In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday, but I didn’t celebrate it by that name until the year 2000. My family moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, in 1993, where my father, a lieutenant in the US Navy, was stationed after a three-year deployment to Naples, Italy, which is where I started school. Second grade was my introduction to the American school calendar and the set of holidays that would be welcomed vacations from the classroom. As a seven-year-old, I didn’t think to ask anyone why January 15 marked Lee-Jackson-King Day.

The Commonwealth of Virginia began observing the January 19 birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee around 1889, and in 1904 added to this the recognition of General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson’s birthday (January 21). Up until 1983, it was known as Lee-Jackson Day. That year, in accordance with the new federal law, Virginia began observing Martin Luther King Day, only the Virginia legislature voted to combine it with the nearby Lee-Jackson Day, giving us Lee-Jackson-King Day, which I celebrated for seven years of my life.

“Celebrated” may not be the correct term. Alongside my classmates, I passively accepted the idea that these three men should be honored with a holiday and gleefully took the day off from school. We never bothered to ask anyone about Lee or Jackson or their accomplishments, and our teachers were more than happy to leave it all unexplained. Before any of us had any real sense of what the Confederacy was, our holiday calendars told us that the men who fought in defense of it were worthy of celebration, and we went along with it. In fact, for several years I believed that, if they were being honored on the same day as King, Lee and Jackson must have also been somehow involved in the civil-rights movement.

It wasn’t until 2000, when Virginia decided to separate King’s holiday from Lee-Jackson Day, observing the former on the third Monday of January and the latter on the preceding Friday, that I came to know the true legacies of the two slave-owning Confederate generals with whom the King had shared a day with for 16 years. A Washington Post story from 1999 about the “peculiar” holiday sported the headline “Three Heroes, One Odd Holiday for Virginians.” Indeed, even after the separation of holidays, they were all treated as such.

The torch bearers who descended upon Charlottesville this past weekend to protest the removal of a statue honoring Lee appear young enough to have attended grade school after the separation, but it’s clear they received the same message. In Lee, they see a hero. Not only do they see a hero, they see themselves. The chant that animated their march was, “You will not replace us.” More than 150 years after the end of Civil War, they choose to identify with those who took up arms in order to maintain holding people in bondage. I wish I found this more surprising.

If in our national memory it is considered heroic both to kill in the defense of slavery and to die attempting to undo slavery’s legacy, then heroism has no meaning. But since we have failed to properly cast the Confederacy as a villain, or even to definitively state that the reason for its secession from the Union was the preservation of slavery, the standards for heroism are more malleable than they perhaps should be. Where we have (mostly) condemned slavery, we have refused to condemn its defenders, choosing to view their actions not as villainous but historical anomalies. We allow them the excuse of being “products of their time,” as if they had no hand in shaping the political and social dynamics of that time. We give them the cover of “states’ rights,” as though that has not always meant further tyranny visited upon black people.

And we protect the modern-day torch wavers by pretending that the culprit is a collective amnesia around American history, when this retelling is a much more deliberate choice. False equivalence is a tool, not an accident of ignorance. It is a choice to focus on Lee’s reputation as a military tactician and not on what that acumen was put to use for, the same as it is a choice to describe his relationship to the institution of slavery as more nebulous than it actually was. It was a choice to erect these statues honoring his life, just as it was a choice to keep them up for so long. What the torch bearers understand as the reason for making these choices, the same reason they chant “you will not replace us,” is that this form of myth-making is the cornerstone of white masculine identity. In order to continue accepting unchecked white-male power, we all must believe, on some level, in the enduring heroism of white-male villains. We must buy into the idea that, even when white men are violently wrong, in reality there are, as the president implied, many sides who are violently wrong. White men’s violence must be viewed as protection of core American values, thus making any response to it a threat to a perceived natural order.

Virginia responded to the threat presented by King’s holiday by making him the equivalent of two Confederate generals. I sometimes wonder how much violence I have accepted in my lifetime as a result of this equivocation, how much authority I have ceded to the notion of white male power as benevolent. It is frightening to think of how colonized your own mind has been, but more frightening to remember that the colonizer is prepared to kill to keep you terrified, and afterward call himself a hero.

At the end of this month, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton will step down from his position. It’s his second time retiring from the post, having served as NYPD commissioner from 1994 to 1997. Upon his election in 2013, Bill de Blasio brought Bratton back to the job, sending a signal to his potential critics that the progressive new mayor would be “tough on crime.”

Bratton will, undoubtedly, go down in history as a legend of American policing. He served as police commissioner for America’s two largest cities—New York and Los Angeles—and oversaw dramatic decreases in crime rates, while implementing tactics that have influenced police departments all over the country, and even some parts of the rest of the world. But how you interpret this legend will depend on what side of those tactics you were on.

A New York Times Magazine story summarizes his legacy this way:

A self-described innovator, [Bratton] embraced the “broken windows” theory of policing—the idea that the police could cut down on serious crimes by making it clear that even the trivial ones wouldn’t go unpunished. To hold officers accountable to this philosophy, especially in neighborhoods they had once neglected, Bratton tasked a transit lieutenant, Jack Maple, with developing a management system that kept careful track of arrest and crime statistics throughout the city. The system, called CompStat, short for “compare statistics,’’ was often credited for the drop in crime that followed. By the time Bratton left New York in 1997, New York’s murder rate had fallen by half. Cities from Chicago to Sydney hired Bratton and his protégés as police chiefs and consultants. Today, most large American cities use some form of CompStat.

Yet, despite wide imitation, there still has not been a definitive link made between “broken windows” policing and a reduction in crime. A recent Department of Investigation report that reviewed arrests from the past six years in New York City found no correlation between the rate of misdemeanor arrests/summonses and that for felony crime. Moreover, combining “broken windows” with CompStat—a system that requires officers to log just how many stops, arrests, summonses they make—has put pressure on police officers to make more arrests, and to do so for increasingly trivial infractions. And, as this same Times story notes, “Most of this activity took place in minority neighborhoods.” According to Newsweek, “Arrestees not listed as ‘white’ accounted for 85.7 percent of total 2014 misdemeanor arrests, a decline from 87 percent in 2013. Blacks and Hispanics accounted for some 80 percent of total misdemeanor arrests in 2014 and 81.1 percent in 2013.”

That is Bratton’s real legacy, and it was further legitimized when de Blasio reappointed him police commissioner. Ironically, de Blasio was elected by dint of his opposition to the overuse of stop-and-frisk, a tactic that became more prevalent under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly. Stop-and-frisk is a natural outgrowth of “broken windows”–style policing, where innocuous behavior is registered as potentially dangerous criminal activity. By bringing Bratton back, de Blasio ensured that policing would not change, as an ostensibly progressive mayor signed off on the same philosophy championed by “law and order” conservatives. Still, even before returning to the NYPD, Bratton trained, consulted, and influenced so many officers and departments that his imprint on police culture is unshakable.

Bratton institutionalized in police officers the kind of fear and suspicion that killed Rekia Boyd in Chicago, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights. His is a legacy of arresting panhandlers and kids dancing in subway cars, of Eric Garner’s videotaped death, Akai Gurley’s being shot in a project stairwell, and a pregnant woman’s being placed in a chokehold over her use of a grill. The stuff a noble career in policing is made of.

Who replaces Bratton is irrelevant, because at this point any person “qualified” to do so is a product of his school of policing. The new commissioner, Jimmy O’Neill, has been in the department since 1983, which means he has served under Bratton twice, as well as Kelly, and has stated he plans to continue “broken windows.” And so long as Bratton’s influence continues to flourish, any lip service paid to the idea of police reform will falter, because it will be at odds with the fundamentals he established. Good riddance, for sure, but the celebration of his resignation is sobered by the realization that he isn’t actually going anywhere.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I decided it was time for me to read everything I could get my hands on in order to become a respectable black intellectual. At Barnes & Noble, I grabbed the only book by bell hooks in stock in the “African-American Interests” section—Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. “I have found myself saying again and again that mental health is the revolutionary anti­racist frontier African Americans must collectively explore,” hooks wrote. She touched on issues of self-hatred, depression, addiction, and emotional well-being. I promptly decided it was one of the most important books I had ever read. Whatever was hurting black people, I wanted to fight. But I soon forgot about the book. I knew people who were in prison; I didn’t know anyone who was depressed.

And that included myself. Starting when I was 16, I had occasional panic attacks. Even so, I failed to connect Rock My Soul to anything in my experience. I saw in hooks’s words something plaguing black communities, not me. My panic attacks were frightening, but whenever they struck, I told myself they were nothing to worry about. After all, I was, by now, a college student. Emotionally stable. Perfectly sane.

Three years later, Rock My Soul became newly relevant. It had always been difficult for me to maintain interest in school, but I had done enough to get by. Now I was finding it harder to pretend. At some point in senior year, I stopped showing up.

I was the editor in chief of our student paper, and my work there was the only thing that got me out of bed on the days when I wanted to sleep until 4, 5, or 6 pm. Often, I would return home and open up a bottle of cheap vodka that I had started keeping around. I didn’t drink in earnest until I was 21—not because I was a stickler for legality, but because I was scared that getting drunk meant losing control. By the beginning of 2008, I had abandoned that fear and would drink that ice-cold vodka more days than not.

Every day, I was lying to people. Responding to a “How are you?” with “I’m fine” was enough to satisfy most people. The more I lied, the more I wanted to believe the lie—and the less I could. Every time I said I was fine, I saw myself dying. Sometimes I saw myself intentionally crashing my car. Sometimes I saw myself jumping from a tall building, frightened and free, feeling the wind beneath me.

I reached a point where I wanted to talk, but I’d pushed away the people it was hard to lie to. I stopped answering my mother’s phone calls. The vodka in my freezer stopped being helpful.

I had never smoked weed before. But the less comfort drinking brought me, the more curious I became. The first time I tried it, it didn’t have much of an effect. The second time, I wanted to make sure I felt it. So I inhaled sharply. Moments later, I noticed that something was off in the middle of my chest. Soon, there was tingling in my left arm. I couldn’t get enough air. In desperation, I asked my roommate Justin to take me to the hospital. As I panicked, sticking my head out of his car window like a dog wagging its tongue, Justin tried to reassure me. At the hospital, the doctor asked me if I’d done anything unusual that evening. “I smoked weed for the first time,” I said. “I guess you learned your lesson, right?” he asked. “Yeah,” I managed. Then the doctor left, the nurses dismissed me, and Justin drove me home.

It was the first time since I was 16 that a panic attack landed me in the hospital. Since it was helped along by the weed, I wrote it off as an anomaly. But by the end of March, it was getting harder to make the lie believable. With increasing frequency, my parents asked me if I was sure I was going to graduate on time. I hadn’t purchased a cap and gown. I still wasn’t going to class. I hadn’t even pretended to revise my thesis. “Yeah, I should,” I told them. “I’ll have to do a summer course to finish my thesis, but I’ll be able to walk.”

To tell the truth would have been to admit failure. I didn’t want to face my mother’s disappointment or my father’s lecture. I was their firstborn, and I was part of the first generation in both families to have several members attend college. My graduation would be a sign of progress. But I wasn’t even making it out of bed most days.

I went home one weekend and found my mother in the backyard, getting her plants ready for summer. “So how are we doing this—when school is over, are you coming back here?” she asked. “What room are you taking?” I started crying. “What’s wrong, my child?”

“I don’t know… everything,” I replied. Her hands were caked in soil, so she called my father over to embrace me. He hugged me and walked me back into the house. I sat on the couch and cried until I physically couldn’t any longer.

I told my parents what I felt—some of it. I told them I wasn’t sleeping, that there was no way I was going to graduate on time, that I felt like a failure, that I was afraid of disappointing them and everyone else. My father said, “It sounds like you’re going through some sort of depression.”

There was the word. I was relieved to hear it, because what I was feeling had a name that I could say. But I still didn’t know what to do about it.

* * *

I now know many people who have lived with depression, but that’s a retroactive designation. When I was 21, no one in my life would have said they suffered from depression. Plenty of people said they were “depressed,” which generally meant “really sad,” but no one would cop to a mental illness. The only people I “knew” who had gone to a psychiatrist and talked about it openly were in Woody Allen movies. For several decades, white people in the professional and artistic classes have been able to wear their weekly analysis sessions as a badge of intellect, while the rest of us struggle with the stigma of mental illness—a stigma that is especially strong in black communities. Black people have every reason to be distrustful of mental-health care in this country: Psychiatric institutions have largely functioned as another form of prison, and mental illnesses are often attributed to black people despite their completely rational behaviors. But that doesn’t mean we don’t suffer, often in silence.

My family wanted to help. Aunt Gay, my mother’s twin, called the next day to reassure me that she was proud of me. Then Darius, one of Aunt Gay’s sons, called and said that I had nothing to be ashamed of, that I had accomplished more than so many young black men get the chance to do. I appreciated the pep talks and told them as much, but they weren’t what I needed. I asked Aunt Gay to tell Antaeus, her oldest son, to call me.

“How do you do it?” I said as soon as he did. Confused, Antaeus asked, “How do I do what?” Crying, I answered: “How do you live without Demetri?”

Demetri was born on February 27, 1982, the first son of Uncle Clayton, my mother’s only brother. Demetri was the best at everything: basketball, football, video games. I would practice Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter at home, trying to get good enough to beat him on our next trip to DC. But I looked up to Demetri because he didn’t tease as hard as everyone else. I felt protected around him.

In March of 1999, my mother left for a few days. On occasion, she would go to see her family without us, so that didn’t strike me as abnormal. Then my father called my brother and me to come downstairs. Demetri had been shot, he told us. Seven times. I didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation because he never said, “Demetri is dead.” Instead, he gave us a lecture about why he was always telling us that “choices” were important in life. (Demetri had sold drugs before, though he wasn’t at the time of the shooting.) My big cousin had been shot, and my father was admonishing me about “choices.”

I didn’t learn that Demetri was dead until the three of us arrived in DC. Up to that point, I thought we were just going to visit him in the hospital. I walked into the church for the funeral and immediately started crying. We had been to a number of funerals in my 12 short years, but none with circumstances this tragic. I finally made it up to the casket where Demetri lay dead, but my body felt out of place and time. I wanted to be anywhere else.

