>> RAMONA PEREZ: Hello, and welcome to our
webinar on The Persistence of Racialized Police
Brutality and Community Responses to These
Traumas.
This webinar is hosted by the American Anthropological
Association and presented by the Center for
Ethnographic Study of Public Safety and Community
in collaboration with the Association of Black
Anthropologists, the Association of Latina
and Latino Anthropologists, and the American
Ethnological Association.
My name is Ramona Perez.
I am a Professor of Anthropology and Director
of the Center for Latin American Studies at
San Diego State University.
I currently serve as the incoming, or President-Elect,
to the American Anthropological Association.
I am a light-skinned, Mexican-American woman,
she/her/hers, with shoulder white hair, hazel-green
eyes, and I am wearing a dark blue blouse
with orange embroidery, colorful chandelier
earrings, and a necklace of orange seeds,
with a large silver heart.
On behalf of the nearly 10,000 members of
the American Anthropological Association,
the largest association of anthropologists
in the world, I want to thank you for joining
us today in yet another step toward addressing
the inequities and violence against Black
lives, as well as the lives of Indigenous
and other people of color.
We also would like to recognize that this
is LGBTQI pride month, and we stand in solidarity
with our LGBTQI brothers and sisters and honor
the accomplishments you have made for and
in your communities.
As we get started, I would like to give you
a brief overview of how our webinar will function
today.
You have logged into the Zoom webinar format.
This is different from the Zoom conference
format that most of us are used to.
At the bottom of your screen, you should see
the category of Q&A.
For most of you, it will be next to the chat
link.
Throughout the webinar, you can type your
questions into the Q&A section for our panelists,
and Jeff Martin, the Director of Communications
for the American Anthro Association, will
read your question.
You may indicate if there is a particular
panelist to whom you would like to address
your question.
Otherwise, it will be open for any of our
panelists to respond.
Please, don't post your questions in the chatroom
as we will leave this to be open for conversations
between yourselves and the panelists.
Again, Q&A for questions; chat for conversations.
The webinar includes heightened security that
includes muting each attendee and preventing
anyone from accessing the screen.
If you have any problems with the Q&A function,
you can chat directly to AAA or Nell with
your problem, both of which you should be
able to see under chat.
In addition, as I did just a minute ago, each
panelist will begin my describing themselves
to assure equitable access and closed captioning
by subtitle or transcripting is available
by clicking on the closed captioning link
near the chat and Q&A links at the bottom
of your screen.
I would like to knowledge that we have more
than 600 people in attendance today, many
of whom are not anthropologists.
For that reason, I'd like to clarify who we
are and why we have something to say about
racialized police brutality and our communities'
responses.
We actually planned this webinar several weeks
ago while George Floyd was still alive and
working toward his tomorrow.
What were thinking on planning on discussing
hasn't changed, but it has increased in importance
and relevance as the realities of this topic
have become a part of many more people's lives.
Our discipline, the discipline of anthropology,
focuses on the human condition, from the beginning
of humanity to the current moment, through
archeological, biological, ethnological, and
linguistic research, and while many social
sciences advance our understanding of culture
and society, it is cultural anthropology's
commitment to community-based engagement that
documents how people actually experience their
world through their voices and their lives
that we share with you today.
Our four panelists are ethnographers who have
dedicated their research lives to the communities
with whom they work.
They will start the webinar by talking for
about four minutes, addressing how racism
and the policing of Black bodies became part
of our mundane lives, how policing has grown
and evolved since its inception, how trauma
is experienced, and why protest is critical
to our communities, along with what our communities
are actually demanding and what a reimagined
public safety program could look like.
Dr. Shanti Parikh is an Associate Professor
of sociocultural anthropology and Associate
Director of African and African-American studies
at Washington University in St. Louis.
Dr. Kalfani Ture is Assistant Professor of
Criminology at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut,
who has trained and served as a police officer.
Dr. Donna Auston is an anthropologist, writer,
and activist whose body of work focuses primarily
on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, media
representation, and Islam in America.
And Dr. Avram Bornstein is Professor of Anthropology,
Interim Dean of Graduate Studies, and was
Co-Director of the New York Police Leadership
Program at John J. College at CUNY, City University
of New York.
Dr. Parikh.
Let's start with you.
Could you first describe yourself as you start
our conversation today?
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Good afternoon, everybody,
or good morning, depending on where you are
in the world.
Welcome.
My name is Shanti Parikh.
I am an African-American woman with an Indian
father, so I guess I'm mixed.
I am wearing a beige jacket, a leopard-printed
beige and tan top.
I have a white background with a red painting.
And I'm a female.
I would like to begin my remarks and since
we only have five minutes, I'm going to read
my remarks, and since I'm the opening speaker,
I'm also going to do a little bit of framing
about the particular historical moment in
which we are living, but first, thank you,
Kalfani, thank you for organizing this event
and for inviting me.
You had great insight into organizing this,
because as Ramona has mentioned, you organized
this before the unfortunate death of George
Floyd and before these particular protests.
It's an honor to be on this panel with brilliant
scholars who have given a lot of thought to
this topic.
Much of my talk will draw from work I've been
doing in the St. Louis region, both before
and after Ferguson Uprising, so I begin.
It is an understatement to say that the current
moment is what I call the urgency of Black
death, and hence, the urgency of anthropology
to show how the ethnographic art of narrative
collection and critical analysis as a form
and way we can respond.
We can see this urgency in Black death in
the enduring legacy of anti-Black police brutality
and the state-sanctioned immunity- impunity
in which, that enables, protects, and rewards
those who enact anti-Black violence.
But we also see the urgency of Black death
in the COVID-19 pandemic and its grossly disproportionate
impact on Black communities and bodies, from
the higher rates of infection, morbidity,
and mortality; to the devastating economic
toll from loss of income and the labor of
caring for the sick, vulnerable, and quarantined,
and I might add that this labor is not just
within their household, but in the role that
African-American, that Black people play in
the service of care in the community.
The symbolism of "I can't breathe" should
not be lost on us as anthropologists, who
like metaphors, for the slow suffocation of
the knee to the neck, of COVID's destroying
of the lungs, but also of the structures of
racism that drives both of the above, but
at the same time, the dramatic collision of
these two familiar paths of Black death -- extrajudicial
killings and medical neglect -- have also
been extremely generative.
We have seen
it has brought millions of cross section of
protestors from around the world from safely
sheltering at home, again a sheltering at
home is a racialized privilege denied to people
such as Breonna Taylor, and into the anti-Black
and increasingly militarized streets, as seen
in, as what is bringing the protests.
While the global protests were ignited by
the painful, viral videos of George Floyd's
slow death and the hauntingly emotionless
face of his uniformed killer, the outrage
over the continued suffocating grip of white
supremacy has been brewing for some time.
The Ferguson Uprising of 2014, the Baltimore
Protests of 2015, Eric Gardner Protests, Sandra
Bland Protests, and again, the ones that we're
seeing this year.
The rapid speed in energy with which police
reform, racial justice, and defund movements
have been advancing in the past few weeks
makes the task of this seminar, and of our
discipline, intimidating, urgent, but exciting.
This movement can be called, to borrow Trump's
phrase, the Real Operation Warp Speed.
But instead of our quest to find a vaccine
for a disease, we are finding a vaccine for
another disease:
the anti-Black police killings and its relationship
to white supremacy.
Like my panelists here and other panelists-
other anthropologists studying policing, I
argue that anthropology has much to bring
to the table, and I have, drawing heavily
from work that I've done in an upcoming issue
of American Ethnologist on Ferguson that I
co-edited with JB Kwon, I am going to propose
two ways that anthropology can be useful.
One is in diagnosing the problem and the second
one is paying attention to community responses
and how community defines needs.
So first, diagnosing of the problem.
Placed in its historical, colonial origins,
we see that the police killings and brutality
of Black people is not the result of a broken
system or rogue police.
Rather, it is precisely how the police was
intended to serve the colonial state, to protect
white male property and discipline and contain
expendable but profitable Black bodies.
From slave patrols that were critical in maintaining
racial and patriarchal order by roaming the
Southern plantations and Northern states in
search of runaway enslaved people, to the
post-Emancipation removal of federal troops,
troops that were intended to ensure the newly
freed Blacks, and replaced in Confederate
states by localized white militias, such as
the KKK, Black communities for long have experienced
police as brutal and often oppressive.
This relationship in St. Louis and elsewhere
was maintained in the 19th and 20th century,
using St. Louis as a case study, I'm just
going to rapidly discuss this, because this
is important for us to understand how policing
unfolds in each locale to maintain certain
social orders and then how, as anthropologists,
our contribution is to understand how solutions
unfold within that.
