Though I’m confident I have noted this before amongst friends and social media forums, I must reiterate a very interesting and poignant observation I’ve made when talking bout social justice issues, particularly when it’s about law enforcement as it pertains to Communities of Color in the US. I find this observation to be sad, generally speaking, because while it is certainly subjective in nature, it is no less honest, and one that various colleagues have noted as well.
What I’ve observed is that when speaking about topics like police brutality, corruption, and summary executions of unarmed Black + Brown Americans, in the midst of getting great insight from the many police officers who are family/friends, the most offended, angry, cold responses about these topics, even just as a tertiary social reference, have been from White American male cops. Across the board, my engaging with White officers who are women, and People of Color employed by Police Departments, even if the discussions have been heated, has always rendered a sense of mutual understanding and respect. For myself and many others, this sentiment, unfortunately, has not been shared by their White male counterparts, to the point where I’ve lost a good friend and musical colleague whom I believe is now a NYPD Detective. Quite simply, he told me to screw off; I believe the last text was, “Go back to your bubble.”
When you run up against mental walls like this, one should be able to understand why the concept of nonviolence and peaceful negotiations suddenly become a useless form of disrupting the system to demand justice. How do you fight people who don’t want to listen, and will shut you down from the moment you engage them?
The latest example of this came from a man - a retired NYPD officer - who saw one of my Facebook posts, and responded by saying: “Your ignorance is astounding.” Not one to take petty insults lightly, I engaged him to demand his reasoning. What I got back was a list of his accomplishments on the job and an angry, offensive take on my perspective. There was no hope of getting through to him about the things I inherently understood about identifying as a Person of Color, how that affects my interactions with police officers, or the historic and present-day antagonizing experienced by marginalized communities on behalf of law enforcement nationwide. The cheapest comebacks had to do with “Bad Apples,” and “Black on Black crime.”
For a man who professed his nearly two dozen years on the job, this kind of glancing blow to a justifiable point of debate solidified what I already had been realizing when it came to this specific issue; namely, that there would likely be this kind of response when speaking to/with White male cops about this, and that this stereotypical indignation must be taken into account when seeking solutions to these problems. As far as addressing the original insult, I will say this much:
Calling someone ignorant on the basis of your personal convictions means you not only misunderstand the definition of the word, but you're using your emotional response to what you are experiencing as justification for your insult. Ignorance, in its purest form, has neither a positive nor a negative connotation. It merely means that one does not know or understand a particular person, place, thing, or idea. In fact, society might be a better place if, when its members are told of their ignorance in a particular area, they didn't immediately take it as an insult but as an impetus to learn more about whatever it is their accuser claims is beyond their scope.
I have never, not once, claimed to be someone who knew or experienced the idiosyncrasies associated with being a police officer. Not only would that be ignorant, it would be a lie. I'm a terrible liar. What I do know is that the individual ability to hold other people accountable to the law, as is part of the job of a law enforcement officer, provides that individual with a form of power. What I also know is that power corrupts. What I've come to understand about corruption is that it happens the moment we receive power, and that said corruption doesn't have to be some major scandal at your job. It can be as minor as taking the few privileges and creature-comforts that are not legally a part of the job but that come with the package.
In this country, we are dealing with an institution that is not only inherently racially biased, but that is inherently prone to corruption. And that propensity towards existing above the laws which this institution is supposed to respectfully enforce has prematurely ended countless lives and eviscerated the lifeblood of entire communities. So I find it odd, if not sad, that people would call me ignorant, when far too much research and history proves me right. In the end, how much good you do in any given situation will almost certainly be weighed against the times you're not willing to identify and work to eliminate the things that stop you from doing good, or simply ignore the bad.
Because that, my ‘astounded’ friend, is called WILLFUL ignorance. And "the power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated."
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