All of the views expressed in this post are reflective of my own and my own alone – these are not representative of any of the organizations, professional nor social, in which I am affiliated.
It is incumbent upon all of us to understand the racial tensions in America, their impact, and what we can do to improve them.
I’ve been worried about the escalation of racial tensions over the past few years across this country, but especially at this time now given the two murders of Arlon Sterling and Philando Castille. My feeling is that many Americans believe this is an issue that doesn’t impact them if they’re not Black, which is far from the truth. Such tension strains interracial relationships and diverse social engagement, but also the emotional effects on people can detract from their economic productivity at work, or in their entrepreneurial endeavors. The objective of this post is to reiterate a Call to Action for making the important reforms necessary to improve the relationship between our police/judicial system and Black America.
What’s shocking about the murders last week is that with Arlon, he wasn’t resisting arrest, and even the owner of the liquor store said that “the police officers went too far” before murdering him. As for Philando, according to his girlfriend, he complied with the officer’s instruction and yet he was still murdered. This one is the most worrisome to me because it shows that even if you listen to the officers, you may be shot. Even though I am college-educated and actively involved in my communities, I realize that I too am at risk simply given the color of my skin, and many others share the same sentiment. Every unnecessary police murder of a Black male hits home for me, but the murder of Philando was a one of the darker reminders of how Blacks are viewed in society.
This may be hard for many people to comprehend, given the myopic view that many of our upbringings unfortunately affords us, but there is an inherent distrust between police officers and many Black Americans. We know that this is rooted in America’s dark history of treatment towards Blacks: beginning with slavery, continued with Jim Crow and Black codes, and further underscored with the War on Drugs under the Nixon and Reagan administrations. It is time that we not only as Americans but as human beings acknowledge that there is such a distrust, and take actionable steps to do something about it.
The silver lining in this regard is that we don’t have to recreate the wheel because great work is underway. We should borrow best practices from Las Vegas since they initiated local police reform in the last few years: increased federal scrutiny, provided classes on unconscious biases and how to deal with them, and implemented “reality-based” field training. These efforts so far have resulted in a reduction of over a third of ill-fated police shootings in Las Vegas. We should continue the push to take these practices further: all cops should have body cameras, and we need to make officers more accountable for their actions (i.e. suspensions without pay during investigations in which an unarmed suspect was murdered).
Within the Federal legal system, we have to petition our respective public representatives to propose and push through legislation that removes inherently biased bills. For example, that includes taking the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 much further (even though that Act is far better than the original Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it’s not perfect), and erasing the disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing. I see building trust between Black Americans and the police force/legal system to be two fold: 1) improve the policing on the streets, and 2) improve the judicial system that supports the bad policing currently in place. In this Act, there were racial biases at play when written, given the demographic usages of the two drug types even though there aren’t fundamental differences between the chemical makeup of the two drug types. In fact, Eric Sterling, former counsel to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary and co-author of the initial Act, spoke on film about the racial implications of the bill. Outside of “normal politics”, there aren’t any legitimate excuses for why there is still a disparity. I have sent letters to each of my U.S. NY senators and my district representative, sharing my thoughts and proposed next steps on these matters.
These are just a few ways to make inroads into reforming a broken system – violence in response to certain actions is not the right way to go about this. We have to work collectively as a nation to ensure that our unconscious biases become conscious, that we truly understand people dissimilar from us, and that we consistently show empathy for our fellow Americans.
My heart goes out to the families and friends of Arlon Sterling and Philando Castille, and the five Dallas officers that were murdered. Doing something to prevent other families from suffering the same fate is long overdue.
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