#race matters

Briefly, why race matters: 

1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.

2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.

Many slaves in the early colonies of the Caribbean were Irish or indigenous, as the demand for slaves grew so did the importation of African slaves. As the African slave population outnumbered the European, the idea of race, an exclusively Black slave population was born.  Resistance to this injustice catalyzed a reactionary intellectual movement that created the modern concept of racial difference in order to validate slavery. 

3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:

“In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.  

4) That being said, the systems that were in place don’t just go away. Nothing illustrates this point better than how quickly Angola Plantation became Angola Prison in Louisiana, to house Louisiana’s new “criminal” class of free-Black people shortly after emancipation. Criminalizing Blackness was of course a means to recapture a population and force them back into bondage and labor.

5) Think of the colonies throughout the world: are the colonized not themselves policing their own people in the interests of racist and exploitative regimes? In British India, the Imperial Police force was comprised largely of local Indians and Burmese, subordinate to European officers. Yet the colonial paradigm remained racist and exploitative.

In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.

Twitter: @bodega_gyro_ao