The eleventh installment of a blog series of 13 sharing art, articles, and abstract ideas that spark a contagious conversation.
In July 2014, a cell phone video captured some of Eric Garner’s final words as New York City police officers sat on his head and pinned him to the ground on a sidewalk: “I can’t breathe.” On May 25 of this year, the same words were spoken by George Floyd, who pleaded for release as an officer knelt on his neck and pinned him to the ground on a Minneapolis street. As a Black man, he joins a group of countless killed by the police in the United States and a list of each person can be found here. Racism is a crisis. As is climate change, and COVID-19. They all end in the same horrific truth – not being able to breathe.
After news broke about George Floyd’s murder the world erupted in protest. Familiar activists from Black Lives Matter along with White allies showed up in droves, holding signs and wearing face masks to protect from the threat of tear gas and coronavirus in cities such as Minneapolis, New York City, and Seattle. At least 40 cities imposed curfews and National Guard members have been activated in at least 23 states and Washington, DC. In many places the curfews were more strictly enforced than COVID-19 Stay at Home orders.
It is not an accident that all crises disproportionately impact Black people. It is important to remember that our systems are not broken, they were built this way. In the United States, police departments were designed to track people who were enslaved during the Civil War.
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
Moving forward we must listen to our Black neighbors, friends, and communities. Too many lives are being taken by COVID-19, climate change and racism. The least we can do is take action to protect the most vulnerable.
Please check out this post by former President Barack Obama for ways to make this moment in history count: https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067
Written by Tatum Eames, Western Washington University Senior and Climate Justice Now Intern.