To My Friends and Family Posting “Blue Lives Matter”
I’ve seen your “Blue Lives Matter” posts. I’ve heard your argument that the police put themselves in the line of fire every day. I know that not every suspect is innocent. You’re still wrong.
Things are tense. You haven’t been liking my BLM posts the way you’ve been liking the posts of my kids the last few years. Instead you’ve been sharing “Blue Lives Matter” memes, reposts of articles about cops being injured or killed during the protests and other content from which any mention of institutional racism is conspicuously absent. Here’s the reality: if a police officer dies in the line of duty, they will by and large be honored by the community. They’ll get a public procession and a 21 gun salute. The perpetrator will likely be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In other words, they will receive the honor befitting someone who chose a profession in which they are called to risk their lives to protect and serve their community.
When a person of color dies during an arrest or pursuit (or any other interaction with police or armed citizens attempting to “enforce the law”), they will by and large have their character assassinated by the police department involved and the mainstream press. They will have received no trial and no opportunity to speak for themselves or recover their good name. Their killer will likely face no discipline beyond an investigation resulting in zero consequences or a letter to their personnel file. This will all be sanctioned and soon forgotten within the wider community of those who enjoy enough privilege that their primary emotional response to police presence is not fear.
We have all witnessed this pattern each time a black or brown person is murdered by police during an arrest for a minor infraction. In the days since George Floyd’s death, every wrong he’s ever committed has been dragged out and trotted across the public stage in an apparent attempt to justify his murder or to detract from the Black Lives Matter protests, of which he is a central focus. The message seems to be that because he was not without sin, he is not worthy of all this fuss.
I come from an extended family of public servants, some of whom have served or are currently serving in the police department in my home town. I love them, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to them. I am fearful for them in the current climate because tensions are high and situations can escalate quickly. But there are only a few of them, and they chose and trained for this line of work. Unless they are working under cover, the danger ends when the shift ends. When situations during their workday do escalate quickly, they are armed and have access to backup. We breathe a sigh of relief when they come home at the end of the day.
Black families never get to breathe that sigh of relief. Every member, from the youngest to the oldest, will face the danger posed by systemic, institutional racism in our police departments and in our communities every day of their lives. The victims of this danger are most often unarmed and alone. Breonna Taylor was shot eight times in her bed when a no-knock warrant was executed on her home. Botham Jean was killed in his living room when a cop walked into his apartment thinking it was hers. These are not people who signed up for this risk. These were regular people, beloved by their families, relaxing in their homes. They are not people who were out in the streets engaging in risky behaviors. But they are dead, and until last week, there were no public processions for them or anyone like them.
And what about those who’ve died during an arrest resulting from the apparent commission of a crime? George Floyd? Eric Garner? They were doing something wrong, you say. But we don’t actually know: George Floyd was detained for allegedly using a counterfeit twenty dollar bill at a deli and Eric Garner for supposedly selling loose cigarettes, and both were unarmed. Because they never got the trial they were entitled to as Americans, we’ll never know definitively if they were guilty of those crimes. But if you’re interested in law and order, you are a proponent of due process. If you’re interested in justice, you would only have wanted them to receive the punishment allotted by the law, and neither of these were anything approaching capital crimes. You would not want to bury the fact that these people were instead murdered in the street, without the dignity befitting a human being, and without anything but “probable cause” as perceived by the responding officers who arrived there ten minutes before.
But let’s for a second assume they were guilty, for the purposes of calibrating our own scales of justice. You know me. I have been guilty of plenty. I broke into the empty house next door to mine when I was thirteen to hang out with my friends without supervision. I broke the law for no good reason. Should I have been executed for it then and there?
