Sometimes in life, if you are truly lucky, you will meet a friend who will become so close and important to you that they would better be described as a brother/sister. This past Saturday night, the friend I consider kin shared with me some news that made me incredibly proud: He finally got hired to be a police officer. While I may be biased as hell, he is a good man and definitely the type of brother anyone would want on a police force. He is deeply centered through his faith, he’s laid back and hilarious, he is not quick to anger or flex his authority and he’s all about reciprocal respect. Many of us realize that there are good cops in this world, and I have no doubt that he will be one.
But before I could call my parents and friends abroad to brag about what he achieved, Mike Brown was shot by the police the very next day in St. Louis. There are a lot of different accounts being told, and a formal investigation still needs to be completed, but it appears Brown was gunned down by an officer while both of his hands were pointing straight into the air. People will attempt to use every synonym of killed that they can think up to describe this situation, but this appears to be a straight-up execution of another unarmed Black teen. This is exactly the shit that will make many in our community scream, “eff the police!” but after this particular murder, it’s officially time for Black people to retire that phrase because the police are NOT our enemy.
If you’ve ever read any of my past articles on police executions (like Eric Garner or Jonathan Ferrell) that last sentence might throw you off. If you’ve ever been brutalized by the police, an assertion that the police are not our enemy might piss you off. And if you’ve ever lost a loved one due to heavy-handed police brutality, that comment might be exactly what you don’t want to hear.
But if you are a Black person who is interested in ending the cycle of police-inflicted savagery, racial profiling and disparate law enforcing, then you need to accept a hard truth about what the police force truly is: It is a commodity that is controlled by those with economic and political power. Saying ‘kill the police’ is not the answer, because they aren’t going anywhere, which means we need to look for an answer. And whether we like it or not, the problem is less about the police, and more about our inability to build our own communities to the point where we can actually have sway over the product that is the police.
If you’ve read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations, then you should be fully aware of America’s long and expansive history of using the police to deny, pillage and destroy everything owned by Blacks, from land to lives. What made Coates’ piece so brilliant was that it examined the police’s actions in the Black communities not just in a vacuum, but as part of a calculate systemic effort to undermine us all. That’s important to note because it’s critical for our community to understand that the police are not just a group of racist thugs acting on their own volition, they are a gang with marching orders that come from the pay grade above them. Hell, if you’ve ever watched an episode of The Wire, you can see how the police hierarchy works and how decisions made at the top influence the officers at the bottom, which directly affects the communities they are policing.
African Americans have $1.1 trillion in buying power, yet a dollar earned in the Black community circulates within our community for only 6 hours before it leaves. Comparatively, when you realize that a dollar circulates within the Jewish community for 20 days and the white community for 17, you start to see the true nature of the problem. We don’t empower ourselves, but we’re quick to march or cuss the system. If Black people really want to change things as much as we like to say we do, then at some point we need to realize that the only way to beat the game, is to play it.
When boys like Mike Brown are gunned down by police, we have a reflexive natural reaction to say eff the police, but we truly need to stop that garbage. I’ve been doing it myself for over 20 years and I’m tired of it, and I see it’s literally getting us no where. All it does is exacerbate tensions between Blacks and the police. And we continually lose that fight because we have no social, economic or political power. We are not vertically integrated enough to stop the abuse, and we definitely are not financially supportive enough of our own communities to even instill substantive fear in those who decide which communities will be profiled, targeted and assaulted. Are the police really “picking” on us, or are they carrying out the orders of a group with actual power? The prison-industrial complex has more Black males currently in prison today than there were slaves in 1850. That’s not because cops are mean to us, it’s because prisons are big businesses and, like most businesses, NOT Black owned. Now I’m not a supporter of throwing innocent folks in jail, but this is just one example of what happens when you don’t have any real social strength.
There once was a time where Black and Hispanic communities were united in our distaste for the police, even when we had rocky interactions with one another. Hell, Cypress Hill released Pigs around the same time Ice-T recorded Cop Killer. But if you take a look at our current trajectory, you will see and hear the “eff the police” rhetoric far less in their communities now then you will hear it on ours because they realized something very important: Real social influence will change more than hatred towards the cops ever will. Leaders in the Hispanic community have Obama’s ears, and constitute major voting blocks around the country. They will soon become the majority in the U.S. and they are using their numbers and increased power to strengthen their positions on topics like immigration. Soon they won’t have to cuss out the police, because they will be able to buy their services to further their cause. That’s how real change is achieved, not by screaming the same shit for decades that has us no further ahead today.
Photo credits: Shutterstock, Shutterstock
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Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.