Lynching by Another Name: Militarism, Police Terrorism and the Myth of a “Post-Racial” United Stat
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, thus launching the “War on Terror” meant to eliminate terrorist attacks against the U.S and spread democracy throughout the globe. Critics of the “War on Terror” recognize the US’ desire to implement democracy abroad while it ignores deterioration of democracy within its own borders. Racial and class disparities in the US have deepened with the war and economic collapse of 2008, and a crackdown on internal unrest (Occupy Wall Street, surveillance of “radical” organizations, cuts to public services such as education and food stamps, corporate control of elections and media etc.) has created as state that resembles more of an oligarchy than the democracy we tout as superior. As technological advances in warfare advances and wars end, used military equipment becomes cheaper and affordable for American police departments. Deep rooted racism, traditions of profiling, and the public identity of black communities have allowed militarized police departments to terrorize communities of color in a resurgence of violence reminiscent of the early-to-mid-1900s. In this paper, I will use an intersectional and antimilitarist feminist approach to discuss how the militarization of American police departments has allowed terrorism against black communities to persist with little impunity.
Before applying the argument of police terrorism to black communities, it is important to understand the widely accepted definition of terrorism. For this, I turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which defines domestic terrorism as activities that fulfill the following categories: “Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; Appear intended...to intimidate or coerce a civilian population...; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.” In the United States, we often discuss international terrorism at length and allow realities of domestic terrorism - in this case, state-sanctioned terrorism - to persist with little critique. Until very recently, the intersection of race and police brutality has been minimized or ignored. As recent protests over the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, it is becoming clearer that there cannot be a meaningful conversation about police brutality in the United States without discussing the racism that still rears its ugly head in nearly every institution.
With the above definition of domestic terrorism in mind, let us examine how the militarization of police departments can be a catalyst for police violence. Generally speaking, police violence is used to control, coerce, or inflict fear on a group of people to enforce the status quo and punish those who transcend it. When police departments are equipped with military-grade weapons and training, the lines between military and police begin to blur. Police departments began receiving military equipment in the early 1990s with the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act. The act allowed for the “transfer of excess [Department of Defense] property to federal and state agencies for use in counterdrug activities.” Later in the decade, the NDAA was broadened to “include [material] that could be used for ‘the execution of law enforcement activities.’” The vagueness of “law enforcement activities” has translated into a growing norm in law enforcement of Humvees and assault rifles on residential streets.
As U.S. wars end and new technology is deployed, military equipment has become widely available for police departments. Military equipment makes its way to police departments in two main ways. The first, called the “Trickle Down” Process, refers to the military creating machinery exclusively for its own uses, but a surplus or used machinery poses an economic opportunity for the military-industrial complex. The corporations that produce military equipment then try to find new markets for their machinery and are finding police departments to be perfect buyers. The second way police departments get military equipment is through the “Directed” Process. In this scenario, military tools are “built for military purposes and with military specifications, but also with an eye toward potential...nonmilitary application.” While military-grade weaponry on their own might not be an issue, the danger becomes very clear when police officers, specifically those in SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, undergo intense military-style training. This training, meant to train officers to “think like soldiers” is in theory supposed to equip them to deal with school shootings and other tragedies, but in reality this soldier-like response to conflict “extends well beyond hostage situations and school shootings, seeping into officers’ everyday interactions with their communities.” Too often, the communities that are impacted most by paramilitary police tactics are communities of color. Widespread media attention was given to New York’s Stop and Frisk policies last year when the Center for Constitutional Rights challenged the program, claiming (correctly) that the program disproportionately targeted men of color. Similarly, SWAT teams and other police officers with military-grade equipment focus much of their brutality on communities of color, and for the purposes of this paper, black communities.
Increased military involvement abroad, paired with constant images of violence we consume from media and dozens of other factors, has led to a normalization of violence. This normalization has manifested into police brutality against black communities that goes virtually unnoticed. When we discuss police brutality against communities of color, there are two main intersections that must be addressed: the first is police violence; the second is communities of color. To understand how police brutality has been normalized in ways it hasn’t in white communities, we must interrogate America’s institutional racism that allows a police officer to fire twelve bullets into an unarmed black youth and face no indictment. All of these factors lead to the normalization of violence against black communities specifically.
Keeping in mind what has been discussed thus far, I want to return to my argument that police violence against black communities should actually be considered police terrorism. The goal of terrorism is to inflict fear or coerce a group either through violence or the threat of violence. While police officers, by definition, induce fear through the universal understanding of reprimands if a law is broken, reprimands have different implications and severity for people of color. This terrorism, encouraged by militarization and capitalism, is in fact not a sign of a broken system. Rather, it is proof that the system is working just as it is meant to:
"When fear and terror become the organizing principles of a society in which the tyranny of the state has been replaced by the despotism of an unaccountable market, violence becomes the only valid form of control. The system has not failed… [rather,] it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, which is to punish those it considers dangerous or disposable - which increasingly includes more and more individuals and groups." (Henry A. Giroux)
Like international terrorism, not all police terrorism is physically violent. Mistreatment can involve manipulation or humiliation such as racial profiling (i.e. pulling over drivers because they are black, following someone around in a store under suspicion of shoplifting, etc). Practices like these are meant to instill fear in the person who is being pulled over or followed.