“What about resisting arrest?” you ask. “They put the officers at risk by resisting arrest! The officers had the right to use force!” Yes, to use force. Not to use excessive force. Not to engage in police brutality. Not to exert so much pressure on a man’s neck or chest cavity that it causes asphyxiation or a fatal coronary event. Police make more than ten million arrests every year in this country, and around two thousand of those people are killed in custody or while being taken into custody annually. Black people make up 24% of that number despite being only 13% of the population. None of the individuals mentioned in this article meet the “behavioral profile” that so many tout as justification for this disparity. Neither have hundreds of other black men, women and children who have lost their lives to police brutality and excessive force just since the current metrics were developed in 2013.
As others have explained better than I ever could, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “ONLY black lives matter.” It does not mean “Black lives matter more than everyone else’s.” Those are not the sentiments of the people at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, the protesters out there this week or those speaking up in their online communities. Those sentiments are strawmen; they are deflections created by people who are uncomfortable with the idea that, while they’ve been happily living their lives thinking nothing was wrong, they may inadvertently have been benefitting from and/or contributing to a system that injures, dehumanizes and kills people of color. It does not mean we are personally evil or responsible for every wrong under the sun. It means we have enjoyed additional privilege, power and protection that is not based on the merit of our characters, and we have a responsibility to do the work of leveling the playing field for everyone regardless of their race or presentation. It means that black lives matter as much as everyone else’s, which has not been apparent in our treatment of them, especially when it comes to how we police them.
For you, the vocal “Blue Lives Matter” people, doing the work means not detracting from the movement to recognize the humanity and equality of people of color, and to prevent them from being the vastly disproportionate victims of police brutality with empty words. There are no blue lives. Cops can take off their uniforms. They can enter other careers if they so choose. In the great majority of cases, they get to move on after an incident in which a black person is killed in an instance of excessive force. These are privileges never afforded to the black community, who cannot “take off” their blackness, which makes them a constant target of fear, racism and violence in this country, whether we feel comfortable admitting it or not. And they do not get to walk away from these murders unscathed — the degree of anger, sadness and determination in these protests demonstrates exactly how deeply the entire black community has been scarred by our choice to uphold a system that has devastated them for centuries. Doing the work means finding ways to support our loved ones in blue in efforts toward reform and equality, without trying to equate their experiences with those of the black community. It’s a false equivalency, and it’s part of the problem.
As a public servant myself, I need to tell you that I too am part of the problem. For ten years I have taught English as a Second Language in black and brown communities in New York. I have also enjoyed the maximum degree of white privilege one can experience my entire life because of my appearance and proximity to whiteness as a Westchester resident with an Italian last name, despite my mixed Hispanic heritage. It took me six years, three degrees and some hefty educational loans to be trained well enough in culturally responsive instructional practices that are at least minimally respectful of my students’ lived experiences to be able to teach in those communities. AND STILL, the educational system of which I am a part is rife with institutional racism and apathy that allows kids like my students to go without textbooks, supplies and reliable internet access and denies them the opportunities their white counterparts are enjoying in wealthy neighborhoods not ten miles away. I AM A PART OF THAT PROBLEMATIC SYSTEM, but I’m not going to quit, nor do I expect any police officers I know to quit. However, by recognizing and naming this system’s essential injustice, my colleagues and I are attempting to do the work, and that is the job with which every public servant is charged. By continuing to learn and hear from the community we serve and incorporating their feedback into our practices, we are trying to adjust our behaviors and approaches to ones more empathetic and equitable to that community. We do not always succeed, but this will be a life-long learning process, and we owe it to ourselves and everyone we serve to try.
To say that the police, even the most well-meaning and least prejudiced, are not part of a flawed and inherently unjust system is disingenuous at best and fatally harmful at worst. It’s not an argument, and it’s not a spin; it’s just a fact. If it took this much work for me to be educated on my students’ struggles enough to teach them grammar, it should take much more than “Blue Lives Matter” for our police apparatus, which we now know is armed to the teeth with deadly military gear, to come out of this crisis. Because our superstructures are permeated by this prejudice, the voices that need to be heard right now are the ones that are calling them out from a place of injury, despair and fear of mortal danger. Please don’t use the power you have to drown that out with calls for support and protection for those who have always had it.