At Aunt Connie’s house afterward, Uncle Clayton had a little to drink. He had already lost the love of his life, Demetri’s mother, and now he had to bury his son. “You still got that jump shot?” he asked me. I tried a smile for him. The last time he’d visited us in Virginia Beach, we’d played basketball in the driveway, and he was impressed by my jump shot. “Next time I come down, I wanna see it, you hear me?” He was trying to make me feel better. I struggled through a half-hearted laugh, nodded my head, and said, “Yeah, OK.”

We never got the chance. Uncle Clayton died the next year.

I still had Demetri in my heart and memories, and I thought that was all I needed. But four years later, I had to acknowledge the pain and ask Antaeus—the only person still around who had been as deeply affected by his death as I was—how he made it through each day without him.

We talked for probably an hour. Antaeus told me how hard it was, why he’d gotten a tattoo of Demetri’s nickname on his forearm, why we had to keep going. It helped—a little—to know I wasn’t alone.

I heard from Aunt Connie next. She started with the familiar pep talk, but when I started talking about Demetri, things changed. “You like to write, don’t you?” she said. “Then you use those words. You use those words to make sure what happened to Demetri don’t have to happen to any other black boys.”

* * *

Black people in the United States pride ourselves on the fact that we have survived despite having every imaginable form of violence inflicted on us. We’ve made it through slavery and lynchings, rape and Jim Crow, poverty and police dogs, fire hoses and jail cells, and we have raised families and created culture that is emulated (and stolen) the world over. Even with all the odds stacked against us, we have persevered through the strength of our collective will and our faith in God. But neither will nor faith can heal the psychic wounds of that survival.

While black women are expected to be strong enough to shoulder the emotional needs of the entire community, men inherit a sense of masculinity that teaches stoicism as a virtue. Generations of black boys and men are walking around with turmoil swelling inside them, ready to explode at any minute. “The violence done to black boys is the abusive insistence, imposed on them by family and by society, that they not feel,” bell hooks writes in Rock My Soul. I learned very early on to suppress my emotions. I was a sensitive child; the slightest bit of teasing from my big cousins, whose approval I desperately wanted, would set me off in tears. So I tried to laugh along or be silent.

And I learned by example. My father was a picture-perfect example of masculine authority. My brother and I knew him as a dutiful provider and a strict disciplinarian. I can only guess now at what made him afraid, what caused him pain, what trauma he’d lived through to become the man he did. He always said we could talk to him about anything, but he never opened up to us—and I learned to never open up, either.

I always waited until my pain was unbearable, until it left me facedown and sinking. Then things would come pouring out of me and I’d feel much better, but I never carried that lesson forward. I wanted to change this pattern, but I didn’t know how.

Sometimes it feels like the problem is that we black men have internalized the perception of ourselves as unfeeling brutes. Sometimes it feels like the problem is our commitment to an antiquated idea of strength. But when we do speak, who listens? Or, more critically: When we speak, what do people hear?

* * *

Hip-hop is the biggest cultural phenomenon of the past half-century. Rappers get criticized for their materialism, sexism, homophobia, and glorification of gangster lifestyles—and there is plenty of merit to that critique. But we’re all guilty of reducing our image of rappers to caricatures. When they tell us what’s wrong, do we listen?

When the Notorious B.I.G. was a “nigga rappin’ ’bout blunts and broads / Tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars,” people paid attention. When he told us about his “Suicidal Thoughts,” we brushed it aside. We turned “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” into a money-making anthem, without taking note of Inspectah Deck saying: “Though I don’t know why I chose to smoke sess / I guess that’s the time when I’m not depressed / But I’m still depressed and I ask, What’s it worth?” When Tupac was hollering “Thug Life,” everyone from vice presidential candidates to my parents wanted him censored, but they couldn’t be found when he said: “I smoke a blunt to take the pain out / And if I wasn’t high I’d probably try to blow my brains out.” Jay Z and Kanye West’s album Watch the Throne was dismissed by some critics as “luxury rap,” but there’s nothing luxurious about Jay Z asking: “Where the fuck is the press? Where the fuck is the Pres? / Either they don’t know or don’t care, I’m fucking depressed.”

When T.I. kept getting arrested on gun and drug charges, did anyone ask whether his behavior was the result of having witnessed so many people in his life die or go to prison while his talent made him a millionaire celebrity, even as survivor’s guilt ate away at him?

Who would we be if we understood mental illness, if we could offer support and had access to all the resources needed to address these common but unspoken struggles? I got lucky: My family cared and supported me, even if they didn’t always understand. Through social media, I found a community—starting with the poet and mental-health advocate Bassey Ikpi—that made me feel less alone and taught me there were ways to heal. And I had enough resources at my disposal to make that healing possible.

It’s not true for everyone, and it’s especially not true for black boys trying to become black men in America. But we can end this deadly lack of care. We can build communities that prioritize mental health and encourage the understanding that depression isn’t a sign of weakness, but an illness like any other. And we can fight to ensure that therapists and psychiatrists versed in racism and gender oppression, proper medication, and facilities that don’t mimic prisons are available to us all. But first we have to start talking about what we need.

Former President Bill Clinton caused a stir last week when, confronted by protesters at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, he offered this defense of the racist language deployed by then–first lady Hillary Clinton as justification for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994:

I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped on crack and sent them out into the street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens…. You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth!

That Bill Clinton is now forcefully defending the same bill that, just last year, he admitted “made the problem [of mass incarceration] worse” does not come as a surprise. For the entirety of his political career, Clinton has attempted to sell regressive racist policies as a form of advancement for black communities, while enjoying a level of cultural cachet within those communities that has largely inoculated him from the criticism he deserves.

Those days are over—and we are finally reckoning with the damage done during Clinton’s presidency and demanding more from the Democratic Party. But Clinton’s comments still shed light on the way our 1990s conceptions of crime and justice influence how we understand those conceptions today.

Undergirding Clinton’s defense of the crime bill is the belief in the existence of a natural and permanent criminal class of citizens. If there are people who are going to commit crimes, logically it follows that we should have mechanisms in place to punish those people. As that class of people grows and shows more and more disregard for the law, logically it follows that we should invest more in those mechanisms of punishment while also making them harsher.

But there is no inherent criminality. First, crime is not a fixed category of behavior. Anything can be a crime if we pass the legislation to make it so. Sagging your pants is a crime in some places. If Republicans have their way, performing an abortion, a routine medical procedure, could become a crime. What is and isn’t illegal is not the best barometer for a behavior’s morality.

And with that, what is and isn’t illegal does vary from state to state, city to city. Consuming alcohol in public is illegal in some places, perfectly legal in others. Selling marijuana is illegal in most places, but, increasingly, legal in others. Does breaking a law in one state that isn’t illegal in another state make you a criminal?

Additionally, if the threshold for becoming a criminal is breaking the law, are not most people criminals? If littering and driving over the speed limit were illegal, wouldn’t most American fit the description of a criminal for having broken these laws? Or does the “criminal” tag only apply to those offenses that we’ve deemed serious enough to warrant prison time?

There are some behaviors that are more socially disruptive than others. Violence, sexual and otherwise, merits our attention as behavior we should seek to eradicate. However, if we buy into the idea of an existing and permanent criminal class, we end up devoting our resources to measures that don’t offer the hope of prevention. We still end up with a system of punishment and containment.

But that is what Harvard University researchers Thomas Abt and Christopher Winship would have us believe. Their new report, which includes research conducted across the United States and Latin America, concludes, according to Vox, that “Cities, states, and the federal government could make significant strides in fighting crime if policing resources were primarily dedicated to the most problematic neighborhoods, blocks, and even people—the ones communities know are causing trouble but don’t get enough specific attention from the criminal justice system. And coupled with behavioral intervention programs for at-risk youth and adults, these types of policies could greatly reduce violence not just in the US but around the world.”

In the interview, Abt says, “My biggest problem with the national conversation is that we’ve created a false dichotomy between legitimacy and safety…. Mass incarceration is a form of social injustice. Excessive use of police force is an injustice. Racial profiling is an injustice. But crime is also an injustice. And like those three forms of injustice that I just described, it has a disproportionate impact on poor people of color. So if you claim to represent poor people of color, I think you really need to take a broader perspective on what social justice means.”

One of my biggest problems with this view is that Abt removes the social, economic, and political contexts under which crime thrives. Again, it’s as if “high crime” and “criminals” simply exist somewhere in the wild. But crime, violence in particular, thrives under particular social circumstances. Poverty is the great predictor of where high-crime areas will be. We have also seen time and again that threats to men’s sense of masculinity and masculine pride drive violence. All of this is exacerbated by the abundance of and easy access to guns in America. Crime, according to Abt, may be an injustice, but it is also a byproduct of other forms of injustice. His solution—more, targeted policing—does not address those underlying factors.

But that leads me to my other big problem. Abt says mass incarceration and police violence are injustices, but still proposes the police as a solution to problems of crime. He advocates ending one form of violence by increasing another form of (state-sanctioned) violence. Even if it works to drive down crime—although the evidence is inconclusive on how effective more policing is to that effect—the means of achieving that are through fear, violence, and the warehousing of human beings in cages. Not only is it unclear that this system is effective as a deterrent to crime, it reinforces the idea that there’s a permanent criminal class, disrespectful of the law and of community safety, and that in turn prevents us from investing in the social programs that would alleviate much of the inequality that produces crime in the first place.

To address undesirable, anti-social behaviors, we constantly turn to the police, but inevitably more policing means more violence and incarceration. Unless we are now advocating for police to be trained in assisting people in finding jobs, the homeless in finding shelter, youth in finding recreation, the only tools a police officer has in combatting crime are the threat or use of violence and arrest. But as the New York Times Magazine profile of Edwin Raymond, a black NYPD officer currently part of a lawsuit against the department for pushing what he has called “inherently racist” policy, shows it is an almost futile battle to alter police culture, especially when trying to do so from within the ranks. Raymond, who grew up in the East Flatbush area of Brooklyn, became a police officer in order to make a steady paycheck and lift himself out of poverty, but also to transform the violence-filled neighborhood that raised him. He wanted to change the relationship his community has to police and focus more on arresting the most violent criminals and less on the so-called “quality of life” infractions that have been a staple of policing since current Commissioner Bill Bratton’s first tenure in this post in the early 1990s. He wanted to change the way policing is done. But according to Raymond, and backed up by the recordings he has taken of meetings with his commanders over a period of two years, he has been passed over for promotion and assigned to less than desirable posts because of his lack of “numbers”—arrests and summonses. As an anonymous officer quoted in the story says, ‘‘You don’t get recognized and rewarded for helping a homeless person get permanent housing, but you get recognized for arresting them again and again and again.’’

Could a police officer take on this duty? Maybe. But my question is, even if he or she did, why should that be a job for a police officer? Why should that be a job for an armed guard for the state? This should be a rallying call for more social workers, more public housing, a guaranteed income, and more investment in economic and social welfare. Instead, we turn to the police.

We’re learning now, though, that depending on who constitutes the affected population, we can create solutions to social problems that do not involve police and prisons—as we’ve seen with the recent heroin epidemic, which is mostly affecting white people. In America, we respond to crime differently based on who we believe are the perpetrators and the victims. That’s another thing Abt, and Clinton, and most others weighing in to this conversation would like to pretend isn’t happening. If you are white and affluent, whether perpetrator or victim, you receive treatment. If you are black and/or poor, whether perpetrator or victim, you receive punishment.

We can imagine a better way. It’s true that even if we were to completely eradicate poverty, abolish gender hierarchies, uproot white supremacy, and generally have a more robust socialist state, we would not completely eliminate violence. It has always been a part of human existence. What we can do, though, is ensure that the social conditions under which violence thrives and perpetuates itself are not as prevalent. And then, we can go about the business of adjudicating instances of violence that don’t involve more violence from the police or prisons, and actually focus on the needs of the victimized.

To get there requires a willingness to put to rest the myths we have built into our politics. It will take us a while to let them go.

I continue to believe that election season brings out the worst in everyone. Uncritical support for deeply compromised politicians turns everyone into a hypocrite, hedging and justifying when their chosen candidate is caught being immoral or unethical, while simultaneously attempting to vilify their opponent for their lack of morals and ethics. Meanwhile, the complex issues and debates that shape our national politics get reduced to talking points and sound bites, points to be earned or lost in the latest polls. It is at once all-consuming, deeply boring, and important—insofar as electoral politics can produce any real change.

But there are moments that, if we look hard enough, can remind us what is truly at stake.

Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who was killed by two Cleveland police officers in 2014, wrote a brief statement published to Medium explaining “Why I Have Not Endorsed Any Candidate.” While a number of highly visible parents of those killed by police and vigilantes have made endorsements and hit the campaign trail, Rice has elected to skip the pageantry.

“No one has been held responsible for any part of this entire traumatic experience,” she wrote. “No one has at least apologized for killing my son. Not a single politician has offered me some substantial support.”

“Twelve year old children should never be murdered for playing in a park,” she continued. “But not a single politician: local, state or federal, has taken action to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

That Samaria Rice felt compelled to write these words is one piece of a larger tragedy, but also a sober reminder that no one election, and no one presidential candidate, will bring about the sort of change that would have saved Tamir.

It’s not that presidents don’t directly impact criminal-justice policy and policing procedure—they do. And they can wield profound influence in shaping national moods and consciousness about race and racial justice. But there is no anti-racist candidate in the mix who offers a program of eliminating or radically altering the institutions that uphold white supremacy in America. This is especially true on the Republican side, but it’s the reality on the Democratic side, as well: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fail to represent any new hope of eradicating institutional racism.

This isn’t to suggest that a Democratic or Republican presidency for the next four years would be exactly the same. But in terms of fighting racism, the prevailing ideology—making the current system a bit less harsh—would remain intact. Though blatant racism has become politically costly (though Donald Trump is proving it may still be viable), elected officials and candidates, en masse, have yet to face consequences for not being sufficiently opposed to institutional racism. Instead, they’ve been rewarded for crossing what’s ultimately a pretty low bar: acknowledging that racism exists.

