On March 3, 1991, four Los Angeles Police Officers beat Black motorist Rodney King so badly that he was hospitalized. However, unbeknownst to the officers, the beating was being recorded by a bystander named George Hadley. Hadley sent the video of the recording to the local T.V. network which promptly televised it. Eventually, the four officers were charged with excessive use of force and put on trial. However, three of the officers were acquitted and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the fourth. Within hours of the charges being dismissed, Los Angeles erupted into an uprising that lasted six days,killed 63 people, and caused millions of dollars of damage.
Central to the events surrounding the beating, trial, and uprising are questions of social justice. In the essay, “What does Social justice look Like?” incarcerated writer Robert Gillens seeks to understand how social justice movements should be built within a systemically racist democratic society. Gillens wrestles with howhe United States, with its long history of racism, slavery, and police violence, could possibly ever be the truly free and inclusive democracy that it purports to be. He places mass incarceration, police violence, and race as central to the construction of social justice movements in the U.S. Gillens ultimately argues that central to the creation of a more just and equitable society is the reformation of the criminal justice to make it more fair and transparent.
Gillens locates the roots of systemic injustice and anti-Black racism within the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the U.S. As Jamaican writer and activist Sylvia Wynter has noted, the colonization of the Americas and the growth of the African save trade centered around the creation of race by Europeans who relegated non-Europeans to a position of “otherness.” Within this context of otherness, being Black or of non-European descent means that you are a savage that needs to be tamed, disciplined, and civilized.
Gillens piece is also in discussion with historians of American slavery and race in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During the long era of American slavery, scholars have shown how the roots of modern policing and anti-Black vigilante groups, such as the Klu Klux Klan, lay in the use of slave patrols to track down and return runaway slaves. After the abolition of slavery, historian Sarah Haley has revealed “how the criminal legal system” in the southern United States “crafted, reinforced, and required black female deviance as part of the broader constitution of Jim Crow modernity premised upon the devaluation and dehumanization of black life broadly.” In this sense, even after the end of slavery, Blackness is something that is monitored under a punitive regime to protect the virtue of whiteness. Scholar Khalil Gibran Muhammad has shown how through biased and flawed crime statistics, Blackness was criminalized in the early twentieth-century U.S. And other historians have demonstrated how policing of U.S. cities is predicated on anti-Blackness and violence.
Indeed, after World War II, historians of policing and incarceration have shown how the liberal New Deal programs such as President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty morphed into the punitive War on Crime. By the 1970s, “Get Tough” and “Law and Order” political rhetoric was in vogue as white conservatives sought to temper the gains made by Black civil rights groups. This rhetoric led to draconian laws such as the Rockefeller Drug Laws which targeted Black communities. By the 1980s, it had become commonplace for conservative politicians to use crime and the fear of crime in primarily Black urban areas to justify the construction of new prisons, increase police budgets, and incarcerate thousands of young Black men for minor drug offenses.
Gillens also asks why have we “rarely seen a group of Black or Latinx cops kill an unarmed white person. Is it because they adhere to the rule of due process? Or are they just more careful?” Historians Simon Balto and Kelly Lytle-Hernandez have shown that throughout the first half of the twentieth century, most police forces were all-white. After Black people were hired to be police officers, they patrolled primarily Black neighborhoods and rarely interacted with white people. Additionally, it was not uncommon that the most violent police officers in Black neighborhoods tended to be Black themselves.
In this context, Gillens’ situating of criminal justice reform as a key mechanism towards social justice rings true. Policing has historically worked to limit the inclusive demands of social justice movements. Additionally, Police violence against people of color in the U.S. is a regular feature of our society. From 1980 through 2019, there were a reported 30,800 deaths by police. Black men were three times as likes to be killed by a police officer. It should also be noted that over the same period, studies have shown that at least half of all deaths at the hands of the police have gone unreported. These numbers show that the U.S. is indeed in the midst of an epidemic of police murders. However, historians Robert Chase and Heather Ann Thompson have shown us that liberal reforms to the criminal justice system leads to more conservative and punitive outcomes. What this tells us is that reform may not be the answer we are seeking.
In sum, Gillens outlines the long history of racism and police violence that has disproportionally affect people of color. He is right to connect the beating of Rodney King to the legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to further link the murder of George Floyd, “Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Kathryn Johnston, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Mario Romero, Timothy Russell, Malissa Williams, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Mansur Ball-Bey, Mario Woods, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, along with so many others,” who have been victims of police violence. Indeed, what society needs, as Gillens points out, is more than reform but a re-thinking of how we approach criminal justice. This rethinking of the criminal justice system must include reparations for slavery, abolition of policing as we know it, and stronger social welfare system that protects the most vulnerable of us and provides the care needed to heal our society.
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