capitalism.  Its about the same thing today regarding criminal police departments and it will always be about that and nothing else.  The sooner we accept this undeniable reality and stop operating in a fantasy world that has never existed, the sooner we can solve this problem once and for all.  Its been written many times in this space the methods in which we can and should organize ourselves to protect ourselves against state terrorism as well as that coming from their vigilante allies.  There are a growing number of us who don't believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and other fantasies.  Its time to get to doing some real work.