With all of the excitement around Sanders’s campaign, it can be easy to forget that he’s a 74-year-old white man. But often, particularly when he speaks about racism, that’s exactly what he sounds like. He’s gotten better since last summer, when he was visibly agitated by the protest that erupted during his speech at Netroots Nation. But when he stumbles through anecdotes about black men’s inability to catch cabs, or speaks vaguely about ghettos and black poverty, and you’re reminded that he has spent his political career railing against the millionaires and billionaires—and not done the work of incorporating anti-racism into his analysis of inequality.

Clinton, meanwhile, has performed the required due diligence: She has repudiated the policies of her husband’s presidency that contributed to the epidemic of mass incarceration, as well as her own support for these policies that saw her deploy the racist language about “superpredators.” And she wowed a crowd in Harlem at the Schomburg Center with her ability to cite the problems facing black communities that would be considered intolerable if white people faced them in equal measure, from the Flint water crisis to disproportionate prison sentencing. Still, she has only acknowledged that the problems exist. She hasn’t exhibited an understanding of how and why these inequities exist, which is crucial to prescribing fixes. In fact, her reading of American history, most notably her insistence that the era of Reconstruction was somehow flawed because it engendered white resentment and violence, shows she still hasn’t grasped racial power dynamics.

They’ve each learned to speak the language of anti-racism, and this is a decent first step. Sanders now incorporates the phrase “institutional racism” into his stump speech, while Clinton leans into “systemic racism” and “intersectional.” But shifts in language that aren’t accompanied by shifts in analysis and ideology won’t produce adequate policy solutions.

“The Democratic Party cannot continue to reap the electoral rewards of the black vote,” Thomas B. Edsall writes in The New York Times, “or embark on a comprehensive revaluation of life at the bottom of the economic scale—without fundamentally reconceiving how it deals with the neighborhoods where many of its voters live.” The Democratic Party has thrived on black turnout, particularly the votes of black women, but failed to make anti-racism central to its party platform. And what it has offered has never adequately addressed the sources of racial inequality or provided in path to amelioration.

“As one of the Mothers of the Movement, I know the death of Tamir has shown many just how important police accountability is,” Rice wrote. “I also know it must be a piece of a larger plan to address the deep corruptions that exist in America.” There is no candidate with that kind of plan, because there is no candidate who has been pushed by the electorate to think he or she needs to have one. We are in the early stages of the movement for black lives, so we can’t expect that an anti-racist presidential candidate would simply emerge on the scene fully formed. It will take time and organizing. It will take campaigns like those in Chicago and Cleveland that ousted Anita Alvarez and Timothy McGinty, the prosecutors that failed to bring charges against the police officers that killed Laquan McDonald and Tamir Rice, respectively. There must be consequences that not only the blatant racist feels but those who have failed to see anti-racism at a core of their job.

On the presidential level, this year, there will be no consequence. Those whose ideology leans center-left will likely line up behind the Democrat in an attempt to defeat what is bound to be an extreme Republican candidate. We won’t have an anti-racist president elected in 2016. We aren’t likely to have one elected in 2020 or 2024 either. But if there are consequences for insufficiently anti-racist local, state, and federal politicians with presidential aspirations in the immediate future, somewhere down the line, possibly, things might be different.

American culture is largely a celebration of white men’s mediocrity—that’s why Ryan Reynolds and Macklemore have any measure of success. It’s also why I haven’t been surprised by Donald Trump’s popularity. He is a self-mythologized success story of unremarkable intelligence who benefited from and subsequently exploited this country’s white supremacist racial hierarchy. He is a beacon of hope to mediocre, aggrieved white men across the nation.

But at the start of this campaign season, my belief was that he was largely a distraction. Trump’s brand of racism, while vile, is not that kind that usually worries me. He says mean, hurtful things that traffic in demeaning stereotypes. It exercises no real power. The everyday maintenance of white supremacy is left in the hands of people who use less volatile language than Trump—instead, it’s in the work of voter ID laws, the extortion of fines collected through racially disproportionate traffic stops, longer prison sentences for crimes associated with racial minorities, and laws allowing police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop. I figured him for a sideshow, a reminder that we can be easily distracted from discussions around institutional racism to focus on personal bigotry. I was planning to write a piece about how Trump’s rhetoric is titillating for those who would like to pretend American racism is reducible to ignorance, while the real work of white supremacy is, and always has been, done by those who fashion themselves intellectuals, who have passed through our most celebrated educational institutions, and don’t look like the caricature we’ve built of what a racist looks like.

Then he started winning. It was easy to dismiss him when his front-runner status was theoretical. But with decisive wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, and strong leads in the polls for upcoming primary states, a Donald Trump presidential nomination looks more and more likely.

As much as I think it’s important to divorce ourselves from the symbolism of the presidency, the thought of this frightens me, for one big reason. Trump’s candidacy has made explicit appeals to racism politically viable again. There isn’t a need for the coded language of the Southern Strategy that Lee Atwater masterminded. Trump shows that you can say outright exactly what you mean, no matter how appalling, and win huge support. That he can mount a campaign that advocates building a wall along the US border with Mexico, accuses the Mexican government of sending rapists to the United States, calls for a ban on Muslims coming into the country, and promotes the use of torture—and not be roundly dismissed by the electorate—is reason enough to panic. That he can do all of those things and be a major political party’s likely nominee for president in 2016 signals a regression that those invested in the American narrative of progress would probably rather ignore.

Donald Trump exists as a direct response to the social movements of this moment. In five years’ time, Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, and Dreamers have pushed issues of inequality, police violence, immigration, and criminal justice to the forefront of American politics. Trump is a 1 percenter who threatens violence against black and brown protesters. He speaks directly to the angst of the mediocre white men whose privilege is threatened by these movements. He is the backlash.

We can’t ignore that in the GOP primary race, voter turnout is up, and that has benefited Trump. He is winning a cross-section of Republican voters—“conservatives, moderates, evangelicals and those who are not born-again Christians,” according to The New York Times—but he’s turning out people who don’t believe the South should have freed the slaves after the Civil War, and who do think that the internment of Japanese people during WWII was a good idea and that desegregating the military was a bad one. Trump supporters want to fight race battles old and new.

He hasn’t won them by accident. He has been more nakedly racist than any presidential candidate since David Duke (who is now encouraging his supporters to back Trump). This is the other side of progress—where the entrenched power rallies to its own defense and asserts its right to continued existence. This is the emergence of Jim Crow laws, black codes, and the convict-leasing system in the wake of Reconstruction. This is the attack on abortion rights in a post Roe v. Wade world, and on contraception and reproductive rights more generally in a post–sexual revolution world. This is the culmination of the Tea Party response to the election of Barack Obama.

This could prove to be an overstatement, if Trump ultimately fails to secure the nomination. It’s not as if the other viable candidates don’t represent the same ideas as Trump. They do, but Trump’s explicit appeals on the basis of vile racist rhetoric marks a regression in American politics that even the GOP should find objectionable. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz want to excite the same voters that Trump has, while still pretending they care about diversifying their party. Trump’s winning is throwing off the veil completely. There’s possibly some solace to be found in the fact that Trump has yet to cross the 50 percent mark in these Republican contests, but the more he wins, the stronger the support for him grows. It is saying that not only does America have contempt for people of color, the country is no longer willing to pretend that isn’t the case. Things are bad enough when we are pretending. Just how bad will it be when we don’t even want to put on the act?

Most of the work of movement building takes place away from cameras and doesn’t get reported. There aren’t any splashy headlines to write about the number of conference calls and meetings and e-mails that make up the bulk of an organizer’s work. Photos of research, fundraising, and community outreach aren’t as appealing as those showing thousands of people marching in the street, or bricks flying through windows, or businesses being burned to the ground. As such, it’s easy to think a movement is dwindling because it’s fading from headlines or not as visible in the streets.

Such is the case with the Black Lives Matter movement, the most recent incarnation of the racial-justice movement here in the United States. “[T]here are fewer protests than before, fewer Black Lives Matter protesters at those protests, and fewer media outlets covering them,” Deadspin’s Greg Howard writes, while an anonymous source tells him that “Movement is dead.” But the work of organizing is as much about knowledge production and base-building as it is about direct action and media attention. The movement isn’t dying; organizers are doing the work that organizers do.

Last week, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization formed in the wake of the not-guilty verdict in murder trial of George Zimmerman, released the most important document to come out of the Movement for Black Lives. The Agenda to Build Black Futures sets forth a thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and transformative set of proposals for not only reducing the presence and impact of police and prisons in black communities, but for strengthening those communities through public investment. Not only that, it provides blueprints for campaigns that could be successful in achieving these goals.

“The liberation of all Black people rests upon achieving a greater margin of economic justice for our families and our communities,” writes BYP100 National Director Charlene Carruthers in the agenda’s introduction. While this is a movement rooted in a response to police- and state-sanctioned killings of black youth, organizers and activists have consistently worked to show that police violence is but one of a range of interconnected issues facing black communities. BYP100’s focus in the Agenda to Build Black Futures is economic injustice, and as such opens with the dire statistics about black poverty and unemployment. But this is a forward-looking document and it moves on to show us what a path toward economic justice in black communities could look like.

The first proposal presented is for reparations. While the issue has gained more national attention in recent years than it has enjoyed in some time, BYP100 puts actual ideas on the table for how reparations could be allocated, helping to end the debate over reparations’ being an impractical policy goal. One area they recognize is in education. BYP100 couples a call to cancel student-loan debt, since blacks are disproportionately impacted by it, with the idea of a “national scholarship fund be established for Black students to be paid by colleges and universities that benefitted directly from slave labor.”

They further their agenda for economic justice by laying out a 10-point “Workers’ Bill of Rights.” It includes many ideas currently within the mainstream discourse of labor rights, such as paid sick leave and parental leave, but also states “All children, regardless of the financial status the child was born into, should receive a Child Development Account or ‘baby bond,’” an idea Jesse A. Myerson and I explored in our piece “We’ll Need an Economic Program to Make #BlackLivesMatter.” At birth, a child would be granted a trust fund that matures until age 18, when they would be able to withdraw the money accrued. The aim is to eliminate the disadvantage faced by children born to cash-poor families saddled with debt (the idea was once briefly supported by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton). Additionally, it includes the idea that “All people have a right to a guaranteed living income regardless of employment status,” a poverty-elimination measure commonly referred to as a universal basic income.

Part of BYP100’s plan for funding this radically different and more equitable future is the divestment of funds from the system of punishment, as in their call to “Reduce police budgets and reallocate residual funds to the people’s vision of public safety,” which also speaks directly to the issue of ending police violence. They also advocate for community land trusts and the strengthening of cooperative enterprises. And true to BYP100’s philosophy of looking at racial justice through a queer/feminist lens, the agenda contains an entire section on investing in the health and wealth of trans people.

The entire document is rich with ideas that deserve serious consideration from activists, politicians, and the public. Perhaps most importantly, in this presidential election year, it doesn’t ask us to wait and see who is eventually elected before organizing. It’s a plan for pressuring whoever is in office, whether they are sympathetic to the causes of racial and economic justice or not. Because we have seen time and again, as Michelle Alexander recently reminded us, that party affiliation or general ease and comfort with black culture does not translate into policies that aim at eradicating racism. Nor is it guaranteed that a political revolution led by a democratic socialist would take seriously the concerns of institutional racism. Most of what appears in the Agenda to Build Black Futures has not made it to the Democratic presidential debate stage. Clinton hasn’t floated the idea of baby bonds since 2007, and, while Bernie Sanders supports a raise in the minimum wage, he hasn’t gone full-socialism and called for either a job guarantee or universal basic income. They each support the end of private prisons, but are not speaking to the ideas of slashing police budgets or ending fines for misdemeanors. They’ll need some pressure to shift their focus.

And we need organized struggle regardless of who occupies elected office, from the president and Congress down to  mayors and city councils. BYP100 draws on campaigns that use the tactics of protest and direct action, media engagement and community outreach, political education, and, yes, voting. The Agenda to Build Black Futures is radical in its outlook, and that’s precisely what we need right now. We have to be willing to look beyond political “realities” and set forth visions of the world we actually want. It’s on those terms we must fight, and it’s on those terms that we must win.

Nate Parker’s new film, The Birth of a Nation, is generating a lot of buzz. The actor best known for his roles in The Great Debaters, Red Tails, and Beyond the Lights, spent seven years making this adaptation of the Nat Turner slave rebellion: writing the script, raising funds, and directing. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week and was purchased by Fox Searchlight for a record $17.5 million. It has become one of the most anticipated films of the year and will certainly end up being one of the most talked about.

So much so that there’s already a backlash, before it has even been released. Kara Brown, at Jezebel, wrote: “I will certainly be buying a ticket to see The Birth of a Nation when it comes to theaters. But part of me is torn about sitting through yet another film that centers around the brutalization of black people. Frankly, I’m tired of slavery movies.”

My first reaction was: What slavery movies? In the past five years, there have been two major releases that have had American slavery at the center of the plot—Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave—unless you count Lincoln, which managed to be a movie about abolition with very few speaking roles for black people. But that only gets us up to three. Before that, we had Amistad (1997), Glory (1989), Gone With the Wind (1939), and The Birth of a Nation (1915), America’s original blockbuster from where Parker’s film gets its name. So, again, what slave movies?

In sheer numbers, there aren’t that many, but Brown’s real argument isn’t about the number of films about slavery in existence. “I’m tired of watching black people go through some of the worst pain in human history for entertainment, and I’m tired of white audiences falling over themselves to praise a film that has the courage and honesty to tell such a brutal story,” she writes. “When movies about slavery or, more broadly, other types of violence against black people are the only types of films regularly deemed ‘important’ and ‘good’ by white people, you wonder if white audiences are only capable of lauding a story where black people are subservient.” Her objection has more to do with the pain of watching these depictions of slavery, knowing that it’s representing a real history of violence endured by people she and I call ancestors. The violence isn’t abstract or hypothetical, and it’s hard to feel entertained by that. And with the paucity of films featuring black people as lead actors (from 2011 to 2013, lead actors were 83 to 89 percent white), writers, or directors (only 5.8 percent of directors of the top-grossing films from 2007 to 2012 were black), it can feel like there aren’t many other stories being told, or at least not getting critical attention in the same way that films with black people’s pain as the main plot device are.