So using St. Louis as a case study, in the
20th century St. Louis, we saw an era in which
housing policies, zoning covenant deeds, and
localized policing were used to enforce geographic,
residential segregation and fragmentation
or what JB Kwon and I call the anti-Black
archipelago, along with economic changes,
infrastructural development, and white flight,
this has had several consequences.
Today, the St. Louis region is fragmented
into 100 separate municipalities and unincorporated
communities, many of which control their own
budgets, police, judicial systems, schooling,
and all of this ensures very stark racial
segregation, and we're known as the divided
city.
Black citizens become trapped, to borrow a
word from Colin Powell's [indistinguishable]
decline.
In particular areas of St. Louis, and the
area is peppered by Black enclaves surrounded
by white areas, such as Ferguson.
In these defense donuts, Black bodies are
required to constantly move in and out of
white spaces for employment, education, access
to ordinary resources, and hence, the heavy
policing of Black residents and bodies, and
all of this was confirmed in the post-Ferguson
DOJ report, which found that, even though
Ferguson was 67% black, they made up 85% of
the police stops, 90% of the citations, 93%
of the arrests, 90% of documented cases of
police force, and 95 cases of jaywalking citations,
which is what brought Michael Brown into contact
with his killer.
These patterns -
RAMONA PEREZ: [indistinguishable] You're right.
All of this is really important, and we're
going to let you come back to that in just
a minute.
But Dr. Ture, I'm wondering if you could talk
to us a little bit from your perspective.
>> KALFANI TURE: Sure.
So, sirst of all, I want to thank the AAAs
for supporting and hosting this, I think,
all-too-important conversation, conversation
that we're not having enough.
But I also want to step back and say thank
you to Shanti for giving us some context to
this problem and helping to historicize it.
For that reason, I'm going to truncate my
remarks, in that vain.
So my name is Kalfani Ture.
I'm an African-American cisgendered male.
I am wearing a white shirt-sleeved dress shirt
with a black vest, and I have a beautiful
visual background, by way of the internet,
which shows me in a highrise, maybe somewhere
on the 30th floor, with a nice window view.
But I am an Assistant Professor of criminal
justice at Quinnipiac University, as was stated,
and I concentrate in the area of policing.
I'm also a former police officer, and I started
my career off with Georgia State Police.
I transitioned to the City of Roswell Police,
which unfortunately was in the news maybe
a couple years ago for something really heinous,
and I ended my career with Cherokee County
Sheriff Department.
I wanted to experience law enforcement at
different scales, so as to be more knowledgeable
about policing, as I would develop my, as
I am developing my own interventions to improve
policing.
But I also went into law enforcement, I should
say, because I wanted to make an immediate
impact on the Black and Brown communities
that law enforcement is often situated in,
and I'll talk about that in just a second.
So I'm going to keep my opening remarks really
short.
The first thing I want to say is, for those
of you who are anthropologists, I strongly
encourage you to read the Association of Black
Anthropology's statement on policing, and
I do want to acknowledge that the Association
of Black Anthropologists have been at this
work for a long time.
Since its inception, the Association of Black
Anthropologists have been not only looking
at police violence, but more broadly, they've
been addressing the issue of white supremacy.
And so I want to knowledge that, and I want
to note that there's an official, informed
statement about this, and I encourage you
all to sort of visit that statement.
The second thing is, I want to talk about
policing, just really quickly.
I'm concerned about policing and race in place.
I mean, my particular research area involves
me looking at the intersections of public
safety, law enforcement, and place.
And in particular, I ask what informs police
decision-making when they encounter African-American
and Latinx males in urban public space, particularly
that space which is characterized by liminality,
and what I mean by liminality is either it
is an interstitial space between predominantly
black and white communities or is it a space
that's undergoing gentrification.
And I ask what, what informs police decision-making?
And I assume that critical areas in that decision-making
is the professional training, the prior sort
of biographies of officers, as well as the
informal and socialization that happens in
law enforcement, which all too often tends
to invalidate all the things that police officers
should be doing in a sort proper way.
The second thing- the third thing I sort of
wanted to mention here is that as a police
officer who actually have gone to three police
academies, and it was particularly tough,
because once I went into law enforcement,
I immediately recognized that I was too Black
for the blue profession, but because of the
history of state-sanctioned violence through
police departments, through police officers
officers, I also became too blue for the Black
community.
So I, in fact, sat in this really sort of
liminal space myself, but it was a particular
space that allowed me to gain, I think, really
great insights into policing and its tensions
and its possibilities for Black communities.
But when I went into law enforcement and I
would begin to undergo my own training in
law enforcement, there's some things I just
want to point out here to give some kind of
context on my remarks to come.
I spent maybe eight hours training around
deescalation.
I spent more than 300 hours on defensive tactics
and use of force.
So there's already this imbalance, right?
It didn't take 9/11, or post-9/11, for us
to learn about sort of warrior policing.
Law enforcement have been trained as warriors.
That's just the way that training in fact
is instituted.
And so there's an issue.
There's a sort of tendency for law enforcement
officers to sort of revert to violence, versus
to sort of draw on more sort of peaceful ways
of resolving issues, breaches of civility,
as we would call it in law enforcement.
So I'm going to stop there and then sort of
entertain questions as they come in the discussion,
but in closing, I also want to be able to
state further in the discussion why I think
it's going to be an uphill battle to reform
police departments and why it might be appropriate
to just totally dismantle them and start from
the ground up.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Thank you so much, Dr. Ture.
I think that's a really important conversation
that we will come back to.
Dr. Auston.
Can we ask you to describe yourself and move
to the next discussion?
>> DONNA AUSTON: Yeah, sure.
Welcome, everyone, thank you for joining us
for this conversation.
I am Donna Auston.
I am an African-American female.
I'm currently wearing a white blouse and a
matching white head wrap.
And I am -- my background is a virtual library
that does not actually reflect the living
conditions, the physical space that I'm currently
in, but it's really exciting, lots of books
and a desk and a chair with fluffy pillows.
And so what I want to do is, I think in some
ways sort of picks up where Dr. Shanti and
Dr. Kalfani left off, and that is sort of
thinking about, briefly, how I approach the
problems of, so my research is actually concerned
with looking at the ways that Black Muslim
communities in the US have been particularly
impacted by virtue of sort of the operation
of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia in relationship
to law enforcement practices, within the context
of the Black Lives Matter movement.
My research was conducted primarily in 2014,
2015, and so one of the things that I want
to do to, really, just to give some brief,
a brief sort of entry into a discussion around
two related, interrelated questions, and that
is what is the nature of the problem, right?
That we're talking about here.
And the second question is, what are possible
solutions, right?
And so my research, per se, is not -- it's
not an ethnography of police officers, per
se.
It's actually more sort of focused on looking
at the ways that the communities that I study
responded through their activism and their
efforts to sort of directly combat various
forms of violence that they experienced at
the hand of law enforcement, both on a local
level, state level, also federal level.
This includes, of course, incidents like the
ones that are foremost at the top of everyone's
mind at the moment, you know, the murder of
Breonna Taylor, the murder of George Floyd,
the murder of Tony McDade.
These are sort of, these all involve, you
know, shootings, suffocations, and I did a
fair amount of research in Baltimore, and
joined the 2015 Uprisings in that particular
case.
It included - the person at the center of
that particular controversy, Freddie Gray,
was arrested violently by police officers,
thrown into the back of a police wagon, and
taken on what's called a nickel ride, or a
rough ride,
where he was put in the back of a paddy wagon,
not strapped in, not restrained, and driven
around, you know, in a truck in a rough fashion,
which you know, sort of, you know, because
he's not restrained, because he's not wearing
a seat belt, he's bumped around the cabin
and died from, you know, literally having
his spine broken.
So there's all of those various ways that
actual violence, what most of us understand
to be violence, physical violence, happens,
but there's also the problem of invasive surveillance,
and particularly with Muslim communities,
this is one of the ways, and also, Black communities
experience this as well, that Black communities
that are not also Muslim, right?
Experience, you know, cameras in their communities,
wire tapping, programs like CDE, countering
violent extremism, which ostensibly is sort
of friendly interventions, but basically picks
on certain communities and people from certain
backgrounds as being particularly susceptible
to violence and therefore are subject to extra
scrutiny and invasive policing practices.
So there's a whole spectrum of problems and
behaviors and practices on the part of the
law enforcement that basically demonstrate
Dr. Parikh's point, when she started by talking
about this system is designed to do, is doing
exactly what it's designed to do, right?
And so our responses to that, I think, have
to consider that.
I think it's important for us to consider,
you know, sort of the gap between the conversations
that are at least currently happening in particular,
in the public, in the mainstream public discourse,
between reform and practices that, you know,
as a collective, are leading more towards
dismantling and abolition, right?
