The wheels of justice move very slowly for those who are marginalized, but they can spin with dizzying speed when activated toward marginalized populations.
A recent example, which I won't link to any hashtags, is a murder of a child by a Black man who was apprehended with great speed but the murder was also leveraged as a derailing conversation about which lives matter and why.
Although it is a recent example, it fits the pattern of how our society handles (or doesn’t handle) racial reckoning conversations.
It’s been less than three months since the police murder of George Floyd and the Minneapolis Uprising but while there are continued efforts to fundamentally challenge and change the way policing is conducted in our nation, some of the efforts are waning and some conversations are pivoting. For Breonna Taylor, it’s been a couple months longer but with less justice and, unfortunately, more memes.
Months in the year of 2020 feel like decades.
There is a lot of fatigue in our communities. There is a lot of uncertainty and anguish and frustration. There is economic risk and health risk cutting deep in our cities and towns. Institutional leadership is absent at best and actively harmful at worst. Even the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is asking for the federal government to send in uber-police ostensibly to combat gun violence but with an active tip line that might be easily weaponized against community leaders engaged fully in protest and societal change. This, just mere weeks after a beautiful Black Lives Matter street mural on Indiana Avenue was painted (and later vandalized).
When will we white people recognize that the answer to police brutality is not more police? When will we white people recognize that the police aren’t a cudgel for us to use at our whim of perceived danger, which we would do well to see as discomfort instead? When will we white people who are property owners and business owners recognize that the perceived inconvenience of engaging with Black people as tenants or customers is not reason enough to leverage the systems of courts and police to have them evicted or removed via simple accusation?
Because for white people like myself, we are talking about moments.
A moment of discomfort at seeing a Black family at a park.
A moment of having a Black man walk into your place of business.
A moment (perhaps slightly elongated) of having Black individuals or families as renters.
But when we activate the system of justice, no justice is done; our moment of discomfort might feel like it has been corrected but a life trajectory could be altered for the Black individuals who are “being dealt with.” Evictions can devastate a person’s ability to get or keep a job, obtain new housing, have any semblance of positive mental or physical health. Removing someone from public spaces via police can become violent or deadly for many Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) and it can have a significant chilling effect for those who witness or later hear about the lack of freedom of movement. And businesses calling the police for perceived theft is also an incredibly dangerous way to resolve a potential business loss.
On May 27th, I wrote the following Facebook post about businesses and their relationship with the police:
Lots of people have been making comments and reacting over the recent police murder(s, because it wasn't just George but it's been so many this month, this year, this...). I want to address something that I haven't seen tackled head on and I do so as a small business owner speaking out to other business owners and managers and trainers, etc.: Review your training policies and revamp them to remove treating your city's police force as your security and collections department. Businesses have insurance. If you are subjected to actual fraud or theft or vandalism, file your insurance claim and work with the other organizations that your business engages with regularly to recover what you can. Yeah, it sucks, but owning and operating and managing business has risks which is what insurance is there for to help mitigate. Also, train yourself and train your employees to understand what your implicit biases are, undergo some sociological and cultural trainings to learn more about yourself and what prejudices you have in order to minimize (both in frequency and intensity) your reactions to your prejudices; if you think someone in your place of business "looks sketchy," ask yourself why before calling 911. Instincts are important but they are also culturally informed and our culture says "minorities are scary." As members of our communities, businesses have a civic responsibility and we should be very critical and exceedingly cautious in calling the police as it can end up in horrifying situations. I have little ground to stand on with police brutality and violence as I am a white woman who is neurotypical and able-bodied. But as a business owner, I want to make this conversation happen. We need to make the differences where we can and business owners would do well to make their needed changes.
I wonder how many businesses could actually do this. I wonder how many insurance companies would support this without police reports being made.
But, the police absolutely should not be used as collections departments or security because that is a really poor use of public taxpayer dollars for one, but they are also terribly ineffective and inefficient at solving the perceived problem in that moment while quite possibly creating other and bigger problems.
All of this is to say that I, as a business owner and white queer woman living in Muncie, Indiana, know I have some small platform to keep pushing on. I am proud to know people here locally who are regularly holding vigils for Black individuals who have been murdered by police and speaking their names because they were concerned that the moment was passing us by while people were moving on. White people have been uncomfortable for a few months now with being told to wear a mask and that Black Lives Matter so it only follows that many white individuals are caught saying some version of these phrases on repeat: “We have to move on. We have to live our lives.”
The urge to move on means we aren’t able to sit with the discomfort of where we are. That urge in and of itself is a sign that WE KNOW we aren’t in a good place but if we can’t reconcile how we got here, we can’t get out to something better.
I’m sitting. I’m very uncomfortable. I’m learning. I’m saying Black Lives Still Matter.
Our window art isn’t coming down any time soon. #BlackLivesMatter Artist: Sydney Teare
