Presente, George Floyd!
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Unlike the Americans so certain they know what freedom means, we, historically oppressed, know no such freedom. It has yet to come into being because it's yet to come into our lives. At best, we are working on what freedom might look like. What we might hear if we lived in a world were freedom wasn't as simple as carrying an AR15 and sporting military gear. The narrative of "law and order" would be held in contempt and eventually put on display in a museum as no more than yellow pages of a relic, no longer readable therefore viable.
Presente, Oscar Grant! Presente, Chantel Moore!
To change course, to simply decide not to continue on a path that can only produce more bloody corpses of black bodies, is to demand a new course for law enforcement.
Empathy. Empathy should be more important than whether or not an officer becomes an excellent marksmen. Compassion would be proactive in stomping out fear and xenophobia. Anti-war and anti-violent targets bullying and the power hungry for elimination.
Anti-black is the new cry of freedom across the land.
Someone infatuated with power isn't in love with the humanity of others. By the same token, a police force in love with guns and tanks and tasers doesn't know the meaning of freedom.
Defunding the police is a start on the way to shaping a new way of understanding freedom. In the democracy America has yet to build, all Americans will recognize that black lives matter, and for those to whom there is no problem killing black Americawell, we'll wish you well. You'll not be needed among the new policing community!
Presente, Michael Brown! Presente, Natosha "Tony" McDade!
The new culture of policing to come in our now, the radically transformed culture of policing, looks like American communities of black, Latinx, Indigenous people, rather than a lineup of Darth Vaders, impenetrable in theory and heartless in action.
The new formations of policing loses the macho, robotic coldness of a machine mentality. How has this demeanor served the black, Latin, and Indigenous communities? How has American been served by this wall of separation that pits the police as civil order and the citizens as criminal elements in need of a baton to the head or a good shove.
I'd like to see those vetted to serve and protect because of their empathy and compassion to be trained (re-educated) by blacks, Latinx, and Indigenous populations from within the community, civic leaders, community organizers, educators in the study of race, gender, and class. The newly vetted will see the trans as human, the homeless as someone in need of lifting up, the addicted in need of counseling not incarceration.
Who is "outside," who is other, foreign when all our neighbors and fellow citizens?
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