And there are different categories of responses
that I think it's important to sort of begin
to think about how they are different.
I want to very briefly try to share something
on my screen that's sort of from the last
week or so that illustrates this.
If you'll give me one quick second to pull
this picture up.
Okay.
So this is a picture of a street in Washington
DC that was recently, recently painted in
this particular matter, in the last week.
On the lefthand side of the picture, you'll
see the word painted in bright yellow paint
that is used to typically divide the line
between the lanes in a street is used to spell
out Black Lives Matter.
You can't see the whole phrase, because it's
too long.
I couldn't find a photo long enough that includes
the whole thing on the one hand.
This was actually done by the City of DC,
the mayor of DC, Mayor Bowser commissioned
this to be painted right near the White House.
In the street itself, it says Black Lives
Matter, right?
And this is on the one hand, sort of indicative
of, you know, our response of, that at least
on the surface indicates, you know, some sort
of commitment on the part of the municipal
authorities in Washington DC to do something
different with regard to law enforcement excess.
And then the second half of the photograph,
you can see, you can see or, you know, it
says, "Defund the police", also in yellow
paint, but that part of this graphic or this
mural that's painted in the asphalt was actually
later added a couple of days later by activists
in Washington DC.
Because there's a gap between what, what the
government or the municipal government was
offering in terms of redress to these problems
and what many of the activists on the ground
are pushing for, and that's sort of how visibly,
you know, heuristically dividing a line between
reform and abolition, right?
>> RAMONA PEREZ: And Dr. Auston, I think the
defund the police, the question of what we
mean by defund is one that I think a lot of
people have misunderstood over time, and I
want to come back to that.
I want to give Dr. Bornstein an opportunity
to also talk to us from his experience of
working with the New York Police Department
in terms of integrating anthropology and anthropological
perspectives into police training and what
that might mean, but I definitely want to
come back because one of the things we really
need to talk about is what is it that we're
asking folks for?
How can we make this a more known topic?
Rather than one that people are speculating
on.
Dr. Bornstein.
I'm wondering if you could share with us.
>> AVRAM BORNSTEIN: Great.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
So I'm a 51-year-old white bald guy, sitting
in a blue-collared shirt, in my living room
near the window here in New York City.
I've been the Dean of Grad Studies for a few
years and will return to faculty, and I before
that directed the criminal justice master's
program and co-directed the NYPD Leadership
Program at John J. College, which we've had
for about 20 years.
I'll say something more about that.
Let me quickly make four points, and we can
circle back if you want to discuss more of
those things.
Points 1 and 2 are about possible transformations
that are basically, that come out of some
of my work on the ground in the -- with NYPD
at our college and then points 3 and 4 are
more macro systematic analysis and anthropologists
like to do both of that, on the ground and
that big, system stuff.
So, first, let me speak about education in
policing, and Kalfani already really hit an
important point, right, about training.
Right now, police across the country are in
something like 1500 different departments,
municipal, county, state, federal police,
with extreme variations in requirements in
training, that they've seen the way that Kalfani
spoke about that, around warrior, and the
imbalance that he spoke about.
Here in New York City, the NYPD has a very
impressive academy, building.
Recruits spend about six months training before
hitting the streets where they're supposed
to receive field training, which could be
good or horrible, and he spoke to that and
in various kinds of in-service training over
the years around use of force and auto theft
and all kinds of things.
Applicants to the department don't need a
college degree.
They need sixty college credits.
Now, at John J., we have had a mission that
has pushed a different kind of model in policing,
one that would make it more like professions,
other professions, in which you need like
at least a two-year degree to be something
like a constable, and you know, that's like
in England and many other countries, and nationally
accredited degrees are part of a promotional
process to make it more professional.
Twenty years ago we started what I thought
would be a pilot program leading towards this.
The bad news is is that it remains kind of
a pilot program after 20 years.
The good news is, I guess, it remains, and
we have this slowly growing, we've got a lot
of experience in creating higher education
and a different model.
So the first point is just to rethink police
education.
The second point is that the call to defund
the police are a really good vehicle for us
to think about how police work and workers
are organized.
While there are really big differences across
the country, about 66% on average, it ranges
from like 30 to 90 something, 66%, two-thirds
of police work is being on patrol and answering
calls for service.
Now, while fire and E.M.S. have pretty defined
jobs, police get called to handle everything
else, loud music, public intoxication, rowdy
teenagers, you know, everything.
Much of this could go elsewhere with the support,
this underlying support of police, right,
to this elsewhere, to these other groups.
We still might want to fund detectives to
do investigations or warrant squads or special
units like that, but the job of patrol, which
is the largest thing and where people have
the most interaction with police often, could
be completely reconsidered.
But that depends on real partnerships with
health services, school systems, housing and
business and development, business development
and all those other kinds of areas of society.
There are some amazing models for these things
out there, but they're really the exceptions,
not the rule.
So the second point is to rethink patrol,
the major part of policing, which is main
draw on their resources.
So next two points are much quicker.
Third, if we step back, take a more macro
look, we can see that policing and criminal
justice systems are part of particular social
and economic systems with their cultural meanings
systems that are all connected together.
And so, for example, you know, stop and frisk,
here in New York, which many people have heard
about, was in large part driven by a new economic
model based on finance, real estate, and entertainment.
So point 3 is really that a real police reform
requires a significant shift in the domestic
and global organization of racial capital.
You can't change one part of it without thinking
about these larger structures to which that
part is really just an appendage.
So fourth and finally, in about 170 years
of policing in New York City, there have been
many, many marches and moments calling for
major police reform.
1850s, 1890s, all through, some successful
and some not.
Today's reform movement, the one I'm sketching
out here sounds a lot like the one put forward
actually in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society
Plan in 1964, in which police reform was only
part of a larger civil rights agenda for socioeconomic
development, something like the Marshall Plan
that had saved Europe.
The theory was that economic development would
minimize the problems of poverty, like street
crime.
But just four years later, this plan was opposed
and undermined by the election of Richard
Nixon in 1968, who rode to victory on a law
and order platform, and that law and order
theory posits that the problems of poverty
like street crime need to be heavily policed
to make the world safe for business development.
So before it was really born, this great society
was declared a failure.
Now, after 50 years, a law and order discourse
seems to be on the ropes, but not defeated.
So, in conclusion, we can recreate police
education, and the organization of police
work, but these things are linked to larger
systems that must also be part of any kind
of reform.
Thank you.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Thank you so much, Dr. Bornstein.
Dr. Parikh, I wanna come back to you.
You were talking about space and the way in
which space and place really enact a kind
of violence against the Black body as it is.
I'm wondering, could you go ahead and finish
that thought and take us where you were going
to?
We need to open up to the Q&A for our various
participants, and thankfully, we have a bunch
of questions for all of you, but I want to
make sure we come back to that.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Yeah, thank you.
So one of the things that is going on in the
national conversation is something that -- Avi
just alluded to, is how to reconceptualize
the police in thinking about which aspects
can be grounded more in sort of a community-based
approach versus which one still does need
to get situated elsewhere.
And one of the things we've been thinking
about here is, what does that mean to have
these local sort of more localized levels
of community policing, when, indeed, the community
level is what has been oppressive to Black
people, since it's so fragmented?
So that's one of the ways in which I think
anthropologists can really help to partner
with communities and understand how do some
of these national recommendations sort of
unfold locally, depending on what's going
on.
So can I just share, since we will probably
talk about it, can I share two slides that
I think are part of the conversation that's
going on, that I'm sure we will touch upon,
and one of, ops, if I can get this, okay.
One of them is this, which is the 8 Can't
Wait.
This one emerged, the 8 Can't Wait Police
Reform emerged out of Ferguson, and I'm sure
we'll be talking about this later.
These are sort of things that are being implemented
locally, and then this one, which is what
Donna and I spoke about, which was the abolition
approach, or abolishing opressive structure
and shifting the resources to infrastructures
that can enable the community.
So in terms of what is going on here, it's
very much about how do we redistribute wealth
in an area that is so fragmented.
>> KALFANI TURE: You know, if I could just
interject really quickly, just share my perspective
about race and place.
In my work, and also in my research, my prior
research is around actual displacement from
public housing, and
what I've concluded is that there is certainly
a spatiality, as we probably would all agree,
a sort of a spatio dimension to white supremacy,
and what's really important for anthropology,
at least what anthropology can offer is that
we don't look at physical places as just sort
of an insignificant backdrop in our work.
We understand that the actual built environment,
social environment, natural environment represent
important constitutive dimensions of one's
identity, or in particular the cultural phenomenon
at which we're looking at.
So what I found is that, at least what I've
concluded by way of my earlier research is
that there is this sort of dialectic at play,
right.