And while I understand, I disagree. I want more films about slavery. I want a Marvel Universe of films about slavery. I want so many films about slavery that white actors start to complain that the only roles they’re being offered are those of slave owners.

Not because I have a desire to see the brutalization of black bodies on the big screen—I get more than enough of that from police dashcams and bystander cellphone cameras. I’m sympathetic to the argument of not wanting to see more black pain on screen. I loved both Fruitvale Station and Selma, but I can’t bring myself to watch them again, to cry uncontrollably through the violence and the feeling of helplessness. My desire for more films about slavery isn’t about me and my particular tastes. And I really don’t care if they win the affections of white critics. The reality is that film is how we create American cultural memory, and while it’s tempting to believe that because we’ve had a few major releases recently with slavery at the center, we have some type of canon to draw from, there isn’t. No slavery narrative exists.

Sure, as Brown argues, the best way for Americans to learn about slavery would be in books and from experts educated on the subject. That’s true of history, period. And as someone who just finished writing a book (available for pre-order now), my hope is that lots and lots people want to read. But it’s a lot harder to get a million people to read the same book than it is to get 10 million to watch the same film. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but film is a powerful tool in exploring the human condition. It’s our most celebrated artistic medium and shapes the way we understand our culture and, yes, our history.

A large problem has been that the people who write the stories we engage with on the screen have been white men more interested in protecting their power and privilege than being honest. The original Birth of a Nation was instrumental to the way people understood slavery and Reconstruction for decades before its naked racism (the depiction of black men as violent sexual predators, Reconstruction as a period of black political supremacy, the KKK as valiant heroes) was finally out of vogue. But it hasn’t been supplanted with something more accurate. The Roots television mini-series captivated the nation at the tail end of the 1970s, but we haven’t deemed slavery important enough to explore on film in much the same way as we have World War II, and slavery is, arguably, more central to the American identity.

I want more films about slavery because America would rather forget. We would rather pretend we know all there is to know about slavery and move on. We would rather act like we understand because we know it happened and that’s enough. But we don’t have any understanding of the economics of slavery, of how the racial caste system was built, of who was complicit in its maintenance, of how it defined our politics, of how it ended. The films about slavery that we have now barely scratch the surface on any of these issues. We basically just think it was a mean thing to do to people. Can a slate of slavery films completely solve this problem? Absolutely not. It would be foolish to think so. But as slavery gets pushed further and further out of our cultural memory by politicians and pundits who dismiss the institution as ancient history not worth discussing (while that history continues to be distorted), then a new cultural memory needs to come into place. I believe film is a place to build it.

Of course, let’s have black people making all kinds of movies. Let’s see black people in all kinds of roles, in front of and behind the camera, in pre- and post-production, in publicity and marketing, at award shows. I’m down for all of that. But films about slavery—lots and lots of films about slavery—should also find their place.

I watched President Obama’s last State of the Union address with the same mix of awe and frustration that has defined my relationship to his presidency. He’s the first president I ever cast a vote for, and the history of the moment has never escaped me. I grew up believing there would never be a black president of the United States. Not only was I proven wrong, but it happened when I was just barely old enough to legally buy liquor, melting away some of the cynicism that had shaped my political identity up to that point. The country had changed. We made progress. President Obama is a symbol of that progress.

My frustration with Obama’s State of the Union, and the last seven years of his presidency, was recognizing that progress is painfully inadequate and symbols are disappointing. Obama did what he does best: He told a story of the America in which the country is always becoming better. “We made change work for us,” he said, “always extending America’s promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people.”

“In fact, it’s that spirit that made the progress of these past seven years possible,” Obama continued. “It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.” Some of these accomplishments are undeniably good (though the reinvention of our energy sector is more aspirational than actual). There’s a real record of achievement that the Obama administration can be proud of. But there’s also a real record of mass deportation, drone strikes, and the placating of big banks. The embrace of certain immoral positions that ensure the continuance of the empire is a prerequisite for being an American president, and it’s something Obama’s symbolism could never overcome.

Because symbols, as powerful as they can be in some respects, are largely a distraction. They allow us to pretend things are better than they are, that we aren’t measuring progress against the our ideas of fascistic catastrophe, as opposed to a noble vision of freedom, justice, and equality. Symbols are seductive. President Obama perhaps even more than usual, because his symbolism as the first black president made the country even more unwilling to deal with its legacy of racism, having satisfied itself with the progress made by electing Obama. Even as we lived the backlash of the Tea Party, the birthers, and Donald Trump’s racism, we could pretend it wasn’t as meaningful as having made the big leap in electing a black man to the office of president.

None of this has anything to do with Obama himself. Any black person who entered this office at this time would have produced a similar effect. What’s frustrating about Obama is he has more often than not acted as though he, too, believes his symbolism is enough, as if his election healed America’s most significant racial wound and there wasn’t much left for the country to address. Those who argue for the power of symbolic politics often say that a political leader who represents a marginalized community is more likely to prioritize their needs, but the Obama presidency produced more rhetoric about rising tides lifting all boats than redress around specific racist injury. We were told this would be more effective. We needed a movement to wake us up from that delusion.

Except you would hardly have known there was a movement challenging white supremacy happening in the streets from Obama’s State of the Union address. For him, it was the beginning of the end—a retrospective on what he’s accomplished and a vision for where he would like to see the country to go when he’s out of office. Nowhere in that vision was an articulation of how the United States can uproot racism. For all of the talk about how there’s nothing at stake for him anymore, and how he’s able to speak more freely about things that would have been political liabilities four and eight years ago, Obama didn’t seem to feel free to talk about the most consequential political movement happening in the country right now. Rather, he appeared uninterested. It’s true that he’s spoken more openly about racism in the public sphere as of late, but Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is a different venue than that State of the Union speech, in reach and prestige. To fail to elevate the discourse happening around racism and white supremacy right now to the level of importance implied in the State of the Union—the last one he will deliver—says something of how he regards it. Symbols will always disappoint.

Obama is a complicated symbol, though, because he is such an impressive man on his own merits. For all my political disagreements with him, for all the blatantly oppressive actions he has taken as president of this country, I can’t help but sometimes look at him and be struck that he’s seemed to keep his humanity intact. He is still a charismatic figure that’s able to win people over with intelligence and humor. And it’s really fucking cool to have a president that knows who Kendrick Lamar is, let alone is on the right side of history in recognizing that Lamar is better than Drake. Less cool is having a president that thinks, as Obama said last Tuesday night, that “the protester determined to prove that justice matters” and “the young cop walking the beat” are a part of the same dream, or that “see[ing] ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white, or Asian or Latino, not as gay or straight, immigrant or native born, not as Democrat or Republican, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed,” is an admirable goal and not a form of patriotism that welcomes us all to take uncritical pride in a history of racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, and economic exploitation.

But that’s symbolism. That’s progress. That’s what we’re content with settling for time and again. The kind of change we need for this to be different won’t start at the presidential level. The Obama presidency is proof enough. To get beyond progress, to create the kind of transformational change we need, we have to start by questioning the very core of what has built the American identity.

It’s clear we haven’t done this as we prepare ourselves to have the same conversation about a potential Hillary Clinton presidency. In the event she wins the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency, her election would signal progress—that’s part of the reason Planned Parenthood broke with tradition to endorse her candidacy during the primary. But she will carry with her the hopes of symbolism her politics will not be able to live up to. She will, as Obama has, as every president does, disappoint on a number of fronts, but her ascendance to the position of president will still be lauded as progress. What we’ll need to realize is that progress simply isn’t enough, and the type of radical change that will actually ensure freedom, equality, and justice for all will not come through investing ourselves in the symbolism of the American presidency.

We have been here before and we will find ourselves here again. The extrajudicial killing of black people like 12-year-old Tamir Rice is not new, and neither is the fact that Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed him, will not face any criminal charges. Our recent history with Darren Wilson and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Daniel Pantaleo and Eric Garner in New York, and the mysterious death of Sandra Bland in Walter County, Texas, show us how little to expect for black lives in the current “justice” system.

The killing of Tamir Rice felt like it could have been different. He was a 12-year-old shot in broad daylight while playing with a toy gun. That much was surmised, or at least hypothesized, by the person who made the initial 911 call. But somehow, that information didn’t make it to the officers who responded to the call, Loehmann and Frank Garmback, and when they arrived to the scene Loehmann opened fire within two seconds. They later claimed that Tamir had ignored their repeated commands to drop the (toy) weapon, but video that surfaced shows them acting more swiftly than their accounts of the shooting would have you believe—too swiftly to have assessed any threat, to make any commands, or made any good-faith attempt at de-escalation. It was the video, that damning piece of evidence, that was supposed to make this time different—the video we didn’t have when Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.

We had video when Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner, and that didn’t make a difference. But maybe Tamir, a child, would be a more sympathetic victim than the 53-year-old Garner, who was accused of the vicious crime of selling loose cigarettes. Tamir was a child playing in the park.

But black children aren’t children, as we were reminded after the McKinney, Texas, pool-party incident, where officers assaulted a black girl wearing a bathing suit, and the assault on a 16-year-old Spring Valley High School student in South Carolina. Black children are assumed latent criminals with violent intentions. Tamir was big for his age and therefore perceived as older, we are told, and should have known as much before playing with his toy gun in a public space. Then again, Ohio is a state where it is legal for an adult to carry a firearm openly, so what grounds, then, did the police have for shooting him?

And what to make of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty’s declining to indict Loehmann and Garmback, and, in the words of Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, acting “like the police officers’ defense attorney” by suggesting to the grand jury that no charges be brought against them? What does it mean when those charged with upholding the law interpret the law in a way that leads no one being held accountable for the death of a 12-year-old black child? How could anyone look at that video and draw any other conclusion than the legal definition of murder?

The video didn’t matter to McGinty, because killing black people is not a crime. The police are not afraid of cameras, because the cameras only capture the police doing their jobs. “Serve and protect,” as popularly understood, is a myth. For the police, to serve means to use violence, including lethal force, at their discretion at any time, and to protect means to validate the threat of blackness born of the racist imagination. They are not meant to deter or prevent crime; the police exist to violently reinforce the status quo of white supremacy and economic degradation. Killing black people is not a crime. Instead, it is the basis of American identity.

Every now and then, the system surprises us, as in the case of former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, recently convicted on four counts of rape after assaulting 13 black women. It’s these moments that are suppose to inspire hope that the system can be tinkered with and reformed, that we can find justice for black lives within the current structure. But this is the exception. More often, “justice” looks like non-indictments in the death of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Tamir Rice. It looks like a year to bring charges against Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, or a hung jury in the case of William Porter, the first officer to go to trial for the death of Freddie Gray. More often than not, “justice” looks like black people being killed by police with no headlines or hashtags. It is the routine killing of black people by the state with no chance for accountability.

When indictments and charges and convictions do come down, it feels like a moment to rejoice. This system has never accounted for black people as citizens, so on the rare occasion that it does, there is some relief. But that relief is tempered by the fact that killings and beatings will continue, no matter the consequences for a select few officers, because the job of the police has not changed. We still call on them to “serve and protect”—to arrest and kill—because every black child is seen as latent criminal with violent intentions. We are still delusional about the role police can play in curbing violence. We still think that 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, who was killed when cops responded to a domestic disturbance call in Chicago last weekend, deserved to die, and that 55-year-old Bettie Jones’s death in the same incident was an “accident.” We think Tamir Rice’s being big for his age is enough of a justification for the bullet that killed him.

We have been here before and, unless white people decide that black lives are more valuable than the American identity built on violence toward blackness, we will find ourselves here again. Until then, the police will do their jobs, the cameras will capture it, and everyone will go about their business.

Spike Lee’s latest film, Chi-raq, is his best in years, which makes the fact that it’s so bad that much more frustrating. Lee set out to make a film about gun violence in black communities, about his belief that such violence has been overlooked in recent discussions around police violence, and about what he thinks black people ought to do in order to end the violence that plagues our neighborhoods. Most of the trademark Spike Lee elements are there—his intimate camerawork, his humorous, if choppy dialogue—and if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be pleased to find them. But Lee is known for being an auteur who marries his art with his politics, with the politics often a driving force behind the audience’s interest in his work. He’s never subtle, but most of the time he’s imbued his characters with enough cool to make you not care. In Chi-raq, however, the politics are the biggest failure—and Lee’s lack of subtlety makes it even harder to hide.

Chi-raq is supposedly set in modern-day Chicago, the major American city that, because of the considerable annual number of gun deaths concentrated in its black neighborhoods, has become a favorite reference point for anyone who thinks people aren’t concerned enough about “black-on-black crime.” But I say supposedly because one of the first things Lee gets wrong in this film is importing Los Angeles gang culture to Chicago. His villainous Trojans and Spartans beef over nothing in particular, but are, the film seems to imply, at war with each other simply because they have different colors and flags. Except that’s not how violence works in Chicago. There aren’t gangs that run the streets in Chicago the way Crips and Bloods do in Los Angeles, and, as Jason Harrington points out in The New York Times Magazine, “Most shootings in black Chicago neighborhoods are no longer a result of epic clashes between street battalions.” Instead, they are usually the result of interpersonal disputes, aided by young people cliquing up for protection. And because he mistakes the nature of the violence, there is no examination in Lee’s Chi-raq of the role displacement caused by the demolition of public-housing projects and the closure of public schools has played in keeping the violence going. The plot may have worked if this were about a nameless, faceless place of Lee’s imagination, but Chicago is a real place with a real identity of its own, and he should have taken the time to get that identity right.