Many Americans (especially white Americans) will argue that we live in a “post-racial” United States. Racial profiling practices like the ones mentioned above, mass incarceration, economic inequality, and an inadequate justice system demonstrate how racism is not eradicated but is largely institutionalized. The term institutional racism was coined by Stokely Carmichael to describe “societal patterns that have the net effect of imposing oppressive or otherwise negative conditions against identifiable groups on the basis of race or ethnicity.” In this context, institutional racism allows for black men to face incarceration at a rate six times larger than their white counterparts despite nearly equal rates of crime between the races. As Nico Lang notes, “While black people are no more likely than any other demographic to be drug consumers, they’re more likely to be questioned and incarcerated for it; people of color make up 90 percent of all prisoners serving time for non-violent drug arrests.” Heightened police surveillance of communities of color is one of the main contributors to this unprecedented difference; police officers can’t arrest white college kids for drug use if they never patrol those areas. Institutional racism, like Carmichael notes, is imposed on one group of people by a privileged group. The criminal justice system was created by white men and a striking majority of police officers in the United States are white, even when the city where they work is composed predominantly of people of color.
To better understand these concepts, I want to turn to the very recent and highly publicized events in Ferguson, Missouri, but there are some vital disclaimers I want to make. First, no one is entirely sure of what exactly happened on Saturday, August 9th. However, what we know or don’t know isn’t what is important; what’s important is whether or not Darren Wilson acted outside his duties as a police officer when he fired 12 shots into an unarmed black man then left his dead body in the street for four and a half hours. The reason the latter is far more important than the former is because dismissing the case by saying “we will never know” only ignores the racial dynamics of what transpired in Ferguson. That there are conflicting accounts of the events says very much about power dynamics and race relations in the U.S.
In an attempt to honor the voices of the marginalized that are so often silenced, I will be using the witness accounts from Dorian Johnson, who was with Michael Brown on the day he was killed, and other witnesses of the incident. This is not meant to dismiss the testimony of Darren Wilson, but for the sake of space and purpose of this paper, I will not be comparing and contrasting the two starkly different testimonies. Institutional racism has created a culture where black voices are vehemently question in ways white voices aren’t. And, like mentioned before, the goal of this paper is to explore the ways militarization and police brutality terrorize communities of color. Police terrorism disproportionately affects communities of color, as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) reported at the beginning of December 2014. Since the death of Amadou Diallo in 1999, 76 unarmed men and women of color have been killed by police officers, including Tamir Rice, 12; Kimani Gray, 16; Aiyana Jones, 7; and the recently publicized and protested Michael Brown and Eric Garner, aged 18 and 43 respectively. And, perhaps even more troubling, in most of the 76 cases, the officers in question were not held accountable.
At first glance, America’s militarism may not seem related to Ferguson. Deep critical analysis of race relations among police officers and citizens, however, will reveal that is has everything to do with Ferguson. Our culture of violence - and consequential desensitization of violence - has given police officers more leeway when it comes to confronting citizens accused of breaking a law. The protests sparked by the death of Michael Brown exposed a deep, unhealed wound on America’s history and present. Despite somewhat conflicting testimonies, the bottom line of the Michael Brown case is that an unarmed black man was killed by a police officer for a minor shoplifting offense; and if a white man committed the same act, he would likely not even be stopped, but certainly would not be shot twelve times with his hands in the air. In a sense, this doesn’t make Wilson an inherently bad or evil person, but rather it makes him an example of how our culture creates public identities of certain groups of people.
Public identities, according to Ange-Marie Hancock, “consist of intersectional stereotypes...ascribed to groups targeted by a specific policy domain.” She goes on to note that these public identities are developed intentionally to shape political goals and, specifically, “serve as ideological justifications for public policy and are disseminated strategically as such.” The public identity of Michael Brown (and other black men) is that he/they are dangerous and criminally-inclined. It is the construction of the black community’s public identity that caused Darren Wilson to see Michael Brown as a threat - not because Brown was a threat, but because our culture teaches white people like Wilson to see black men as threats. When we understand the situation in this way, we can see that Wilson made a judgement based on the construction of race and public identity rather than an informed calculation of the presented danger. When so many unarmed (or lightly armed) men and women of color are killed by police, black communities feel the pain tenfold.
Shortly after the Grand Jury decision not to indict Officer Wilson for the death of Michael Brown, social media exploded with opinions on every imaginable side. One quote that was floating around so much the source has been lost was (paraphrased), “white privilege is being outraged and angered by the Ferguson decision rather than utterly terrified." The key word here, of course, is terrified. Again, the actions of militarized police departments has translated into a form of terrorism that disproportionately affects communities of color. bell hooks, one of the most notable feminist theorists of the last few decades, poignantly connects police terrorism to lynching; “The point of lynching historically,” hooks asserts, “was not to kill individuals but to let everybody know: 'This could happen to you.'” It is this fear that allows terrorist organizations to control people. The Ku Klux Klan used horrific violence and faced little to no repercussions for their murders. It’s hard to look critically at recent events in the U.S. and not see a blue uniform as the only difference between then and now. In another attempt to honor the voices of the people experiencing racialized police terrorism, I turn to a testimony from a black protester who touched a barricade and was clubbed by a black police officer: “I'm unarmed, peaceful, and now I'm bruised and in pain. You are armed with guns, billy clubs and riot gear. What is it about this uniform that robs you of your humanity?"
Once we pull back the layers and examine police brutality through an intersectional lens, we are able to see the ways police brutality resembles terrorism. To understand how police departments have resorted to such violent practices, an analysis of militarization must be used; military-grade training and equipment have shifted the culture of law enforcement from one of protection and prevention to one of the preservation of order the status quo through any means necessary. It would be inauthentic, then, to ignore the deep racial implications of police terrorism. Countless research and data analyses have revealed that young black men are much more likely to be victims of police terrorism than their white counterparts. As we look forward from Ferguson and related cases, it is important to be conscious of how institutional racism allows racialized violence to persist with impunity. To address police violence, we must address America’s reliance on militaristic responses to disorder as well as the systematic racism that has taken and will continue to take the lives of countless black men and women.
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