In order for white society and the white power
structure to in fact be maintained, it must
in fact have this contra distinctive place
or people or et cetera.
And so spatially, then, African-American people
or Latinx people, people who are otherwise
in this society, they are tied, in fact, they
are sort of forced to occupy or live within
spaces that represent the contra distinction,
the opposite.
So, for example, you take public housing,
you take what's referred to as African-American
urban ghettos, or what Tony White had out
of University of Maryland would call racialized
urban ghetto [indistinguishable], these are
intentional spaces, right, because we don't
define ourselves as the, the larger society,
the white society, don't define themselves
by who they are.
In fact, whiteness becomes a sort of silent
standard, if you will.
We're defined by who we're not.
And so when we create these sort of, we tie
these sort of marginalized people to these
spaces, and we disinvest from them, we put
polluting industries around them, et cetera,
we're basically setting up or establishing
that contra distinctive other.
And then we use policing to maintain the countours,
to maintain the boundaries, or to in fact
police that interstitial space.
So I think it's really important for us when
we think about sort of this sort of policing
issue, we need to think about it's sort of
connection to race in place.
Anyways, I'll stop there.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: That's great.
Thank you.
Donna, Avram, was there anything else you
guys wanted to add?
We have a good number of questions coming
in from the panelists, or from the participants,
and I just want to say, I apologize if anyone
perceives that I was cutting anybody off.
We had agreed ahead of time to a certain amount
of time and part of that reason is to make
sure that we could address these questions
since there's so many folks on it.
So I deeply apologize, Shanti, Donna, if you
feel that I have, I owe you both a very, very
sincere apology.
That's not my intention.
My intention is just to make sure that everybody
gets a chance to be heard and share.
We have so much to share, we have so much
to say, and I want to be sure that everybody
feels like they're being included.
So to our many participants, I apologize if
that was the perception.
But, Donna.
Avi.
Is there anything else that you guys would
like to add before we start opening it up
to folks for their questions?
>> DONNA AUSTON: Well, I think one of the
things that hasn't been mentioned, which is
where I was going, in part where I was going,
in addition to, you know, sort of considering
the whole ecosystem, right, of policing, right,
with, you know, connected to property and
real estate and those sorts of connections,
I think it's also, it's vital to sort of think
about the ways that policing, the practice
of policing has become increasingly militarized
over the course of, you know, several decades,
right.
And this is part of where I was going with
like, the nature of the problem, right?
Because it includes sort of these individual
incidents of brutality, but it also sort of
includes the fact that police departments
have been receiving federal grants of military-grade
equipment for quite some time now.
I know we give a lot of attention to this
in the post-9/11 era, but it was in fact happening
long before then, particularly in relationship
to, you know, initiatives like the war on
drugs and the war on terror, right, where
Black communities and Black Muslim communities
also have been in particular impacted by these
specific initiatives.
That come at the federal level, but also have
local reservations and repercussions, and
it's why we saw or how we saw, for example,
in response to protests after the death of
Mike Brown, the teargas and tanks and, you
know, by a small, suburban, Midwestern police
department really occupying, and not as hyperbole,
but really actually occupying the streets
of, you know, of a largely Black township,
right?
And so these questions, I think, are also
important, particularly as we begin to talk
about what the possible solutions might be,
because, yes, we have to sort of think about
what it means to, what it means to provide
safety.
And, of course, a part of that is, it's not,
it's not, in most cases, it's actually not
increased policing.
You all have sort of covered that very well.
It isn't attention to, you know, making sure
that people have access to food and making
sure that people have access to good housing
and all of these other things, right?
But it's also sort of thinking about the ways
that we have been equipping and authorizing
police personnel at the local, state, federal
level, right, to really behave.
And we've seen how this has really, like,
you know, been unleashed in cities across
America in the last couple of weeks, right?
We've seen, you know, we've seen teargas,
you know, we've seen all of these things happening,
and one of the ways that this is, one of the
ways that this is possible, of course, is
because, you know, we've allocated the resources
at whatever levels of government our funding
these particular police entities to basically
function as paramilitary, you know, forces,
that act without, you know, any type of measures
of accountability, really, that have been
actually capable of restraining and keeping,
keeping this weaponry from being deployed
on largely unarmed communities.
And that's, I think, a really important part
of the question.
And certainly when we start to think about
why abolition as a direction for solution
becomes something that we actually have to
take pretty seriously, because it's not just
a problem of an individual officer's training,
although that matters, and though that may
have some impact.
We're also dealing with something that's a
lot more systematic, and quite frankly, much
bigger than what an individual officer might
do, as tragic as the consequences of those
individual actions might be and are and have
been, there's also something else at work
here that I think we also need to think about.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Ramona, if I may interject,
in addition to Donna's about the militarization,
and I'm sure this will be part of the discussion,
two other protective mechanisms are certainly
the Fraternal Order of the Police or the police
unions, and then the pair of Supreme Court
decisions in the 1980s, Tennessee v Gardner,
and Graham v. Connor, which basically gave,
which in effect, said that you could use,
police officers can use excessive force, deadly
or not, against citizens who are constructed
as threatening.
And in the historical context whereas the
black body is perceived as threatening, that
becomes an easy, as we've seen in these cases,
has become the easy defense.
And actually one of the cases in St. Louis,
with Jason Stockley, Officer Jason Stockley,
who murdered somebody, he actually used that,
the judge used that in his defense.
He said, from what we know, the construction
about the, an urban drug dealer is likely
to be armed with a weapon.
So he himself in his verdict relied on those
tropes and stereotypes.
So the police order, the unions that kind
of protect police officers, but also, the
law and the Supreme Court decision which allow
it.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Yeah, there were two fabulous
reports that were just submitted over to Congress,
and we can make sure those reports are made
available to the audience that hit on exactly
on what you're saying, Shanti, hit exactly
on what you're saying.
But, Kalfani and Avi, I'm wondering, you know
one of the big questions that we have is how
can the anthropological perspective, how can
anthropologists who understand this very kind
of lived experience begin to really make a
change, how they can really begin to impact
policy, how they can begin to empower communities,
and how we can have a more dominant voice
in this understanding of the fusion of the
two.
>> KALFANI TURE: Avi?
>> AVRAM BORNSTEIN: Well, I think that there's,
you know, anthropology as this holistic discipline,
right, covers a lot of different possibilities
with the answer to that question, right, and
even as you can see this panel here, that
people working on very different kinds of
questions, community-based, resistance-based,
you know, I'm working with NYPD.
13:49:39 So there's all different levels of
this.
13:49:54 I think that, you know, my own interest
has always sort of been in the anthropology
of work, and then it became anthropology of
violence, right, because I realized how much
violence shapes work.
And so I'm really interested, things like
the militarization that Donna is talking about,
and Shanti are talking about, there's aspects
of this that are more subtle, and in the organization
of work, right?
And that we can see, if we're looking closely
as anthropologists.
So I'll just give one quick example is that
the way we've had a shift in terms of militarization,
in terms of like, th way reporting structures
happen, in terms of policing and such.
There were times in New York history where
housing police officers and school police
officers reported to housing managers and
school principals, and they're basically,
they were in the background and the school
principal said, come with me.
I give the orders, right?
And that was one model.
And that ended.
And police in housing and police in schools
started reporting to NYPD.
And you know, a totally different model of
subject and job and the way things are shaped
making a much more militarized force.
So that kind of granular level of the organization
of work, the organization of policing, the
way police kind of think, that Kalfani is
studying about the decision-making processes
that police are in.
These are things, there's so many aspects
to this complicated job, and there's multivariable
things that I think we all have a part of
it, a part of that.
And then, of course, together, we can pull
it together.
It seems like at the macro level, we have
a lot of agreement here that we're talking
about a systematic oppression that's economic
and social and political and violent.
And we're all looking at different pieces
of it.
>> KALFANI TURE: So I would just quickly add
that, first, you know, I think disciplinary
boundaries are blurring evermore each day
that pass by, and I think that's a good thing,
because, particularly as African-American
anthropology, as least what I've gathered
from my colleagues, we want to pull theory
and methods, et cetera, from anywhere that
helps us answer the question.
But what I would say is I think is particularly
unique about anthropology and what attracted
me to anthropology towards these sort of larger
questions about public safety, race, and place,
was that, you know, anthropologists sort of
privileges culture, and what I mean by that
is, I mean one of the first ethnographers
who looked at sort of race and place and sort
of urban crime, if you will, was W.E.B.
Du Bois, but he understood that you can't
quantify culture, right?
So, he offers us in his classic work on Philadelphia,
the Philadelphia Negro, he gives us sort of
statisticial sort of demographics.
