I am sick of just being outraged as I sit at home or at the office or at the gym or walking down the street. I feel like my energy towards these recent injustices is not helping anyone and is frustrating me more.
How can we, as a society, go forward from here when twice now two grand juries on opposite ends of the country let someone go with no indictment because he wears a badge? How can people be blocking out the larger discourse behind these isolated events and not see that its the results of a broken and inherently racist system?
So I’ve been trying to think constructively – who are the groups involved; what can be done to fight pervasive institutional racism?
I believe that because it’s the job of the police to offer protective services – they should be learning what that means and how it applies to everyone, regardless of their own personal biases as a person.
The issue isn’t just contained in the minutes surrounding the death of Michael Brown or Eric Garner – the issue begins in what people are learning about other groups of people and how, in a position of power, they are allowing their beliefs to cloud their professional duties.
So my constructive idea to this horrible fucked up situation took a while to think about because honestly, trying to surmount racism as a whole seems overwhelming and futile because- things are set up to run this way.
I am still working on where to next take this idea beyond the platform of this blog, which I know for a fact only 1 maybe 2 other people read, so that in the end it doesn’t make me feel like I am still doing nothing.
I would like it to be mandatory for police officers (during training and then throughout their position as a full-fledged cop) to take a social justice and human diversity class. In training it would be once a week – a part of their requirement to graduate – and across precincts it would be bi-monthly with the requirement to attend once a month or face consequences (lose a shift, or earn a desk.paperwork shift). Police officers need to be forced to examine their own biases and really acknowledge them before they can be asked to not act on them. This would be met with a lot of ‘boys will be boys’ attitude, and ‘what do grown men need to learn about themselves?’ but that is just fear/deflection from facing things that they don’t address daily on a conscious level. It isn’t easy to learn about your biases and admit to having them – especially while you are simultaneously learning how disenfranchised groups of people feel.
The course would being with working to identify biases with various activities (can you tell I took this class in graduate school for my Master of Social Work? good.) and then would build up with guest speakers and break out groups to discuss articles and current events surrounding race and racism. This way, at least when the officers are out in the communities they will be working with a more well-rounded and self-aware knowledge…
It isn’t enough to blame the officers in the cases of Michael or Eric if you’re not willing to blame the system, to tackle the system, to change the system.
