Police Brutality in Our Community
The fact that all over America concerned citizens will demonstrate in various ways about the murder of a person of color by a policeman leaves me with a feeling of unfinished business. Despite the demonstrations, the slaughter goes on certified bylaws and policies of an inherently racist society designed to protect policemen rather than the people of color they murder with impunity. Racism sits inside our institutions impervious to our demonstrated desire to be treated fairly. Simply going after an individual officer, even when they are prosecuted, does little to undo the institutional racism embedded in the policies in the criminal justice system that enables police persecution of people of color.
In Superior WI. the officer who beat a young black woman was exonerated by the underlying racist policies of the criminal justice system. Every police union wants to protect their own from unwarranted accusations but they also know that the institution will protect them from the malfeasance of their own racist and misogynist fellow officers, The “Bad Apples.” We want to believe that their bigotry and brutality was brought into the police department undetected. We also know that nothing is done to detect these officers and get rid of them until they have worked their evil on innocent Black men and boys. And even then, the criminal justice system is designed to protect them and perpetuate a culture of racism within the department.
I admire our police chief and his efforts to infuse his department with a dedication to fairness and professionalism but I also know that the odds favor the existence of police officers who, given the opportunity, would shoot me dead in the streets of Duluth and the criminal justice system would let them go free. Most Black men in America lives a life filled with that fear. It is institutional racism, buried deep within the same criminal justice system designed to protect and serve the larger society.
I want the criminal justice system to examine itself through the lens of the people they serve. They need to examine the assumptions that go unexamined in our public schools and get reinforced throughout white society. I know that the irrational hatred of people of color is promoted by the public schools in the denial to formally reveal and examine the assumptions derived from the myth of race that gives credence to racist behavior. Our children are carefully conditioned to accept the irrational bias of race without knowing how and why it poisoned America. I understand that white America is ashamed of the persistence of racism even as we depend on its existence. Racism as a tool of the economic system is used to control workers a technique perfected through slavery. Slavery was the nursery of industrial capitalism in America and its mother’s milk was the myth of race. We all depend on racism to a greater or lessor degree and it’s a disease that kills quickly as well as slowly.
Each day I get into my car as a Black Man understanding that in America I can be killed with impunity by a policeman who, in elementary school, was denied the opportunity to understand that we are both human beings.
Rogier Gregoire
Co Chairman
Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, Inc.