He gives us the profile in stats, but then
he says, you know "To really understand a
people, you have to immerse yourself within
those people, to understand the phenomenon,
the sort of contingencies that they deal with
day to day.
And I think anthropology, as anthropologists,
we're well suited for that.
But then I also say that, you know, like we
understand the importance of sort of the evolutionary
perspective, the comparative perspective,
the culturally relative perspective, but also
the holistic perspective.
So when we go into these communities or embed
ourselves in these sort of work spaces, whether
they be police stations or police academies,
local, state, or federal levels, we're not
just looking at the sort of socialization
or professionalization of officers in that
location.
We want to understand it against the law so
when Shanti talks, cites the sort of jurisprudence
around this, and I would just sort of add
to that list, Dred Scott, the Dred Scott decision
where the Chief Justice Taney said that Black
lives have no rights that white folks are
bound to respect, which actually occurred
not too distant from where you are presently
located.
Plessey versus Ferguson, and I would actually
go before Tennessee versus Gardner, or Graham
v. Connor, and I would say that when the Supreme
Court decided to come up with its own law
with qualified immunity, right, qualified
immunity in 1967 and its most recent sort
of [indistinguishable] decision was in 2009,
it sort of insulated law enforcement, insulated
sort of this culture of violence, insulated
white supremacy and this institution, this
coercive institution, that is often utilized,
right, particularly in this post-racial world,
where its sort of mode of production is changing,
et cetera, they rely on it more heavily.
So from a holistic perspective, I also know
that I need to look at sort of legal jurisprudence.
I need to look at what the law says.
But I also need to look at the historically,
what are things that anthropologists, we don't
just privilege culture, but we see that culture
changes over time.
And it changes within sort of interlocking
structure.
And so we want to look at culture both historically
and what are the institutions that come in
and out.
So I think that doesn't get to the answer,
but I would say that, you know, ethnography
by way of anthropology is certainly an important
part of that solution.
It's how we study the problem.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: To that I would add, I think
that a role that anthropology has played in
a lot of what we do is exposing how public
discourse shores up particular sentiments
and fears and racializations.
So Kalfani's point, the police do that, but
then how the American public buys into this
idea that if you get rid, if you defund the
police, then there's vulnerability of subjects.
A particular, can I share my screen just to
show this one, I was amazed as I was preparing
for this, this is what displayed in the local
newspaper yesterday.
And if you can see, this came out just yesterday.
Sort of playing on discourses of fear, to
Kalfani's point, this idea of violence, of
playing on white people's fears, and it was,
it was supposed to be a critique of the defund,
so already, they're trying to mobilize people,
probably for elections that are around the
corner, and this idea that if you vote Democrat,
this is what's going to happen.
So the police, sort of our attempts to reform
police are also caught up in the moment that
we're in, which is the election.
And I think now is the critical time, both
to, for anthropologist to put forth an agenda
that is tuned to local specificities and it
takes into account the communities that are
marginalized that are being overpoliced but
also do want a police presence to protect
them in other ways, but also this very aggressive
counter narrative that's going to try to disrupt
or confuse the public imagination and definition
of some of these terms.
So, for example, the idea of abolition or
the idea of reparations that becomes so politically
coded and heated.
So part of our role also is to help disentangle
for public consumption what that means, and
what it means in local instances.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: And how we could imagine
some kind of alternative to public safety
program that takes the warrior out of it and
puts the caregiver back into this, right?
And that's what a lot of the defunding is
about, is that moving of those funds into
those areas where we could actually care again
for each other and care for our communities.
If you guys are comfortable, I want to go
ahead and
have Jeff begin to summarize some of the questions
we have.
We have about 44, 45 questions that are out
there.
Some of them are the same, so I know that,
Jeff, you're going to have to condense them
maybe and create opportunities for the panelists
to really dive into this.
We have about 30 minutes left before we lose
our closed captioner, so I want to make sure
that the folks that have logged on have an
opportunity to ask you guys the kinds of questions
that need to get answered.
So does anyone else have anything they want
to say before I have Jeff start to pull these
questions together for you, which is going
to open up a whole deeper conversation hopefully.
>> DONNA AUSTON: Just very quickly to add
on to what anthropologists can do, I would
say also it's important to consider that anthropologists
already currently function in spaces outside
of the Ivory Tower in the academy and they're,
are contributing in ways that are sort of,
you know, across the spectrum, drawing upon
their anthropological knowledge and practice
and how they interact with communities, how
they're speaking to, how they're actually
activists themselves, how they're actually
working in government offices, you know.
Where, I mean, anthropologists are already
doing a lot of this broad spectrum work on
these issues in ways we would often sometimes
think of as applied versus sort of theoretical.
And so it's important to sort of consider
that as well.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: And putting pressure on
our universities.
Sometimes, we work in institutions that are
large employers in the landscapes in which
we, and they sit at the table with a lot of
power, so even encouraging the institutions
that we work at.
One other thing I think it would be great,
and I know this is something we all thought
about, is the project that race that AAA has.
Can we do that?
Can we first start by just creating a tool,
a database of how these different reforms
that are being sort of sort of circulated
nationally, whether it's the 8 Can't Wait
or the movement for Black lives, their platform.
These are platforms, or the Congressional
Black Caucus, these are platforms that are
being picked up by a lot of localities, and
as anthropologists situated in different locales,
can we start to document for our own database
as we start to analyze it over the next year
how these are, one, picked up locally, how
they're applied locally, which ones resonate
locally, given the particular instruments
of power, sort of maintenance of social order
that is in local locales.
So just two other thoughts.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Yeah, absolutely.
I think one of the great things about this
webinar is the ability to understand what
people want to know over here with these questions,
so any questions that we don't actually get
to, we will have a chance, hopefully, to begin
to address those and put some up so that they
can be accessible so that people can feel
like they've been engaged with the conversation.
But to your larger point, Shanti, yes.
I mean, we've had our race project has been
one that has been very instrumental in getting
communities to talk.
And we've had the task force on racialized
brutality and extrajudicial violence, and
we want to move that into the same kind of
project where communities, it's something
communities can pick up and becomes a tool
and a resource that anthropologists in their
local communities who can help them put these
kind of things together.
That's one of the intents of this webinar,
is really get at how anthropology can begin
to address this.
But to everybody else is okay?
We good with me having Jeff summarize some
of these questions so that we can get to them?
>> JEFF MARTIN: Thanks, Ramona.
I am Jeff Martin.
I am a white male with black framed glasses
and graying brown hair, graying brown beard.
Too much gray for my purposes.
And I'm the Director of Communications for
the American Anthropological Association.
I'm glad you ended that with what you just
did, both, both Donna and Shanti and everyone
else.
Some of the questions that I can encapsulate
were really how do we as university faculty
and students, what steps can we take towards
minimizing racial bias and subconscious discrimination
in our institution, and subsequently, too,
how do we bring this further into K through
12 so that it starts young, when they're younger?
>> DONNA AUSTON: So I can maybe start to address
that.
After Charlottesville and the incidents there
a couple of years ago, I was actually asked
by the AAA to contribute a short blog post
about what was happening in that particular
moment, and one of the things that I, it was
very short, like 500 words or less, but essentially
the main point that was urgent to me in that
moment was, now see often what happens in
moments of crisis, you know, we have all of
this sort of inward-looking, sort of existential,
what are we supposed to do, in this moment
of crisis about the racism that exists somewhere
out there?
So what do we do about Charlottesville, without
often, particularly within academic spaces,
often sort of doing that introspective work,
didn't look around at perhaps the graduate
students that are in your program, maybe that
one Black graduate student that your program
has and taking a hard look at your recruiting,
retention, support for students from underrepresented
backgrounds.
It looks like doing work with the academic
disciplinary canons that we construct, we
completely often marginalize, or completely
ignore, or completely erase, you know, which
works and which thinkers are considered essential
and important to shaping the discipline and
the disciplinary practices.
You know, so we have canons full of, you know,
to use the common phrase for this sort of
thing, dead white men who we all sort of rely
upon to tell us everything that we ever needed
to know about the human experience.
You know, it looks like looking at the hiring
practices in your department.
It looks like not waiting for the moment of
crisis to have conversations about race, to
teach about race, not to marginalize scholarship
on race, because I know as somebody who actually
works on race within the academy, you know,
when I started my program in 2011, it was
like, you know, sort of, at I guess peak-post-racial
moment where a lot of people sort of thought
that race was passe and a parochial field
of study and we really need to do that anymore,
and so the funding agencies that sort of support
scholars doing this sort of work are not prioritizing
scholarship on race at those particular times,
and then when there's, you know, sort of a
rupture, it's like, "Oh my god, wait, we have
to look at this again."
But it was always important.
It was always relevant.