But the very first thing Lee gets wrong is the name of the film. “Chi-raq” is a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, popularized by native Chicago rapper Chief Keef, and meant to evoke the image of Chicago as a warzone. Lee accepts this and plays into it, starting the film with statistics about the number of deaths in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 and comparing those with the number of shooting deaths in Chicago during the same period. Never once does he question whether or not this normalizes the existence of war zones abroad and what it means for the people living in Iraq, or the fact that Iraq is a war zone precisely because of the actions of the US government. True enough, it’s a name that comes from the young people in the community, but there’s a way of honoring the truth of young people trying to make sense of their condition without uncritically perpetuating this politically empty and morally irresponsible term.

Lee’s uncritical adoption of ideas he should instead scrutinize doesn’t end there. Chi-raq is a modern day adaptation of the Greek play Lysistrata, the satire written by Aristophanes about how the women of Greece bring about an end to the Peloponnesian War through a sex strike. Again far from subtle, Lee doesn’t hide the influence. The protagonist, named Lysistrata, finds herself fed up with the gang violence that has gripped her city, in which her boyfriend (named Chi-raq) is a key player. After researching Nobel Peace Prize Winner Leymah Gbowee, who led a real-life sex strike to put an end to the Second Liberian Civil War, Lysistrata recruits other women involved with gangbangers into a sex strike of their own. Gradually, the strike spreads from their Chicago neighborhood to the rest of the nation and across the globe, with women demanding an end to violence everywhere—or else they will continue to refuse having sex with men. Through their willingness to withhold sex from their men, Lysistrata and her crew bring about a peace treaty between the Trojans and Spartans, while also convincing the mayor to invest in full employment, affordable housing, and new hospitals.

The Lysistrata tale means that “women are reduced to walking vaginas,” as critic Ijeoma Oluo puts it—their political power comes from denying men access to their genitals—but that’s not the only problem here. At its heart, Chi-raq is a critique of the hypermasculine posturing that props up so much gang violence. The consequences for young black men are clear: more shootings, more death. What, then, would happen in that hypermasculine climate to black women who embark on a sex strike in an attempt to end that violence?

The same thing that happens to them now, with no sex strike in effect. Rape, sexual assault, and beatings are all results of the hypermasculine culture Lee is critiquing. But in Chi-raq he sees only the strength of the black women involved—mostly the strength of their sexuality—not their vulnerability. It’s exactly that kind of thinking that has led to silence around violence against black women, like that perpetrated by former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who was recently convicted of sexually assaulting 13 black women. Whether it comes from the state or exists inside their homes, black women have been subjected to forms of violence and only had other black women to come to their aid.

If Chi-raq were truly just satire, as Lee has claimed, and the entire point was to exaggerate in order to draw attention to an important issue, in this case gun violence, then perhaps Lee could be forgiven for this oversight. But Lee has said publicly that he thinks a sex strike could be an effective method of protest for putting an end to violence. He told Stephen Colbert: “I think that a sex strike could really work on college campuses where there’s an abundance of sexual harassment and date rape.” That’s one of the most misguided things Lee has ever said publicly, representing a fundamental lack of understanding of rape and sexual assault. A sex strike wouldn’t end rape—rape occurs precisely because someone said “no.” The original play doesn’t feature any rape, and this film follows suit. But rest assured that rape would be one outcome of a sex strike.

And that’s the biggest problem with Chi-raq. Lee includes a systemic critique of why gun violence flourishes in black neighborhoods (though he gives most of the best lines contextualizing the violence to a white, Father Michael Pfleger–inspired, character, as if the black residents of “Chi-raq” are incapable of articulating the same—and though it’s overshadowed by his insistence that we point the finger at ourselves first). He’s clearly concerned about gun violence among young black men, telling us over and over again, “this is an emergency! this is an emergency!” via a robotic alarm-like voiceover. But the time when we uncritically accepted the narrative of the “endangered black man” is over. We are living at a moment where we are expanding our politics to understand how systems of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, and imperialism are working to kill, oppress, or exploit us all, not only black men. It doesn’t diminish the need to put an end to gun violence among young black men, but it does call into question whether we can afford to focus all of our attention there—and then allow those same young black men to be complicit in other forms of oppression and violence. The times we live in, where young people are taking to the streets to declare that “black lives matter,” are not defined by the patriarchal impulse to save black men and therefore save the community. Our politics moved beyond that. Spike Lee didn’t come with us.

Last night, November 23, five people were shot while protesting at a police precinct in Minneapolis. The protests, which have lasted over a week, are in response to the police killing of 24-year-old Jamar Clark, who witnesses say was unarmed and handcuffed at the time of the shooting. Activists representing several different organizations, including Communities United Against Police Brutality, the NAACP, and Black Lives Matter have been camped out at the precinct and have been demanding the release of several videos—from the ambulance that was on scene, cell phone video from witnesses, and a public housing authority camera—that capture the shooting. These activists say that white supremacist groups have been out every night of the protest, threatening violence. On the night of the shooting, three men wearing masks and bulletproof vests were identified and removed from the protest area. The protesters believe these are the same men who opened fire and shot five people, none of whom are believed to have life-threatening injuries at this time. The shooters have not yet been identified.

This sort of violence, whether it’s done by the state or individual actors, is intended to frighten, to produce cowardice in the people fighting for answers in the death of yet another black person killed by the police. This is the kind of violence that is meant to remind black people of their place. It’s the defense of a racist status quo.

And it’s a natural reaction from those who seek to stem the current tide of change. The movement that has grown since the death of Trayvon Martin and accelerated after the death of Michael Brown is exerting great influence of the political landscape and threatens to produce real change. Every Democratic candidate for president has been challenged to present a comprehensive plan for reform of the justice system, the current president became the first ever to visit a federal prison, and student activists across the country are either forcing the ouster of college presidents or having their demands for institutional change taken seriously enough to have university administrators sign pledges. Even the nation’s top law enforcement officers are calling for reforms to mandatory minimum sentencing and a shift in drug laws.

Cracks are showing, but they can’t come without backlash. Any change in the system, no matter how minor, threatens to undo the foundation, and therefore the identity, of the country. The status quo produces its own defenders. And, as it appears now, those defenders opened fire in Minneapolis.

It has to be understood that this is not a fear that can be reasoned with. No amount of facts and logic will deter the defenders from doing their job. They will charge on regardless.

But no one who has put their body on the line in protest has done so without recognizing that the threat of death is imminent. Whether it comes from official state actors or vigilantes acting on behalf of white supremacy, violence is the ultimate tool of repression. Fighting for your life and rights is a dangerous occupation.

And the fight won’t stop. It’s frightening to think that a consequence of speaking out against injustice may be a bullet, but the cost of not speaking out is the continued slaughter. What the shooters wanted was for the protesters to cower in fear. What they are likely to find is that this only strengthens their resolve.

The “Ferguson Effect”—the claim, cited by some law enforcement officers, that the current spike in violent crime was sparked by the movement against police violence—is not real. But despite a lack of social science evidence to support this theory, FBI Director James Comey would have you believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is responsible for the increase in tragic violence.

In an address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual convention in Chicago, Comey described police and minority communities as two lines in parallel. “Each incident that involves real or perceived police misconduct drives one line this way. Each time an officer is attacked in the line of duty, it drives the other line this way. I actually feel the lines continuing to arc away from each other, incident by incident, video by video, more and more quickly,” he said. “Just as those lines are arcing away from each other–and maybe because they are arcing away–we have a crisis of violent crime in some of our most vulnerable communities across the country.”

Drawing a false equivalency between the amount of police-enacted violence and violence directed at police, Comey traces a growing divide between the community and the police force due to increased awareness of police violence. That divide, he contends, results in the police pulling back their crime-fighting resources from communities most affected by violence.

As activist and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe points out, this position rests on a few different fallacies: first, that police are being less aggressive out of fear of being the next cop to have their tactics publicly scrutinized, and secondly, that aggressive policing leads to a reduction in violent crime. There is no evidence to support this, and if a nationwide decrease in police aggression is indeed underway, someone should tell the girl who was body-slammed and dragged by Officer Ben Fields at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, for her refusal to give her cellphone to a teacher. If aggressive policing, which includes the kind of violence recently caught on film, led to less crime, that would mean that the only thing law-enforcement agencies have come up with to reduce violence is the use of more violence, and the violation of people’s rights. In other words, the only way to prevent violent crime is martial law.

Instead, invoking the “Ferguson Effect” is an attempt to discredit the newly revived grassroots movement for racial justice. Governor Chris Christie, for instance, recently accused the movement of supporting “lawlessness” and “calling for the murder of police officers.” But this isn’t new. In some ways, it’s a twist on the way in which “black-on-black crime” has been used to deflect our attention from the ways in which police have been used to subjugate and dehumanize black communities. People who would rather not talk about that point to violence within those communities as the “real” issue. That further pathologizes blackness—as if there is something uniquely abhorrent about black people killing other black people. In fact, because America is highly segregated, it is more likely that a person of any race will commit violence against a person of the same race than a different one. More often than not, violent crimes are committed where a person lives and against someone the person knows. If there is “black-on-black crime,” there is also “white-on-white crime.” This is not unique to black people.

But sometimes, the concern about so-called “black-on-black crime” is genuine. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when the phrase became popularized, the community leaders and activists that made it their mission to end intra-racial violence in black communities were not (always) attempting to pathologize black people. They were, in most cases, horrified by the violence, and all the attendant trauma, their communities were experiencing, and were seeking to make their communities safer.

It’s in that spirit that I tried to receive John McWhorter’s recent Washington Post op-ed, “Black Lives Matter should also take on ‘black-on-black crime.’” McWhorter acknowledges police violence as a problem and supports the protests, but also believes, as he writes, that “Black Lives Matter should develop a second wing, devoted to rooting out the minority of criminals in black neighborhoods who kill with such abandon that in almost any big city in America, reading of such events over a weekend is so typical it barely makes news.”

What McWhorter misses is that this new generation does care about so-called “black-on-black crime,” though it refuses that misleading phrase. Many of the organizations currently lumped together under the banner of Black Lives Matter have as one of their platform goals an end to violence within the community—and not just gun violence among young black men, as “black-on-black crime” is often imagined, but also sexual violence, intimate-partner violence, and violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people. But, they do not, as McWhorter and others have, see the police, prisons, and the carceral state as part of the solution.

For McWhorter, the goal is to “forg[e] more trust between black communities and police.” Incident after incident of unjustified violence from police officers toward black men and women shows us that trust is not possible, nor desired. Instead, the goal is to eliminate the constant police presence altogether. To that end, this new movement understands the problem of intra-community violence as one born of systemic inequality and institutional racism. The response, then, cannot be to root out the “minority of criminals in black neighborhoods” but to understand the conditions in which the violence thrives—“joblessness, economic redlining and lack of access to municipal services other locales take for granted,” as McWhorter describes them—and call for the necessary investments for prevention. To identify a class of people as “criminals” and not address the underlying causes of “criminal” behavior is reductive, not transformative. It only serves to suggest there is a group of people who are disposable, who are not also victims of the same system of injustice.

This is what Black Youth Project 100, and several other organizations, were telling us when they were arrested for protesting Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to hire 300 more police officers and give $200 million to the police department. At the same convention where Comey delivered his remarks on the “Ferguson effect,” the organizers “bound [themselves] together by lock boxes while they shut down three intersections surrounding the IACP’s conference location at McCormick Place…and one organizer took down the American flag and replaced it with a flag titled, ‘Unapologetically Black,’” BYP100’s Facebook page describes, while wearing hoodies that said “Fund Black Futures.” “BYP100, allied-organizations, and community supporters conducted…direct actions at the IACP conference to demonstrate an urgency to divest from police departments and organizations and reallocate funds to programs and policies that keep Black communities safe,” the Facebook post continued. The fight to end police violence is not separate from that to end intra-racial violence, because they are direct results of the same system, and must be addressed through the same measures.

But for those not satisfied with that sort of long-term investment in reducing violence, there are groups like S.O.S. Crown Heights in New York City that do anti–gun violence work, through a number of different community-outreach programs, including violence intervention and teaching conflict mediation. They also help put communities in touch with mental-health services and assist in the search for jobs. And this is done without arrests, without prisons, without police, without the carceral state.

The national focus at the moment may be that of police violence, but that does not mean this movement is ignoring every other form of violence facing black communities. On the contrary, it is expanding its focus to put an end to all forms of oppressive violence and to build a better future for all black lives.

Determination to “do something” about the issue of mass incarceration has, at last, moved from the academic and activist worlds into the halls of Congress: At the beginning of October, a bipartisan coalition of Senators, including Chuck Grassley, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, John Cornyn, and Tim Scott, unveiled a criminal-justice-reform plan. Whether that “something” they’re doing is commensurate to the scale of the problem, though, depends on the terms of the debate.

So far, the growing cost of imprisonment and the injustice of long prison sentences for nonviolent offenders have been the centerpieces of conversations about reform. But if that is all the criminal-justice reformers focus on, the “something” that gets done about the United States’ prison problem will fail to address the root causes of the explosion in the incarcerated population that has occurred over the past 40 years.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, as it is currently known, reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some nonviolent drug offenders, replaces life sentences for “three strikes” violations with 25 years, provides judges more discretion in sentencing low-level drug offenders, mostly ends solitary confinement for juveniles, and funds reentry programs, among other reforms. The bill is expected to pass in the Senate, be supported in the House (which introduced its own reform bill earlier this year), and ultimately be signed into law by President Obama.

In the immediate future, it will mean shorter sentences for some nonviolent drug offenders in federal prison; when applied retroactively, it will lead to the release of others. The prison population will shrink slightly, and the federal government will save a bit of money. But the United States will remain free to continue locking away millions of people.

Many reform advocates have praised the Senate proposal, and understandably so. Organizing around prisons and incarcerated people—those written off as the dregs of society—is tough, and any win is a welcome one, particularly one that will directly benefit people currently serving unjust sentences. “I spent 12 years behind bars because of mandatory minimum sentences in New York,” Tony Papa of Drug Policy Alliance said in a statement, “and I’ve been fighting to end them since my release in 1996. I’m proud to say DPA worked with members of Congress to reach this…historic deal. It’s a great step in the right direction.”

