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Empathy is not a prominent trait among most Americans but I do ask white people to try to imagine what their opinion of the police in general would be if they experienced it exclusively as Black people do. https://twitter.com/fleetadmiralj/status/1334964301824622593
And it’s not just that white people experience the police differently. The police are trained to keep their knees (literally) on the necks of the Black communities and white people are conditioned to believe this keeps them safe.
It’s why white liberals in Manhattan still speak fondly of Giuliani.
The militarization of the police reflects is existence as a Black oppression unit.
The people being oppressed — the Breonna Taylors, George Floyds, Jacob Blakes — should get to say ENOUGH. We want something entirely different.
Cops are unwilling and incapable of conceiving of law enforcement that is not oppressive, that is not about “warriors” containing “bad guys” (again, this is how they’re trained)
And even if Democrats were successful in an overall reform, the reality is that true reform would be radical. White people have trouble comprehending this, either through naïveté or the covert or downright overt belief that if Black people aren’t contained, there’s chaos.
And maybe the same officers who beat up Black Oliver Twists all day but are Mary Poppins to the average white person could be trained to be Mary Poppins all the time and to everyone.
But that seems like a significant psychological change. I’ve talked to cops, read detailed interviews with them, watched the documentaries. They see the world in a way I find terrifying.