It was always key to sort of understanding
so many of these other things that we understand
to be epistemological and submjet matter priorities
because it shapes everything about the social
world that we live in, particularly in the
US, right?
Even though, you know, it's different in other
parts of the world, but white supremacy is
a global phenomenon, right?
It's not something that just exists in the
U.S., you know.
The particulars, you know, whatever, tomato,
tomato, right, but it's very important that
we understand that this is essential work,
essential knowledge, and we support not as
a Band-Aid matter, like sort of after the
fact, like I mean I don't know about you,
but I have been inundated with solidarity
statements from my academic department and
my university and from this office and that
office and from, you know, Starbucks and from,
you know, from everybody who now decides that,
oh, my God, we have to pay attention to this,
and we need to sort of do something.
What is it that you are going to be doing
in a sustained and, you know, sort of pointed,
identifiable set of action steps to redress
how racism operates in whatever your domain
is, right?
And that, trust me, whatever field you work
in, whatever profession you're in, whatever
your institution is, whatever your company
is, right, you have racism structurally, institutionalized
within your domain.
Figure out how to fix it and don't look away
when the "crisis" recedes, right?
And thinking about this as a perpetual crisis,
right?
It's not just sort of when this problem sort
of explodes into the field of vision of white
mainstream America who has, because of the
way that racism works, has the option to look
away from it when it's not, you know, in the
streets of their downtown, or closing, you
know what I mean?
So I think for us, to really take these problems
seriously as, they're not, they shouldn't
be addressed as a trendy matter, they shouldn't
be addressed in a superficial way.
Like, there has to be real, sustained paradigm
shifts that guide the way we think about what
to do with these intractable, long-standing,
stubborn, obstinate problems.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Thank you, Donna.
Shanti, do you have something you want to
add to that?
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Just quickly adding to that
always, as well, keeping at the foreground
the way in which the visibilities and our
rallying around the violence against Black
bodies becomes very gendered.
So how violence against queer subjects, nongender-conforming
subjects, which is very brutal, at rates that
are extraordinarily, you know, unacceptable,
becomes invisible.
But also, Black women.
If you think historically about the movement
against anti-Black violence, it was, it was
the image of the Black male.
So the lynching, Emmett Till, Rodney King,
Trayvon, and the Say Her Name Movement was
a movement to say, you know, the violence
that's inflicted on Black women is there.
It's very, you know, all violence is gendered.
But how we have to understand them as occurring
and needing to be addressed simultaneously,
not addressing one and then shifting and the
other one.
So really trying to understand that and how
the Say Her Name was, part of that movement
was about the police going and treating a
woman with a mental illness in a very violent
way.
How her Black womanness got read as the trope
of the angry Black woman.
So instead of addressing her mental illness,
criminalizing the trope that sort of preexisted.
So in addition to looking at race, also being
really aware of look at sexuality, gender,
and always keeping that in the foreground.
That's I think what was so powerful about
the Ferguson movement.
It was a movement that was led by young, queer
bodies of color, whether it was cis gender,
nongender-conforming, or you know, and it
was, and they kept that front in the center.
>> KALFANI TURE: You know, I would just jump
in and say, and try to say in a very quick
way, we start to think about solutions.
You know, so it seems like the problem is
multiple, and so in an acute sense, we have
to worry about law enforcement and racialized
violence.
But in this more chronic sense, we haven't
sort of addressed the issue of white supremacy.
And I would actually strongly encourage the
listening audience to take a look at the ABA
statement, their most recent statement on
police violence.
I think it gets to, and I think it also sort
of outlines important steps that the discipline
can take.
So when Donna says that, you know, we tend
to think about out there and think about the
interventions that we will sort of craft or
develop for out there.
We often don't think about the way in which
anthropology as a discipline has in the past
and continues to uphold white supremacy.
I mean, this is probably a discipline that
we were serving most anthropologists would
say that they have liberal sort of orientations,
and they would classify themselves as being
very progressive, but you know, when we sort
of take a bird's eyeview of this, we find
out that the progressives and those folk who
are so-called liberal identifying are just
as problematic with regards to viability of
Black lives, the violence that Black people
experience day to day, whether it's physical
in the grotesque forms, whether its the silencing,
not siding, all of the different variations
of violence, and so it's not always the sort
of the grotesque, dramatic forms of violence.
It's a continuum, but they would say that
they're very progressive and they support
this cause and they're here because they feel
it in their heart to be here.
But in many ways, this is a misunderstanding
of the way in which white supremacy socializes
even those with good intentions.
It's not a dichotomy, or dichotomous relationship
between good and bad, or good or bad, but
we all are shaped by white supremacy, and
if we don't think about it consciously, then
we can't take the proper, we don't even name
it.
I mean, we become nervous about even naming
it, right, to say the word, to evoke, when
we talk about race, we automatically assume
we're talking about Black people.
>> DONNA AUSTON: Right.
If we say we need to reverse gaze, if you
will, and talk about whiteness, people get
fragile, get upset, get tense, but we could
never sort of resolve this problem if we don't
do that, so to answer the question, you know,
anthropology has to first look at in-house.
And honestly do so.
And then we can provide the proper interventions
for policing and some of the other sort of
manifestations of white supremacy, whether
it be racism, sexism, classism, et cetera.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Yeah, anthropology has really
been great at defining terms and the language
that we use that is specific.
So, to Kalfani's point, white supremacy, anti-Blackness,
and those sorts of rhetorical shifts actually
then impact how people begin to think about
it.
But you're absolutely right.
Just calling it race, it became this neutral
thing.
So it is, that's a role we could play is really
help creating a language, a precise language
that can become a natural part of how we talk
about it, but that's precise, that identifies
the particular problem.
>> JEFF MARTIN: Okay.
Thank you.
It's interesting how you all are addressing
many of the questions, just through your discourse,
just through your conversations.
You're covering everything.
Here's another question, and this may be possibly
geared, so it will be geared to all of you,
but Avi Bornstein particularly.
Can the panelists talk about the larger global
systems of racialized policing and what anthropologists
can contribute?
For example, the police in Minneapolis and
everywhere else were IDF-trained and stepping
on the necks of people to control them is
a specific technique that's supplied to Palestinians
in the occupied territories, so what about
the larger, global systems of racialized policing?
>> AVRAM BORNSTEIN: Yeah, I mean, that's a
natural entry for anthropology as well.
That's right.
Your example speaks to me.
My work, you know, for many years was in the
occupied territories in with Palestinians
writing about the impact of the occupation
of Israeli violence on everyday life.
So, and you're absolutely right that there's
a shared technology, and a shared technology
of every level.
From, you know, pressure-point type of stuff
to the kinds of architecture that's being
used to the software, the kind of stuff that
Donna was talking about in terms of militarization,
that's shared training that goes across the
world.
But this is, you know, this is not really
a unique thing, right?
This is a part of the history of policing
as well, right?
That what was an original experiment to control
the Irish, you know, in the English occupation
of Ireland, you know, was adopted to control
the Irish in New York City and Boston.
So that kind of global level of sharing and
the exporting of, and New York has been one
of the biggest exporters of police, you know,
rhetoric and police organization and Giuliani,
who's been in the news so much with President
Trump, and had made a fortune selling his
consultancy work to countries all over the
world about how to use geomapping, basically
what was stop and frisk, to use geomapping
systems of crime control that ended up giving,
controlling Black areas of town, dark areas
of town, so, in Rio, right, or in Johannesburg.
So this kind of global reach, not to mention
that the very systems that we're talking about,
the exploitative systems that we're talking
about are global in nature.
That that same, you know, anti-Blackness racism
and white supremacy that we're talking about
in the United States, allows for the kind
of exploitation of resources around the world,
whether it's people's labor in Bangladesh,
right, or resources in the Middle East or
things like that.
So all of that is, it's part of this global
system, that's right.
I think that that's, and that's something
that anthropologists have spent a good deal
of time studying and seeing how policing has
been exported and imported and the racism
of it as well, and as Donna and Shanti said,
also the rhetorics of racism that have reverberated
around the world, and that's right, it's not
only, it's amazing how powerful what white
supremacist ideology has infiltrated different
parts of the world.
I mean, you know, there's some great material
on the genocide in Rwanda, you know, and of
course, there's this whole ideology of race,
of white supremacy, that's involved with Hutus
and Tutsis, that it's like kind of shocking
in a way, but that that has infiltrated, that
has infiltrated the globe as well.
>> KALFANI TURE: And I would just throw in,
it's very fluid.
There's a wonderful book out called Badges
without Borders, how global counter insurgencies
transform American policing written by, I
apologize, I can't remember the author's name,
but he's at Johns Hopkins University.
And he's talks about how we didn't just learn
from, you know, the [indistinguishable], or
police in Germany or other parts of the world,
but we've also been training police around
the world.