“But,” he added, “we must remember it is just a step.” These changes only affect federal sentencing guidelines and don’t end mandatory minimums (in fact, the bill imposes new minimums, on certain crimes related to domestic violence and gun possession or sale linked to terrorist activity). Despite such moderate reforms, it is being hailed as “historic,” “major,” and a “game changer.” Why? Because a true agenda for change has been ceded to the language of reform. The debate started and has effectively ended without considering the injustice of the very existence of prisons. We never considered abolition.

In a reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Atlantic cover story “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” political scientist Marie Gottschalk calls for a “third Reconstruction.” She argues that any plan to reduce the prison population cannot focus only on those already incarcerated, but must include a massive investment program to ameliorate the conditions that produce the violence that leads to arrest and imprisonment. “If the US is serious about reducing high levels of concentrated violence,” Gottschalk writes, “then addressing the country’s high levels of inequality and concentrated poverty should become a top priority, not a public-policy afterthought.”

Gottschalk is using language that will be familiar to longtime Nation readers. It was at the onset of Bill Clinton’s presidency that historian Eric Foner made the case in these pages for a “third Reconstruction” to repair the damage of done during the Reagan/Bush era. The Reconstruction, of course, is the period after the end of the Civil War, when federal investment and military protection made it possible for the formerly enslaved to relocate, vote, run for office, start their own businesses, and begin the building of thriving communities. The second Reconstruction is considered to be the fruit of the civil-rights movement, which ended legalized segregation, implemented federal protections to ensure the right to vote, and led to the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Gottschalk sees room to invest in the sort of programs that would drastically reduce the crimes used as a pretext for mass incarceration. To her, the “only legitimate long-term solution to the crime crisis is another Reconstruction.”

But the language of “reconstruction” can’t be employed without considering what preceded it—abolition. We abolished the institution of slavery. We abolished legalized segregation. If we want a third Reconstruction to take place, the abolition of prisons should be on the table.

Abolition makes sense, though, only if we see prisons as a site of injustice in and of themselves. And they are—not only because of the violence of rape and murder that exists within prison walls, the psychological damage, the lack of educational opportunities, and the denial of due process that locks up innocent people. Prison is the means by which we tell ourselves we are dealing with our societal ills, but only creating more. Prison makes us lazy thinkers, hungry for revenge instead of justice. Prison is a violent representation of our failure to fight inequality at all levels. In abolishing prison, we force ourselves to answer the difficult question: How do we provide safety and security for all people?

Abolition will not win right now. But an abolitionist framework for crafting reforms would lead to more substantial changes in the US prison system. An abolitionist framework makes us consider not only reducing mandatory minimums but eliminating them altogether. An abolitionist framework would call for us to decriminalize possession and sale of drugs. Abolition would end the death penalty and life sentences, and push the maximum number of years that can be served for any offense down to ten years, at most.

With these reforms in place, we as a society would have a huge incentive to rehabilitate those in prison, and we would ensure the incarcerated are capable of socialization when they are released. And without being able to depend on prison as a site of retribution, we would have to find new ways to address things like gender-based violence, sexual assault, and domestic violence. And we could then start making the kinds of investments in alleviating poverty that Gottschalk calls for.

But we can’t do that so long as prison exists as a fail-safe. Abolition may not win today, but neither did it win when it was first introduced as solution for slavery or segregation. So long as we allow the terms of the debate to be shaped by what is politically possible, we’ll only ever be taking tiny steps and calling them major.

There are two quotes from September 2, 2005, that 
have become fixtures in our cultural and political language, and each sums up the ways in which Americans with differing perspectives came to view the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. The first is from George W. Bush: Five days after Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast region, the president landed in Louisiana facing heavy criticism for his administration’s slow response to the devastation. Touring the state with FEMA director Michael Brown—the only person who’d been more heavily criticized for the government’s inadequate response—Bush turned to the man he’d placed in charge of disaster relief and said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” Part of Bush’s appeal had always been his folksiness, but it offered no solace here. His comment only served to further exemplify his ineptitude.

The other quote—what Bush would later call the worst moment of his presidency—came at an unexpected time from a rather unexpected source.

Later that same evening, after Bush’s “heckuva job” comment, NBC did what television networks do during times of disaster and hosted a celebrity telethon. Faith Hill, Harry Connick Jr., Claire Danes, Hilary Swank, Lindsay Lohan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others stood before an audience of millions, accompanied by the pictures of despair that were still streaming from the gulf—New Orleans in particular.

Also invited was Kanye West, one of the more popular entertainers in the country at the time. He was paired with Mike Myers, famous for his performances as Austin Powers and as the voice of Shrek. Myers read from a teleprompter about the suffering in New Orleans, attempting to build up sympathy before the big ask. When it was West’s turn, he deviated from the script and started speaking from his heart.

“I hate the way they portray us in the media,” Kanye said. “You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days because most of the people are black…. America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible.”

Myers attempted to rebound, returning to the teleprompter script. The folks in the control room at NBC must have been hoping that West would do the same. Perhaps they weren’t familiar with his brash reputation, or perhaps they thought he would rein himself in, in service of charity. But Kanye wasn’t done: He still needed to deliver what would become one of my generation’s greatest moments of live television. Speaking as if he were reading from the teleprompter, his cadence straddling the line between stiff and natural, he looked straight into the camera and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Had this happened even five years earlier, it would have been newsy fodder for comedians and might even have made its way into some year-end retrospectives. But it would also have receded more easily into a cultural footnote, a had-to-see-it-to-believe-it moment in television. In September 2005, however, millennials were already taking more direct control of our media diets; we were deciding for ourselves which moments were fleeting and which were definitive. YouTube had launched earlier that year and was already starting to catch on; the idea of the Internet providing video on demand was becoming more of the norm. I was back on campus for my second year of college when this telethon aired, and for weeks afterward, if someone mentioned that they had missed Kanye’s declaration, another person would open a laptop, conduct a quick Google search, and pull up the video for a crowd of onlookers. Facebook, founded the previous year, didn’t yet support video links, but we could all post on one another’s walls some variation of jokes involving West, Bush, or not caring about black people. With these new technological possibilities, and the most succinct political statement of the year, West was able to further ingratiate himself with a generation of young people who already loved his music, but who now had, in him, our first relatable expression of black rage on a national stage.

* * *

Black rage, as a political message, had all but 
disappeared from the cultural and political landscape by the time my generation came of age. The aspirations of the black political class had shifted from the anger that animated the civil-rights and Black Power era to seeking influence through electoral politics, where black rage does not translate into votes. Jesse Jackson had gone from agitator and organizer to presidential candidate, while Oakland, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and many other cities had voted their first black mayors into office, and Douglas Wilder, in my home state of Virginia, had become the nation’s first elected black governor. The Rev. Al Sharpton could still command media attention, but his expressions of rage were diluted by his celebrity-activist status and the larger-than-life persona that made him a prime target for caricature.

The world of hip-hop that West came out of had also long since excised political anger in favor of narratives of material wish fulfillment. Of course, there were always artists like Dead Prez and the Coup, groups with a radical, socialist Black Power message, but the days of Public Enemy and NWA selling millions of records of uncut black rage and becoming part of mainstream American culture were no more. Whereas Ice Cube had once crashed the Billboard charts with an album featuring the song “I Wanna Kill [Uncle] Sam,” by the time Kanye West reached prominence, most rappers were searching for an “In da Club” clone.

That’s what was important about West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” comment. This kind of rhetorical expression of black rage was marginalized throughout most of the relatively prosperous 1990s, when there was no longer a Reagan or a Bush to serve as an identifiable enemy, and the nation’s children were being taught that racism was essentially over because we were committed to celebrating multiculturalism.

The second Bush proved an easier foil than his Democratic predecessor, but his historic appointments of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice gave him the sort of symbolic cover we’ve come to accept as evidence that racism is a nonfactor. In 2001, when Bush took office, a Gallup poll showed that 32 percent of black people believed that “relations between blacks and whites” would eventually be worked out, and by 2004 that number had risen to 43 percent.

Black rage, at its most potent, cuts through that kind of bullshit. Black rage announces itself at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, and says, “Ain’t I a woman?” Black rage stands before hundreds of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial and says, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” Black rage says to the Democratic National Convention, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Black rage says “Fuck tha Police” and “Fight the Power.”

At its best, black rage speaks to the core concerns of black people in America, providing a radical critique of the system of racism that has upheld all of our institutions and made living black in America a special form of hell. But that anger has not only drawn attention to injustice; it has driven people to action, sparking movements and spurring them forward. At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities and people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are not alone.

This is what West’s telethon moment did. It was replayed over and over, adopted as slang, fit to whatever situation one was in, because it gave language to the pain we felt watching the nightmare in New Orleans play out after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. When the levees broke and the water rose, a city full of black people attempted to wade through it alone. The sick, the young, the elderly were being left for dead in one of the most wealthy countries in the world. The media spoke of people attempting to survive as if they were savages (a study by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg showed that in articles that used either “refugee” or “evacuee” to describe the survivors, “refugee” was far more likely—68 versus 32 percent—to appear in stories that also mentioned “poor” and/or “black” people). And you couldn’t help but think, because you knew it was true, that had this been a city with a larger white population, there wouldn’t have been so much death and destruction, or at least there would have been greater relief.

When West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” he wasn’t just speaking about George W. Bush. It was an indictment of an America that doesn’t care about black people, and that elected a president to carry on the tradition.

* * *

There was a sign, a few years later, that 
the black rage to which Kanye gave voice might turn into a movement. In 2007, young people of color led the charge seeking justice for the Jena Six, a group of teenage boys in Jena, Louisiana, who had been charged with attempted murder for what amounted to a schoolyard fight. Thousands of young black people used social media to raise awareness of their case, with new Facebook groups dedicated to justice for the Jena Six appearing nearly every day during the summer of 2007. Hundreds traveled to Louisiana, and thousands marched on the day that Mychal Bell was to be sentenced; he had been convicted of lesser but still serious felony charges that could have sent him to prison for up to 22 years. Thousands of students organized protests on their college campuses in solidarity. Al Sharpton called it the “beginning of the 21st-century civil-rights movement.” At the time, it truly felt that way.

But then Barack Obama happened.

In 2008, young black people turned out to vote for Obama at historic levels, helping to ensure that he would become the first black president of the United States. But this meant the activist energy that had been building since Hurricane Katrina, and had caught a bit more momentum with the Jena Six, was being redirected to electoral politics and the messaging of Obama’s candidacy. Black rage was being channeled into black hope. On its face, that isn’t entirely bad, but the particular brand of black hope that Obama represented was one that muted black rage, and its possibilities, altogether.

This was first evident in Obama’s famous speech on race. During the 2008 campaign, the then-senator had to address the controversy that had arisen around his attendance at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, presided over by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The pastor was in the spotlight after tapes were uncovered by ABC News in which he was heard saying things like “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” Obama’s association with Wright was used by his opponents to paint him as some kind of secret black radical, obviously unfit for the presidency. Obama needed to distance himself from the pastor who had officiated at his wedding and baptized his children.

He accomplished this in what has become known as the “Philadelphia race speech.” In it, Obama denounced Wright’s inflammatory rhetoric, saying that his words had the “potential…to widen the racial divide” and that he obviously didn’t agree with everything his former pastor had to say. But he also said that Wright was like family and that the Obamas couldn’t disown him.

The speech was regarded as an instant classic, a treatise on race in America that we all needed to hear, from the first viable black presidential candidate in our history. But it was also the first major speech by the first viable black presidential candidate to throw water on the flames of black rage.

“That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers or white friends,” Obama said. “But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings….

“That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our own condition; it prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.”

But black rage is about holding America accountable. It does not distract “attention from solving real problems”; it illuminates those problems and asks America to confront their roots. If black rage has prevented alliances from forging, those are likely not alliances that would have yielded much in the way of progress anyway.

As president, Obama continued to blunt the edge of black rage, at a time when the reasons for that anger were stacking up in plain sight. In fairness, his job as president is not to represent black America—and if he were ever to register any type of anger in office, the already racist coverage that follows him would only worsen. That doesn’t, however, mean that he needed to make black anger seem unjustified or undignified. As president, he speaks with a different moral authority for many people. Because he is the first black president, that moral authority is all the more highly regarded when he is speaking about race.

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in front of his own home, Obama’s response was to call him to the White House garden for a beer summit with the arresting officer, thereby sending the message that racial profiling is, meh, not that big a deal. It didn’t even matter that this happened to a celebrated Harvard professor and PBS documentarian who serves as an avatar for black mainstream assimilation and acceptance—or that Gates himself had been enraged. Obama’s solution was to calm the black anger down, come together over a pint, and talk it out.

This invalidation of black rage felt even more insidious when Obama used the tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman to reinforce ideas about black male criminality. In his remarks following the verdict, Obama at first did what no other president has had the capacity to do: He spoke about Martin’s death in very personal terms, including the experience of being racially profiled and living with the burden of the stereotypes attached to young black men. It represented the best of what having a black president has meant. But then he pivoted and said, “I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.”

False moral equivalencies of this kind are a pattern for the president when discussing race. Whereas Obama was uniquely positioned to relate Martin’s story to his own, as the first black president, he has also been uniquely positioned to speak with authority on the ways that racism has built America. But even when he’s risen to the task, Obama has done so by making the perceived moral failings of black Americans as much a part of that story as racism itself. His rhetoric provides further ammunition for those who believe that black people’s anger at racism is unjustified.

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But Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal also represented a turning point. The generation that heard Kanye West say “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” then pushed the vote for the first black president, then watched America continue to not care about black people, simply has had enough. As the deaths of young, unarmed black people continue to become headlines, and social media holds more hashtag funerals, the hope has turned to despair, and the despair into rage. That rage consumed the streets of Ferguson when Michael Brown was killed; it set fire to the streets of Baltimore when Freddie Gray was killed; and it sent Bree Newsome up the flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol to bring down the Confederate flag in the wake of nine people being killed in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Black rage is back, cutting to the core of white supremacy and demanding that America change.

