The Israeli forces mowing down unarmed Palestinian protesters also train U.S. police forces that brutalize communities of color.
Police kill more people in California than in any other state. From 2013 to 2017, there were 929 cases of police killings in California—primarily Black or Latinx men.
I have had bursts of enthusiasm before when women marched for their rights, masses mobilized against war, and many stepped up to say no to police violence and mass incarceration, I was touched emotionally even more this time around, by several features of this new movement.
The author argues convincingly and in graphic detail that the problem with police in civil society is not just the lack of adequate training, police diversity, increased militarization or even police methods such as the routine brutalization of many people of color, but the dramatic and unprecedented expansion in the last four decades of the too-accepted social role of police. The problem, the sociologist-author insists, is policing itself.
We can't be silent in the face of racism anymore. "It needs to be white Americans who stand up in solidarity and say this isn't right," country music singer Meghan Linsey took a knee with her guitarist Tyler Cain, Sept. 24 at the Titans-Seahawks NFL game.
Frank Serpico, who testified against NYPD police corruption in 1972, joined more than 100 African American uniformed officers who demonstrated at a rally supporting NFL player Colin Kaepernick's objections to police abuse and inequality. "Kaepernick was not disrespecting the flag or our vets. I believe that Kaepernick was protesting a corrupt system of justice that allows some police to use excessive force, even the taking of innocent life, without consequences"
Amid protesting in St. Louis over the acquittal of a white police officer accused of murdering a black man after a car chase, a youth football team decided to take a knee during a pregame rendition of the national anthem. The team's coach said that the decision was made by the eight-year-olds following "a good teaching moment" about what was happening in the nearby city, and why.
Abolition of the carceral state is a fundamental political goal for the Left today: specifically, abolishing the carceral state’s logic and institutions. . Abolition is both a goal and a discourse: it informs the strategies we adopt, as well as the framework we use to critique the carceral state and describe alternatives.
Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.
As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well. The idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. We argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. The idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.
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