And post-9/11, we were training a lot of law
enforcement at the global level in both tactics
of using force but also just surveillance.
And so, it's a wonderful book, and I think
it gives this sort of comparative treatment
to police training globally.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Certainly the relationship
between the emergence of very militaristic,
entrenched, sort of brutal police forces with
the global extractive economy, right?
So that's sort of the impetus behind a lot
of it.
I'm thinking now of both South Africa in the
regulation of, and most of my research is
in Africa, the regulations again of Black
bodies to confined spaces, whether it's the
homelands or at the mines into protected,
you know, basically racial apartheid but also
for the extractive pieces as well as to Avi's
part about Rwanda and securing who has access
to resources.
Probably one of the worst places in the world
right now is The Democratic Republic of the
Congo and protecting the extraction of very
critical resources that are used for our cell
phones and the like, and the importation of
weapons, for the exportation of resources.
So also, the tie with the global economy and
extraction.
Again, same thing we see in St. Louis.
>> JEFF MARTIN: Okay.
Next question is, actually, from an economic
student at San Diego State.
I'm curious because oftentimes it seems like
issues of incarceration, drug targeting, police
brutality, are largely tied to low-income
communities.
From econometric analysis, race is correlated,
but it seems like class is more significant
variable in understanding these issues.
Can you talk about the connection between
race and class in the context of these issues?
Is it appropriate to address issues of racism
without addressing class antagonisms?
>> DONNA AUSTON: One of the answers that I
give to this question, because it comes up
a lot, when discussing these types of issues,
not just policing, but say, something like
environmental racism, for example, and I always
like to start with reminding people that Black
people in the United States, in the Caribbean,
in South America, literally started our journey
in this part of the world as property.
So we are, like black people, are literally
capital, right?
So it is absolutely impossible, in my opinion,
to separate race from class.
And had a race-based economic system that
actually built wealth on, you know, on the
sale and extraction of labor from Black people
in the Western hemisphere.
But also, under the colonial order, in various
parts of the globe.
I mean, what Shanti was saying about that
system of global extraction, I mean, officially,
we're like post-colonialism, right, allegedly,
right?
But that was, so the people who weren't shipped
here weren't, you know, worked to, you know,
extract resources from the places that they
lived in.
And this continues to this day.
And so at that point, it's, when I get this
question, I have to admit, and I'm not picking
on the questioner at all, but it is a bit
frustrating, because a lot of times we do,
it's not one or the other.
It's always both.
And so I think it's very important for us,
and it continues to be the case.
So, for example, if you look at the wage gap
in the US, right, race and gender have everything
to do with, you know, with wealth and class
mobility, right?
If you are a Black woman earning pennies on
the dollar to what a white man makes just
because of your identity, how is it possible
to separate race from class and from gender
and from some of these other categories, right?
When we look at practices in the US where
racism has often been tied to specific economic
practices, such as redlining, you know, preventing
Black veterans returning from war from being
eligible for loans and grants and other financial
means of assistance under the GI Bill, whether
you're talking about school segregation where
Black people were legally and often violently
excluded from educational opportunities, which
in many ways is, has been one of the primary
means of economic class mobility for people.
If I can't actually attend school or if the
schools that I am attending are separate and
inferior, so go back to, you know, Plessey
versus Ferguson and some of these other earlier
cases that established segregation as the
legal, like, law of the land in many cases,
and, of course, it's continued in sort of,
you know, these, you know, more- sorry, what
is the word I'm looking for?
You know, sort of transformed, right, sort
of ways.
We don't have Jim Crow anymore.
Brown versus Board of Education was supposed
to have ended school segregation.
But we know from the data that in most places
in the US, schools are still highly segregated.
I know New Jersey where I live, which is in
the North, right, it's not a part of the Jim
Crow Belt historically.
We still have some of the most segregated
schools in the country.
And so like all of these things that actually
contribute to people's ability, and this is,
and I could go on, they're predatory lending
schemes that disproportionately impact communities
of color.
I mean, it's like, you know, we have all day.
We could do a whole webinar on the ways that
economics is profoundly and primarily shaped
in a lot of ways by race, gender, and other
sorts of social identity.
So these things, in my opinion, are very much
inseparable.
>> AVRAM BORNSTEIN: In our discussion, someone
threw out the word that's on everybody's lips
right now that you were just describing of
intersectionality, and so there's a certain
intersection between these types of identities.
I would just want to make one sort of addition
to that, and that, clearly, the racial system,
you know, that has this intense organizing
factor in terms of class systems.
But they're intersecting.
They're not identical, right?
And that racist fears, cultural fears of the
other, in any dimension.
I've written about this in terms of Israelis
and Palestinians, that there's an exploitative
opportunity with those things, but there's
also a dynamic of racial fear and white supremacy
that operates beyond exploitation, even, that
has a dynamic completely on its own, that
is, has no economic rationality to it, and
that it cannot be reduced to, that it is irrational
in a certain economic way.
So although some people can be opportunistic
and completely exploit these racism and racial
fear and racial otherizing, it has a dynamic
that can also just destroy the ability to
make any profit whatsoever, and you know,
in multiple time frames that we could look
at that.
So I think we should allow it some of its
own momentum, in a sense, or social power.
>> JEFF MARTIN: In the remaining time, we
have, it doesn't look like much, but I want
to get to the culture of policing again, if
I can, and the thought that, you know, some
people say, "Oh, there are rogue cops, there
are bad cops."
No, there's a culture of policing, and the
training and where it all begins and it goes
even beyond that.
But this question says, when it comes to reforming
police education to require a two-year degree,
how would this be vetted?
I have seen the types of classes that folks
going into policing take in community college.
I've actually seen the course material, and
it tends to be racist, sociology-based data
that reifies the ideologies that people of
color are inherently criminal.
So how would this even be a solution if before
they even get into the academy, they're already
being indoctrinated to see people of color
as nonhuman in need of surveillance and order?
>> AVRAM BORNSTEIN: I guess I'll jump on that
because I spoke about education.
There's no question that education, that the
higher education in the United States has
been an instrument in order to support white
supremacy since its beginning, and it always
has been.
It's also been a vehicle to counter white
supremacy and to counter other kinds of vehicles.
You know, I mean, we're very proud of the
mobility we bring to folks, to people of color
at CUNY who have moved through the system,
through the economic system, the educational
system.
And so I think that, for sure, it depends
a lot on what kind of education is gonna happen.
I think that we need to have an accredited
type of education.
You know, we can say the same thing about
counseling and school teachers, right?
And so they have had, in their accreditation
process, they have, you know, they have metrics
that look at how does the profession address
these issues.
And not everybody does it well, right?
But it's a self-conscious kind of thing.
Now, criminal justice is much further than
counseling or K through 12 education, but
that's a potential direction.
That that becomes a part of, you want to have
an accredited two-year degree or four-year
degree, you have to at least try to address
certain benchmarks.
Does it, is it a fool proof system?
Absolutely not, but it is built with the idea
that higher education can be a progressive
force in this, the kind of analysis and attack
on ethnocentrism that we are advocating here
for anthropology.
That's the higher education that we're advocating
for, and we know that it could also be racist.
Anthropology has also taught people about
cranial sizes and those kinds of things for
plenty of years.
I want to throw one thing out here about police
culture, though.
Kalfani already touched on the warrior stuff,
so I'm not going to come back to that and
the militarization.
But there is a double side to this, right,
there is a contradiction, because police,
you know, they don't perceive themselves in
this perspective, right, of being warriors
against people, good people, citizens, and
such like this.
They see themselves defending everybody, right?
Every good person gets their defense, and
any, you know, that's the, that's what they
want to see themselves as, right?
The defender of the neighborhood.
And coming into even a poor, oppressed, Black
neighborhood, and I might be a white guy from
Long Island, but I see myself as the defender
of the people of this neighborhood, as deluded
as that might be, right?
But that is, that's a very strong cultural
element, that pulls, in a very, you know,
it's completely corrupted by racism, but I
don't think, I don't think it's, but I think
that is a basically idea about democratic
policing, that no matter who you are, you
can call a cop and get somebody to come deal
with your problems, right?
And cops want to believe that about themselves.
So that's something a part of it that can
be tapped, let me put it that way, and encouraged,
and we need, like good anthropologists to
expose them to the ethnocentric racist presumptions
they make in trying to protect the good people,
right?
Those kinds.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: But that also means that
we need to step up and put ourselves in a
space where we can teach those classes in
our criminology programs, in our policing
programs, in our homeland security programs,
in our programs where we're seeing this kind
of phenomena happening.
And it means that as anthropologists, I mean
some of the questions that have come up is
how can we as academics really begin to address
this on our campuses?
How do we get our campus police involved?