This movement, known across the country and the world as “Black Lives Matter,” has pushed an agenda to address police violence, racial profiling, and racial inequality onto the national political stage. When black rage is felt, organized, and radically expressed, this is what it does best—shift consciousness and make the needs and concerns of black America part of the body politic. It has made presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton take notice, and it has even moved Obama. At the 2015 NAACP convention, the president delivered his strongest speech yet on criminal-justice reform, calling for the end of mass incarceration, the reduction or elimination of mandatory-minimum sentencing, the restoration of voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, the end of rape in prisons, and more—without the added moralizing about sagging pants, missing fathers, and “acting white” that he’d grown so fond of.

An opportunity may have been missed in those post-Katrina days, when the words “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” still buzzed. But a decade later, the resurgence of black rage in the political sphere is finally ready to make America face its racist past and present. Or burn it down trying.

One thing that sets the current racial justice movement apart from its predecessors is the intentional centering of voices that have previously been marginalized—even within movement spaces. While the media still primarily pay attention to institutionalized racism when a black heterosexual cisgender man is killed by police, organizers on the ground are looking to grow a movement that ensures liberation across sexual, gender, and class identity.

In my second interview with the creators of Black Lives Matter, I spoke with Opal Tometi, Executive Director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration, about building an inclusive movement, the importance of identity, and how to shift the narrative of justice away from the conviction and jailing of killer cops.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mychal Denzel Smith: Can you take me to the moment you read Alicia Garza’s Facebook post that said “Black Lives Matter” and what you felt reading at the time?

Opal Tometi: There was a call to action with the group of people that we had been working with called BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity). Within this formation Alicia basically said, “Hey, we need to come together to understand this moment and provide some shared guidance, a reading, as well as a call to action for our people.” Black Lives Matter is how she’d been talking about it. That really resonated with me.

At the time, Black Lives Matter was kind of like a rallying call and it was something we’ve been articulating online in some ways, in conversations, and beginning to put it on our posters and signs as we are going through the streets.

The point was really to engage people who are community organizers or just concerned citizens in this moment in racial justice. How are we specifically addressing anti-black violence as it occurs? More broadly, I really wanted to open up the space for a conversation that moved beyond police brutality. So that’s why we kind of kept it broad. And that’s also why Black Lives Matter is Black Lives Matter, not justice for X. It was very important to have something that was broad enough that captured the state of black life and the fact that we are experiencing a range of violence and we need to be able to speak to all of that.

You also asked about the feeling of that moment and I kind of digressed. I had actually just walked out of a screening of Fruitvale Station with my friend, another black organizer in Brooklyn when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin. I had a slew of texts from people asking, “What are we doing? Where are we going? March tomorrow.” Both of us, as organizers, were like, “Oh my god what is this moment.”

Although many people think that justice would have meant finding him guilty, we know that it’s beyond that. But there was just something in that moment that felt really hopeless for a lot of us. As organizers, we knew that we couldn’t sit in that hopelessness, right? We had to make this mean something and I was very committed to that. For me the solution is always organizing.

Black Lives Matter, in a lot of people’s understanding, is very much tied to anti-police brutality work because the slogan got popular around Michael Brown’s killing. It has become linked to the idea that justice means indicting, convicting, and incarcerating killer cops. Can you talk a little bit about the limitations of that?

Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It’s a love note for our people, but it’s also a demand. We know that the system was not designed for justice for us. Even if we were going to get an indictment or a guilty verdict, that actually would not provide us with the larger vision of liberation that our communities actually deserve. Absolutely, I have a huge concern in relying on the current apparatuses we have for “justice” for our people. It’s never going to be a solution for us. We know that nearly half of the incarcerated population is black people. We know that 50 percent of women who are incarcerated are black women. We don’t want to reinforce a system that is actually designed to lock up our people. We actually need to push a more profound question around the structures that are oppressing our people.

That really puts Black Lives Matter in a different space. I think we’re at this stage where we are doing a lot more education with our people and saying, “We are not just looking for one guilty verdict.” We are having these one on one or small community/town hall and panels to really engage our people in a deeper conversation about what we truly deserve. The reality is we deserve to live in a world where we are not murdered. We deserve to live in a world where there’s no impunity, but beyond this question of impunity there are all these structures that are actually doing a disservice to our people.

I look at things like the immigration system. I also think about the education system. I think about health care. I think about any of these other sectors and the ways in which they are treating our people and I look at the outcomes. We are experiencing premature death for a number of reasons. Police are only one aspect. We are actually experiencing this in very institutionalized ways every single day. I think about things like the poverty that exists in our communities. Our communities have been gutted. I think about the attacks on labor unions and what that has done to the standard of living, the employability of our people, the kind of wages that we are making, and the benefits. That to me is actually violence that’s sanctioned by the state. Those things also have to be taken into account. My hope is that our people will be able to pivot and understand the various ways we are experiencing this violence and we will continue to rise up and fight back.

Your work outside the Black Lives Matter movement is rooted in just immigration policy. For me, it gets into this idea of inclusivity, understanding that black experiences of violence and oppression are going to be different across the board because we come to it with different backgrounds. There’s incarceration, but also immigration, which we don’t normally talk about black people being included in.

Also when we talk about inclusivity we talk about black trans women. At the beginning of 2015 we saw almost a death a week among black trans women. There are people talking about that, and trying to make it part of the narrative of Black Lives Matter, but those deaths don’t fit so neatly into what we understand as the Black Lives Matter movement in that they aren’t so clearly connected to state violence. How do we incorporate those narratives?

I think that’s a really good point—we need to do more work to talk about what Black Lives Matter means even within our communities. Part of it is complicating the narrative about who’s black and what it means to be black. The larger public narrative and discourse, particularly in this moment, is still so focused on black male bodies, cisgender male.

We still experience resistance against including these stories in the broader narrative. Black Lives Matter has been viral and people are taking it, appropriating it, and using it however they see fit. That’s part of the challenge in being able to shape the narrative when we are not necessarily around or when leaders from our network aren’t the ones sharing the stories. Our network leaders know that we are diligently uplifting black trans women and so the work on the ground in many places does reflect that. However, there’s still some resistance towards that.

I do agree we have to deal with it. It’s a question that’s been raised quite a bit, particularly in spaces where I’m speaking with many more women nationally…gender based violence. We have to talk about that in our spaces. These are women who would be out there for our men and alongside our men. I think about the ways in which a black immigrant woman, or a black trans immigrant woman…I mean I know black trans immigrants…the types and layers to which they are experiencing violence at the state level and in the community, and possibly even in the home are things we actually have to become more adept with talking about and finding solutions for engaging in that.

How important is it to you for people to know that the three women at the helm of Black Lives Matter, two of whom are queer?

I think it is very important that people know that. The queer community and the black queer community specifically have been riding so hard for us. We become invisible in the work and it’s actually a lot of freaking work. Our days are 16-18 hours. We are barely getting any sleep because we are building out this political project and social movement network. There’s very real labor that’s going into that. It’s also important that we acknowledge that.

The last piece of that is that the three of us are black organizers. We came in as organizers before creating the Black Lives Matter network and project and we are still organizers, strategists, political thinkers, and philosophers, so we actually have a lot ideas and a lot of really thought out strategies. We want to grow a movement filled with leaders.

I think there’s something important about saying, “Hey, these are three women who put this together. Here’s why. Here’s who they actually are.” That will allow for other folks to rise up. When I speak at events these days and share that I have Nigerian roots. I will automatically have fifteen people come up to me after the talk and share with me, “I’m this. I’m actually from this. I’m from Ghana. I’m from Jamaica.” They really resonate with what I shared and they are able to add a different type of value to my own understanding and the broader community understanding of who is black and what is actually happening to them as they are experiencing anything really.

I think it’s been really important to also say that my black queer sisters. People are like, “Oh wow, queer women helped to start this?” People perk up and listen in different ways and identify in different ways when they really know who it is that started this thing. Lastly, we don’t want it to be about ego. It’s not about ego, but it’s also about historical memory and the truth, so we in many ways are stepping more and more into our own leadership. People have identified what they want and who they want to be speaking and sharing, so part of our responsibility now is just to own that and step into that and listen to our elders who are saying, “Yes, go Opal go! Go Patrice! Share your stories. Lead this movement.” I have a lot of elders who are calling me up these days and really encouraging me, even from a distance and it’s been really beautiful to see.

Whenever there is an uprising in an American city, as we’ve seen in Baltimore over the past few days in response to the police-involved death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, there always emerges a chorus of elected officials, pundits, and other public figures that forcefully condemn “violent protests.” They offer their unconditional support for “legitimate” or “peaceful” protests, but describe those who break windows and set fires as thugs, criminals, or animals. And eventually someone invokes the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement, reminding us that nonviolence brought down Jim Crow segregation and won voting rights.

There’s something that needs to be cleared up: the civil-rights movement was not successful because the quiet dignity of nonviolent protests appealed to the morality of the white public. Nonviolent direct action, a staple employed by many organizations during the civil-rights movement, was and is a much more sophisticated tactic. Organizers found success when nonviolent protests were able to provoke white violence, either by ordinary citizens or police, and images of that brutality were transmitted across the country and the rest of the world. The pictures of bloodied bodies standing in nonviolent defiance of the law horrified people at home and proved embarrassing for the country in a global context.

So anyone who calls for protestors to remain “peaceful,” like the civil-rights activists of old, must answer this question: What actions should be taken when America refuses to be ashamed? Images of black death are proliferating beyond our capacity to tell each story, yet there remains no tipping point in sight—no moment when white people in America will say, “Enough.” And no amount of international outrage diminishes the US’s reputation to the point of challenging its status as a hegemonic superpower.

What change will a “peaceful” protest spark if a “peaceful” protest is so easy to ignore?

It’s not only ahistorical to suggest that “riots” have never been useful in the quest for social justice, it is impractical to believe that the exact same tactics of movements past can be applied today. The politics of our time are different, so must be our social justice movements.

Does that mean “riots” are the answer? No one knows. If the anger of a people denied humanity and democracy is continually dismissed as lawlessness, perhaps these uprisings will prove only destructive. But if the people with the ability to change the system that produced this anger will only listen to the sound of shattering glass, then maybe this is the solution.

Either way, condemnation without understanding will only feed the current rage. If the elected officials, pundits, and other public figures are actually concerned about torn up buildings and burned out cars, they’d do better to pay less attention to King’s tactic of nonviolence and more to his message of justice.

A few weeks ago, there was a shooting at my apartment building. A total of five shots were fired resulting in, thankfully, zero injuries. I was home when it happened, but live on the third floor, away from the shooter’s target. The kids downstairs, who hang out in the hallway pretty much everyday, drinking, smoking, talking shit, and selling weed, had some of their beef meet them at home. That night, I remember hearing one of them scream, “They shot me bro!”—though it seems it was probably the shock of the gunshots plus the shattering of glass from the building’s front door that made him believe he was hit. It was frightening.

However, more frightening than that is the fact that nearly every night since the shooting there has either been a police car, parked across the street with its lights flashing, or two cops posted outside my building, right at the steps, standing guard. This is supposed to be the measure that prevents further violence, but the presence of the police scares me more than the kids selling drugs or the gunshots ever did.

One day, while walking into my building, avoiding all eye contact with the two officers, I heard one of them say to other “Wanna do a vertical?” as I put my keys in the front door. A vertical is when police enter a building and go from top to bottom, scoping the place out for any potential criminal activity. I remember that these are the circumstances under which Akai Gurley was killed.

Another night, I was walking to the bodega to buy some ice cream, and as soon as I hit the bottom of the steps, still needing to walk down the hallway to get to the front door, the officers eyes were fixed on me, and they didn’t let up until I was blocks away. I feel incredibly lucky, especially days later when video surfaced of Walter Scott being shot in the back as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager in South Carolina.

Slager originally stopped Scott for driving with a broken taillight. Scott ran away, possibly fearing he would be arrested for owing back child support, and Slager chased after him. The video doesn’t show when the taser was drawn, but this interaction escalated to Slager using his taser on Scott, who managed to get away, at which point Slager drew his gun and shot at Scott eight times, hitting him with five shots. Were it not for the video taken by a local bystander, Slager’s account of the shooting—that Scott took the taser and because Slager feared for his life he had no other choice but to shoot him—would be the only account available. Now Slager has been fired and charged with murder.

That’s it, right? That’s what the movement was about? This is what justice looks like, correct? We’ve learned the mistakes from Darren Wilson killing Michael Brown, and Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner, yeah? We’re going to start holding the police accountable.

I’ve said this before: there is no justice where there are dead black people. I’ll continue saying it, because if we’re satisfied with charges and potential prison time, we’ve missed the entire point of #BlackLivesMatter. This isn’t about getting “better” police, ones who exercise discretion in using force, but getting away from “needing” police altogether.

In 1966, James Baldwin wrote for The Nation: “…the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.” This remains as true today as it was in 1966, only now we have bought into the myth of police “serving and protecting” wholesale. What do you do with an institution whose core function is the control and elimination of black people specifically, and people of color and the poor more broadly?

You abolish it. In 1964, Malcolm X told the students of Oxford Union: “You’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be change and a better world has to be built. And the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods.” Abolishing the police is an extreme measure, but as a measure of justice, it should be our ultimate goal.

We don’t consider the abolition of police a viable position to take because we believe they’re the only thing standing between upstanding citizens and the violence of the deranged. We’re afraid of being attacked on the street, of having our homes shot at, and being left without access to equally violent retribution. But does this mean we want police, or safety and security? Safety and security are ideas, ones that may never be fully achieved, and the police are an institution that have proved themselves capable of only providing the illusion of safety and security to a select few. The bulk of their jobs has nothing to do with violence prevention. They spend most of their time doing things like Slager did in his initial contact with Scott—stopping people for broken taillights. Writing for Gawker, David Graeber of the London School of Economics says:

The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you.

The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.

