Don't tell Black people how to respond.
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As mentioned in yesterday's email, the next few days of action will center the black experience as we protest for our freedom. Today's prompt is urgent – AND is a practice to remember when acknowledge the pain and wounding of any person of color (or any person, quite frankly).
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- Nicole
TAKE ACTION
If you identify as non-black:
Find someone that's actively policing a Black person on social media and tell them why it's harmful. Feel free to copy and paste the web version of this email. And, obviously, don't tell black people how to respond.
If you identify as Black:
Take care of yourself today. Do what you need.
GET EDUCATED
What is policing black behavior?
Policing black behavior is when black people are unjustifiably judged, shamed, questioned, detained, physically harmed, murdered, etc. because their actions were deemed suspicious or threatening by whiteness. Usually policing black behavior follows racial profiling, or, using a person’s race or ethnicity to create suspicion or wariness of how they take up space.
Policing doesn't have to involve law enforcement. Obviously, policing by law enforcement is at the center of our nation's conversation right now. But it happens in micro-ways too, like admonishing Black people for not speaking up OR speaking up too much, or questioning why people in protests have to "yell so loud" (these are real examples, ya'll. I'm tired).
Policing black behavior has been normalized since Black people were in slavery. Some of the earliest colonial laws about slavery allowed white people to stop, question, capture and kill Black people. In fact, many white people worked alongside law enforcement as free agents to gain social power, or called in law enforcement to do their work for them. Read about this history in this powerful Washington Post article.
This is all about power. Remember our conversation about white privilege and the power of normal? When Black people start practicing normalized activities alongside white people, it feels like a threat to their power.
So we see countless examples of Black people objectively being policed for doing normal things. Read this Vox article for an analysis of Living While Black.
Case Study: Amy Cooper
And let's not forget one of the most recent and public examples: Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the cops on Christian Cooper while he was birdwatching. She was the one breaking the rules – walking her dog without a leash, which is prohibited in the Ramble – and yet she called the cops on him.
She knew exactly what she was doing when she called them, using the term African-American. It was a threat. She knew he could be harmed. And she knew, as a white woman, what has been normalized in this society and what her white privilege would grant her. She knew exactly how police have been treating Black people.
She tapped into centuries of policing Black behavior to invoke harm instead of putting her dog on a leash.
Remember, all that happened was that a man asked her to put her dog on a leash. If he was a white man...
Would she have responded to him in the same way?
Could she have used law enforcement to bolster her policing?
Would she have been as "worried about her safety" (which is NOT an excuse)?
What would an anti-racist response have looked like?
Why is this important?
Because first and foremost it's RACIST. It causes harm. It's no one's business how black people – or anyone – want to respond right now. Period.
AND we have to remember that individual racist actions allow for the same injustices to play out on a societal level. Remember that, as Sonya Renee Taylor spoke to eloquently in an interview for The Wellness of We conference, the system isn't some foreign man lurking in the shadows. It's a culmination of individual choices and decisions that have become normalized over time. When we unravel our individual actions, we shift the collective (although there is, in addition, some deep dismantling we need to do too).
Let's unpack some basic responses you may hear when you do today's action:
"But I'm not calling the cops! I just posted on Facebook that I don't like the protests happening on my street".
Even if you yourself don't bring in police you are still policing through statements like this, and you're also encouraging others to do so. Besides, the right to protest is protected by both the U.S. Constitution, so people with this response are usually asking to revoke free speech from Black people.
"I just wish Black people would watch their language when sharing about this!"
This is also policing. I can assure you that society is not policing the anger or frustration of non-Black people during times of crises. Also you are incredibly privileged if you watch the consistent murder and injustice against black people and always have a "composed" response.
But why are Black people so mad at me?! I didn't do anything!
There's a very specific and insidious policing of black behavior about anger. You can read about it in this article by The Lily on how people have policed Serena Williams through her entire career. Black people are mad at the system and the people that protect it. And if you are sharing / posting content that upholds the system you are complicit even if you are not, for example, the police officer who had his knee in George Floyd's neck.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Policing black behavior is judging and punishing black people for behavior protected by white privilege
When we normalize micro-actions of policing, we normalize and uphold systems that do the same
Our society has normalized this since slavery and there's millions of examples at all levels of injustice
We see this happen on a major stage quite often, but need to recognize how we practice this on a micro level
“These conversations are always so tense, so painful. People are defensive. We want to believe we are good. To face the racisms and prejudices we carry forces us to recognize the ways in which we are imperfect. We have to be willing to accept our imperfections and we have to be willing to accept the imperfections of others. Is that possible on the scale required for change?”
Roxane Gay, in an article for The Toast
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