And I think there comes a point where we have
to step up and say, we are suited to have
these kinds of conversations, and then we
need to go to our senates, our faculty senates
and basically say, "Let's create requirements",
and you know, we were fortunate at San Diego
State, and we're very fortunate in California
that we have an ethnic studies mandate now
as part of our general education program,
but in addition the Senate just passed a resolution
that all of these kinds of programs now have
to have a course, a series of courses, actually,
but they have to take at least one course
that gets to dive into the policing of Black
bodies.
So this is something that we can do as individuals
and as departments and as faculty and then
work with our anthropologists and others in
the communities to really make that happen.
>> KALFANI TURE: Go ahead.
>> DONNA AUSTON: If I can just add, really
quickly, part of what also, I think, is a
component of the culture of policing is, of
course, education, training, that sort of
thing, but it's also sort of what police are
allowed to do and get away with.
And there's a culture that extends beyond
immediate police departments and it stems
into the legislature and it extends into the
court system and it extends into, you know,
some of these other ancillary systems that
are sort of responsible for making sure that,
you know, somebody, you know, holds police
accountable.
And because that's been severely lacking or
very weak in most cases, I mean, most of these
officers are not even charged formally for
killing people.
It's very difficult to sort of, you know,
to sort of expect that the police are going
to police themselves.
And there has to be, you know, yes, I think
there are things that we can do in our classrooms
and whatever, right, that actually are very
important in helping people to see issues
differently, right?
It's one of the reasons why I teach, why I
like to teach, because I like to sort of have
my students learn the process of, you know,
being exposed to other perspectives and that
sort of thing.
But at the same time, you know, and I'm, I'm
speaking now primarily as a Black woman.
You know, who happens to be an anthropologist,
but it's everything that in my experience,
you know, in however many years I've been
alive, I won't tell you all how old I am,
but it's more than a few, that police, they
don't have any incentive to rein in behavior,
you know, unless they're internally motivated,
right?
And I think that's a big problem.
And one of the things that Dr. King said,
Dr. Martin Luther King said was that you know,
that, "The law may not make a man love me,
but it can keep him from lynching me."
And that's a very, that's very important,
you know, distinction.
You know, sometimes, there has to be some
measure of accountability, and also, I believe,
you know, taking away the ability, you know,
in this case, you know, one of the ways to
do that is through defunding, right?
Not funding police so that they are able to
be armed to the teeth.
So that every single, cause it's sort of a
contradictory messaging, right, that we're
saying, you should get this type of training,
and, again, it may help individual officers,
but I think at a systemic level it has limits,
because you're telling, you know, yeah, you
know, Black people, you know, maybe are like
this or that, and maybe you shouldn't, you
know, shoot on site, but then you sort of
sit, you know, the most sophisticated, you
know, murderous, destructive weaponry in their
hand, like what is the actual like messaging
that we're giving to police officers when
we tell them to exercise this type of restraint
but actually then give them the most lethal
set of tools in order to do the job that they're
supposed to do?
It's sort of, it's hard to sort of expect,
I think, that they will not, "Well, why do
I have all this fancy equipment?
I must, it's for use, right?"
And so that's one aspect, like thinking about
this as, you know, there are, there are a
lot of different approaches that I think have
to be simultaneously enacted that help us
to really get this problem under some sort
of control.
>> KALFANI TURE: So I just want to add.
So there was a lot of points raised.
And first, let me just be matter of fact,
here.
You can't train someone who doesn't want to
be trained.
In other words, they can go through the motions
in the police academy.
I can tell from you the academies I attended,
you had a multiple choice test at the end
of some instruction block, but a week prior,
you had already received the answers.
So you can't train someone who doesn't want
to be trained.
And second of all, there are a lot of different
structural things that also invalidate the
training.
You know, I spent about what, 16 hours learning
about domestic violence or interpersonal violence,
only to leave the class and have another academy
recruit tell me, what did this so-and-so do
to that guy?
Right?
And so you have a culture that invalidates
the training.
So that's an issue.
And then you have, we've gotta understand
how the D.A. or the prosecutor works with
the police officers.
When they have an issue, they go to the police
department to investigate that issue.
So there is this sort of incestual relationship
with the people who in fact should hold them
accountable.
And then, as we mentioned earlier, there's
this sort of legal sort of philosophies, whatever,
or practices, whether it be qualified immunity
or just other sort of legal jurisprudence
that protects them.
So bad policing is well insulated.
Now, I've always been an advocate for taking
police academies and putting them on college
campuses, and here's why.
So I respect the idea that you can have bad
pedagogy and a bad professor in the classroom.
But if we require police officers to get degrees
alongside of their certifications in law enforcement,
they have greater chance of being exposed
to analyses of structural inequality, what
underpins structural inequality.
They have more than 16 hours of interpersonal
violence or domestic violence.
They've taken a semester course on interpersonal
violence.
Instead of approaching policing in a ahistorical
manner, they then have to learn something
about the history of policing, perhaps, the
history of policing and race.
So I've always been a fan of moving police
academies to campuses.
The stuff that we do that we can't do on campuses
in terms of firearms training, defensive tactics,
perhaps and learning how to operate an emergency
vehicle, yeah, you can do that off campus,
but you're also exposed, hopefully, or theoretically,
to diversity.
The other thing that I want to say is, when
I say you can't train someone that doesn't
want to be trained.
Again, policing is one issue, but we have
to think about the umbrella, which is white
supremacy.
Look, you know, the reason why we have a federal
1033 program, which is for the militarization
of police officers, because culturally, we
as American citizens, also have been accepting
the idea around the Second Amendment.
We are a pro-gun country, and at the root
of that militarization of police or us as
everyday citizens and the Second Amendment
is that we fear the other.
We fear the encroachment of the other.
We believe in some, that there's some dystopic
sort quality of the other being in public
space in civil society.
And so whether as police officers, we immediately
seize upon these dystopic figures, who may
be Black or Latinx, women or queer, right,
whether we seize upon them to apprehend them,
or to permanently incapicitate them, we see
that as our obligation as police officers,
but we also see that as an obligation as everyday
citizen.
So one of the things that we did not discuss
is lateral policing, which is seeing everyday
citizens as extensions to law enforcement
who go out and enforce order.
So you can get folk who will chase Ahmaud
Arbery down, hunt him down and kill him, or
you can get a police officer that would use
force, that this sort of distance between
the two is not what we imagine; it's very
close.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: Or the woman who called
the police on the birdwatcher.
>> KALFANI TURE: That's right.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: We are arming civilians,
and the only evidence she had to give knowing
how powerful it would be is a Black man, an
African-American Man.
>> KALFANI TURE: Absolutely.
>> SHANTI PARIKH: One thing to add that I
found very useful during and after the Ferguson
thing is many of these places have Black police
societies.
That within the police are, have identified
unique structural issues that need to be addressed.
So I'm now thinking of the Ethical Society
of Police in St. Louis where they have already
identified specific structural issues that
they would like, you know, that they think
need to be abolished.
Some of them are removing police departments
from the investigative process, making the
whistle blower complaint system more, very
few whistle blower complaints within the police
because there is such an incentive to not
be a whistle blower and there's actually very
punitive measures if you are a whistle blower
from within, but also making police files
public if a police officer has a lot of different
violations as we're seeing in the Minnesota
case.
So even on the ground in our different localities,
there have been groups who have identified
and, again, going back to the 8 Can't Wait
and going back to the movement for Black lives,
those sorts of outlines can be very useful
in thinking about which one of these policies,
which one of these recommendations are the
right ones to target, depending on the particular
situation.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Thank you so much.
We are really against time.
Dr. Auston, Dr. Parikh, Dr. Ture, Dr. Bornstein,
your insight, the opportunity to have had
this conversation with you today is something
that none of us can walk away from without
having changed our lives in some kind of really
powerful way.
Jeff, I don't nkow if you want to be able
to talk a little bit about how we can begin
to answer the questions that did not get answered
and how we can continue to include our amazing
panelists as part of this ongoing conversation
as we move forward to not just leave it here,
but this is where we pick it up, and we run
with it.
>> JEFF MARTIN: Exactly.
One of the things I want to say quickly is
that this has been recorded, and we will make
this visible on the AAA YouTube channel, so
you'll be able to see it.
And I don't know if my boss, Ed, is going
to get angry with me right now, but I am actually
going to talk to him about actually possibly
a part 2 webinar, because we've only just
begun to address this issue.
And out of, I can tell you, 61 questions,
we only asked maybe five or six.
So it's possible, we could have a part 2 and
continue this discussion again.
>> RAMONA PEREZ: Thank you.
Thank you so much, Dr. Austin, Dr. Parikh,
Dr. Ture, Dr. Bornstein, any last?
