Michelle Conlin, “Off duty, black cops in New York feel threat from fellow police”
Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Blue Lives Matter”
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. The manifestation of this desire is broad. …
… The killings of Officers Liu and Ramos prompt national comment. The killings of black civilians do not. When it is convenient to award qualitative value to murder, we do so. When it isn’t, we do not. We are outraged by violence done to police, because it is violence done to all of us as a society. In the same measure, we look away from violence done by the police, because the police are not the true agents of the violence. We are.
Brittney Cooper, “America’s fear of black rage: Why tragic NYPD shootings are so misunderstood”
The thing we are not saying here, the thing that must be said, particularly as commentators leapfrog over clear mental health issues to malign Black Lives Matter protestors, is that white people deeply fear black anger. Many fear that at any moment black rage could boil over into deadly forms of violence. It is the reason that professional black people have a running internal joke about the things white people say to us, whenever they see more than three black people gathered together talking at school or at work. On more than one occasion, white people have been known to respond to such mundane conversations by asking if we were “plotting the revolution.” This fear of the unpredictability of black rage is the reason that black people are frequently characterized as angry when we aren’t smiling. Toni Morrison famously wrote about the ways that Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings had far more references to his warm smile and laughter than to his history as a legal scholar.
The police, whatever their color, fear black anger, too. And they “act accordingly,” by policing black communities with a finger on the trigger. That was true before they were a “wartime police department.” I shudder to think what a police force that has declared war on the communities they aim to serve might do.
The prevailing logic of this moment is that black and brown communities are supposed to willingly submit to the use of excessive force, surveillance and violence by the police, without ever “overreacting” to the injustice of it all.
George Orwell, “Marrakech”
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. “How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
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