Samhita caught some heat last week for writing about Lovelle Mixon, the Oakland man who murdered four police officers. Now she follows up with a post fleshing out her thoughts, and it’s well worth reading.
For a lot of us who are raised white and middle-class, police officers are protectors and sometimes heroes. They’re people we’re taught to trust — and often, though not always, we can trust them. We believe they help keep us safe. Sometimes they do keep us safe. And sometimes they don’t — just ask a rape survivor, or a woman seeking protection from a stalker or abuser. But the cultural narrative of the white middle-class is that the police are the good guys.
We also don’t interact with them very much.
That isn’t necessarily case for everyone — particularly in urban low-income communities of color. In those communities, police officers aren’t there to protect you so much as to police you. And while of course most individual police officers aren’t bad people, the police force structurally breeds abuse. It’s worse in some places and in some forces than others, but abuse is going to be pervasive in entities that exist to exert power and control through force — this is Psych 101 stuff.
Abuse by police officers and the criminal justice system isn’t something that a lot of middle-class white people understand first-hand. Police officers as threatening rather than protective isn’t something that a lot of middle-class white people grow up knowing. The inability to call the police for help — the very idea that calling the police will cause more problems, not less — isn’t a reality that a lot of middle-class white people live. When Jessica Hoffman wrote this phenomenal letter about policing and prisons, the community here was appalled by her suggestion that calling the police isn’t an option available to every woman, and that for a lot of us, “protection” is the exact opposite of what we expect from cops.
But that’s reality: For many people, the police are more of a threat than a help. For many women, policing is another tool of oppression.
And yet whenever policing or prisons come up on a feminist blog, the immediate question is, “Why is this a feminist issue?” and the discussion turns to quibbling over where we draw the lines of feminism. Is Sean Bell a feminist issue because he had a fiancee and a mother and women in his life who were impacted by his death? Is his murder a feminist issue because systems of oppression are interrelated, and what impacts one marginalized community impacts us all?
To be quite honest, I’m not all that interested in arguments over who and what we include or exclude from the feminist umbrella. I am interested in social justice norms that extend beyond what The Feminist Movement has designated important or valuable; I am interested in pursuing norms of social justice even when they challenge my feminism or don’t quite mesh with I understand feminism to encompass. I am interested in a feminism that is flexible, and that recognizes that my understanding of it, and my experience of female-ness, is not universal.
I am frustrated by the fact that feminist solutions to problems like sexual assault, intimate partner violence, sex trafficking, and a slew of other issues often rely on the police force and the legal system for “justice.” I am frustrated that by virtue of that reliance, a whole lot of women are left with limited recourse when they’re victimized — and a whole lot of women are victimized further. I am frustrated that entire communities are terrorized and left without a safety net, and people who I consider my allies and community members are seemingly unable to understand that maybe we don’t all pass through this world in the same way.
Surely we can chew gum and walk at the same time — we can realize that Lovelle Mixon did a truly terrible and unjustifiable thing, and simultaneously realize that our policing and criminal justice systems are fundamentally broken, and that this incident is going to have widespread and horrific effects on communities of color in Oakland. We can realize that the culture of violence and brutality that police forces help to breed creates troubling situations where people like Lovelle Mixon — a murderer and accused rapist — engender support. Samhita writes:
Mixon is a difficult person to build a narrative of police brutality around, but this story isn’t about him. He is dead, he can do no more harm. But the police state can, and most likely will, use this case as an excuse to continually police and brutalize people of color in Oakland. Mixon was a very extreme example of violence, but he is still part of an entire system of violence. The more we have a repressive police system that engages in extreme forms of violence, the more people will support the actions of a cop-killer. Some have suggested that if perhaps Oakland police and stood up against what happened to Oscar Grant, Oakland youth would be singing a different tune right now.
Just go read her.