Ninety percent of an officer’s time isn’t devoted to our safety, but rather to things we may find annoying (or in the case of things like untaxed cigarettes, create a black market for goods that threaten the profits of businesses), inserting the potential for violence where there is cause for none. And when it comes to preventing heinous acts of violence (or holding the perpetrators accountable) that should be condemned by all, like domestic violence and sexual assault, the police are largely ineffectual. The police are not performing the function we say they are, and there are real ways to achieve a world with less violence that don’t include the police. We simply haven’t tried. Until we invest in full employment, universal healthcare that includes mental health services, free education at every level, comprehensive sex education that teaches about consent and bodily autonomy, the decriminalization of drugs and erasure of the stigma around drug use, affordable and adequate housing, eliminating homophobia and transphobia—things that actually reduce the amount of violence we witness—I don’t want to hear about how necessary the police are. They are only necessary because we are all too willing to hide behind our cowardice and not actually put forth the effort to create a better world. It’s too extreme.

When I say, “abolish the police,” I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked. What people mean is “who is going to protect us?” Who protects us now? If you’re white and well-off, perhaps the police protect you. The rest of us, not so much. What use do I have for an institution that routinely kills people who look like me, and make it so I’m afraid to walk out of my home?

My honest answer is that I don’t know what a world without police looks like. I only know there will be less dead black people. I know that a world without police is a world with one less institution dedicated to the maintenance of white supremacy and inequality. It’s a world worth imagining.

Before he became the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he wrote. At the time, he was a slave-owner. Hypocrisy aside, there’s a “duh” factor in saying “all men are created equal,” but Jefferson must have found value in the proclamation of a self-evident truth. The fact that he needed to spell it out might have reflected the reality that we didn’t then live in a world where all men were treated equally—and we don’t now.

On July 13, George Zimmerman was acquitted on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin. Immediately thereafter, Alicia Garza, an organizer and special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, took to Facebook to write her own self-evident truth: “Black Lives Matter.” At once powerful and haunting, those three words have been embraced as the banner under which a new generation of activists and organizers is building a movement for racial justice. Like Jefferson’s “all men,” the statement is undeniable in its truth. But unlike the celebrated founding father, Garza’s words do not echo a hypocrisy. Instead, they challenge a nation that has failed to live up to its stated belief that “all men are created equal.”

I sat down with Garza, in the first of a series of interviews with the three creators of Black Lives Matter, on February 21, 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, and we spoke about imagining a world where the fact that “Black Lives Matter” is self-evident.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Mychal Denzel Smith: In everything you have written and every interview that you’ve done, you say that Black Lives Matter, as a movement, does not depend on convictions and incarceration for the sense of justice. Why is that?

Alicia Garza: What we are dealing with right now is a disease that has plagued America since its inception. Convicting a few cops isn’t going to deal with that disease. We’ve been trying hard this year to be clear that state violence is bigger than police terrorism. Although police terrorism plays a specific role on behalf of the state, it is not the totality of what state violence looks like or feels like in our communities. We’ve been shifting the narrative to talk about state violence being structural racism. Given that, what we are lifting up here is that we need a bigger vision than just Band-Aid reforms—we need to move towards a transformative vision that touches on what’s at the root of the problems we are facing.

The new movement against police violence was sparked by specific deaths of young black people, as movements of the past have been. In the moment, people want a sense of justice. The chant goes: “Indict, convict, send that killer cop to jail!” Is it hard to get people who are drawn to these rallies and marches on the basis of those deaths to understand that there is more to the movement than convicting the individual police officer—and we need to think bigger than relying on the criminal justice system?

In some ways, [the focus on individual deaths] allows us to build the movement. Right now, our movement is very segmented. Where are the people doing work around housing in this fight around black lives? They may not see the connection between the murder of young black people and evictions and the demolition of public housing. We need to, if we are going to sustain what we’ve started, but also if we are going to get free. Which is the point, right?

The thing that’s important in this moment is that our movement doesn’t become an intellectual exercise, but that it’s something that actually happens in practice. At the NDWA, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about state violence against black domestic workers [and their families]. People say, what’s the connection? Well, we are three-dimensional beings and black women who are working in other people’s homes also have families and are afraid for their children. These are women who are living in communities that have really high rates of unemployment where their kids can’t get quality education. They are living in conditions where over 60 percent of black domestic workers that we talked to said that they didn’t have food in the last month. Many are also spending way more of their income than they should on rent or mortgage. The way we organize forces people to choose what’s most important to them as opposed to creating movement space where people can understand and can put words to and have a framework around what they live every single day.

Is Black Lives Matter a movement aimed towards abolition of the police?

When we sit and think about what the world needs to looks like in order for black lives to actually matter, there is a debate: what is going to make our communities safe, how do we deal with harm, how do we solve problems that come up in our communities? I saw a piece in The Nationthat said we should abolish the police, which was awesome and in some ways is forcing questions that we have been afraid to talk about for a long time. The point to me is to be able to dig into these questions as opposed to being prescriptive about what the answers are.

In the same way, we are living in political moment where for the first time in a long time we are talking about alternatives to capitalism. Socialism became this weird household word partially because right-wingers call Obama a socialist, which he is the farthest from. It is a political moment that’s opening up opportunities to envision a world where people can actually live in dignity. So whether that’s abolishing a criminal justice system that feeds off the labor and the lives of black and brown people, whether that’s abolishing an economic system that thrives on exploitation, poverty and misery: this is the time for us to not just dream about what could be, but also start to build alternatives that we want to see.

But the institution of policing won’t be abolished overnight. In the interim, what does policing look like in a world where black lives matter?

Quite honestly I’m not sure we can have both [policing and the valuing of black lives]. That’s me personally.

Right now we have a really harmful set-up where the police police themselves. They act as judge, jury and executioner, usurping democracy. That’s how we can get a situation where a white man in Wyoming or Montana can stalk and shoot a black chief of police and still be alive. Where people like Cliven Bundy can openly call for an uprising against the government and still be alive and holding property and land—but a little black kid can’t go into a store and get Skittles and an iced tea and live to see the next day. Another little black kid will lay bleeding out for four and a half hours in front of his mother’s home because he is walking in the middle of the street.

I’m not sure that the way that we can have policing where black lives matter because the institution of policing is rooted in the legacy of catching slaves. But what we can do in the interim is make sure that police departments don’t get tax dollars for tanks, for bazookas, for flash grenades and things like that. We can make sure that police departments that have been shown to exercise a pattern and a practice of discriminatory and quite frankly racist policing don’t get resources to do that.

The other thing we can do immediately is insist on more oversight over police departments—oversight that is accountable to the communities the police purport to serve. What this looks like is civilian review boards that actually have teeth. In the worst cases, review boards are still constructed by the police. People who are not going to raise questions or rock the boat are handpicked to play a role. Then we see amazing things like in Los Angeles, where activists just won permanent civilian oversight of the Los Angeles sheriff department, which has not happened before. They are fighting to ensure that there’s teeth and accountability and a redistribution of resources from militarization to community needs, so that we don’t need to put people in jails and prisons.

Black Lives Matter as a slogan and as an ideology has taken off, with a lot people embracing those three simple words. You created it in a moment where you needed to say it for yourself to affirm black lives do matter because there was a pervasive feeling that they don’t. How do you feel now about the way this phrase has been embraced?

That’s such a big question. You know, I’ve been reflecting a lot today. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination and I’ve been reflecting a lot on his contributions. One thing I really admire is that Malcolm talked about self-actualization, self-love and being really rooted in who we are unapologetically. When [Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors and I] created Black Lives Matter, it absolutely was about: how do we live in a world that dehumanizes us and still be human? The fight is not just being able to keep breathing. The fight is actually to be able to walk down the street with your head held high—and feel like I belong here, or I deserve to be here, or I just have right to have a level of dignity.

Before [Black Lives Matter] I was hearing people not want to talk about race, even black people. They would say, “When we talk about race it sets us apart from everybody else.” I’m like, “We are different and that’s OK!” It’s actually OK to be unique and have your own contributions, to celebrate what it means to be black, how we’ve survived and thrived through the worst conditions possible.

After Trayvon was killed and when George Zimmerman was acquitted, I was in a public place with a lot of other black people. I felt like I got punched in the gut, but it was like we couldn’t look each other in the eye because on televisions across America that court said black lives don’t matter.

We carry that in our shape. We carry that in our physical body. So what’s profound to me about this moment is the way that black folks are looking at each other in the eyes, the way I was taught to by my mother, who came up in really different political conditions. She told me any time you see black person, you say, “What’s up.” I don’t give a fuck who they are, what they’re doing, what they look like. That’s a culture that we created to survive, a culture of solidarity. It’s what has kept us alive.

I’m really feeling that right and I see it. People come up to me and say, “I’m having a hard time sitting with the fact that I didn’t think this was going to happen again in my lifetime and I just resigned myself to it. Now I’m so hopeful and I don’t know how to feel about how hopeful I am because I’m also scared. I’m scared for what the backlash will be. I’m scared that you all will have to hold what we had to hold and you will have to watch your movement be dismantled.” They say, “We are rooting for y’all.” I’m like, no, “We are rooting for us.” It’s profound.

I don’t know how to wrap my head around what’s happening with Black Lives Matter right now, but what I can say is that I’m so in awe of how bold and brave people have been. I’m so in awe of the folks in Ferguson who are still fighting, no cameras. They are out there every day at the police station doing direct actions, calling out the mayor. They are in it. I’m really honored to be a part of this moment. This is a moment I have dreamed of my whole life. Growing up, I learned about the black freedom struggle and the Black Liberation Movement and was told that this was a “lull period” or that it wasn’t possible to have black liberation in our lifetime. So I’m just grateful to be alive in this moment where more and more people are saying: we believe it can happen and we’re gonna to fight for it.

My hope is that no Starbucks barista anywhere dares write “Race Together” on anyone’s latte and decides to have a “conversation about race” with customers who simply wanted to pay too much for a cup of coffee. Not only is it extra work for which employees are not being compensated, my gut tells me these conversations will go down with as much awkwardness and anger as the 1975 Saturday Night Live “Word Association” sketch with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor, “in which tensions rise as racial slurs are exchanged, boiling over when Chase drops the infamous N-word and Pryor responses with a death threat.”

However, if there is a barista out there just dying to take part in their CEO’s new campaign, I hope they choose only white people to “Race Together” with, and I hope they ask only one question: Where in America are black people safe from racism?

At home? In the street? In their cars? Public transportation? At work? Where in America are black people safe from racism?

Nowhere. The answer is nowhere. I know this, but maybe it’s time white people were confronted with the question head on and made to consider the answer. And when they’re asked, possibly while nervously sipping their caramel macchiato, the barista should play this video of the arrest of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson and ask, “Should black people at least be safe at school? Can they be granted that much?”

Johnson was arrested outside of a bar he allegedly attempted to enter using a fake ID. He’s been charged with “resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public.” According to an e-mail sent by a group of, as Jezebel describes them, concerned black students at UVA, the incident unfolded as follows:

After Martese was denied entry to the bar, he found himself suddenly flung to the ground. The brutish force used resulted in his head and bodily injuries. His treatment was unprovoked as he did not resist questioning or arrest. In confusion, with blood painting his face and creating a pool on the bricks of the corner, he yelled out for mercy. Though he lay bleeding and crying out, officers continued to hold him to the pavement, pinning him down, twisting his arm, with knees to his back until he was handcuffed.

According to The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia student newspaper, the arrest record says Johnson “was very agitated and belligerent but [has] no previous criminal history.” After customer and barista watch the video together, the barista should ask, “Did Martese have reason to be ‘agitated and belligerent,’ having his body thrown to the ground, his face bloodied, because he tried to do something college students everywhere do?”

And if things haven’t gotten too tense at this point, they should then start talking about how Johnson’s exemplary credentials as a student have been mentioned throughout media reports about the incident, and ask this question: Does all that make a difference? If he weren’t an honor student, would he have deserved this treatment? Attending a prestigious university didn’t protect him from American racism, so why should his grades or student leadership? When will we reckon with the fact that there is no level of respectability a black person can reach that will distance them from racism, violent or otherwise?

This shouldn’t be a one-sided lecture on the part of the barista. The white person who’s likely to have gulped down everything in their cup including the foam should have to answer. White people everywhere should ask themselves this question daily. Where in America are black people safe from racism? They should have to answer honestly. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, if he’s really dedicated to this conversation, should kick it off. Then maybe I’ll entertain the idea of us being in this “race together.”

About a month after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin and had yet to be arrested for doing so, I wrote:

The crime of killing a black person still is not greater than the crime of being black.

After Zimmerman had been arrested, I wrote:

Those new to the cause of defending black life will soon have to face the bleak truth black people have lived with for so long: we don’t often win. The justice system has never been kind when it comes to its dealings with black men. Emmett Till’s killers both died of cancer—as free men, never having spent a day in prison. The police officer caught on cell phone camera killing Oscar Grant served all of eleven months. It took more than five years for the cop who fired the first of fifty shots at Sean Bell to lose his job. Despite evidence of his innocence, Troy Davis was executed. And those are just the names we know.

That same month, after Dante Servin shot and killed Rekia Boyd, I wrote:

Even if the police are telling the absolute, 100% truth in this case, the actions of those endowed with the authority to kill should be subject to intense scrutiny. Police command a certain amount of respect, but given how tense and violent the relationship between them and the Black community has been, there is an understandable level of skepticism and apprehension Black people in general hold toward police. So even if it was an accident, it never feels like an accident. Black folk, particularly Black youth, feel hunted. And so long as police are not held accountable for taking the lives of young Black people, the cycle of death and distrust continues.

Several months later, after Michael Dunn killed Jordan Davis, I wrote:

We have deluded ourselves into thinking that the post-civil rights/Obama era is one in which racism either doesn’t exist or is waning to the point of irrelevance. Whether or not things are “better” starts to feel inconsequential when “better” still means young black people aren’t safe in their own skin. We haven’t come to grips with the fact that America is a fundamentally racist society. Racism built this country into what we know it to be today. It takes more than observing a Martin Luther King Jr holiday and electing a black president to unwind such deep-seated bigotry. We can’t eradicate it if we can’t name it, and so long as we refuse to name it, more Jordans, more Trayvons and more Oscars will die. Their blood is on our hands, and we’ve become so self-satisfied, we don’t even bother to wash it off. We keep moving as if they never existed.

The next summer, after a mistrial was declared in the case of Joseph Weekley killing Aiyana Stanley-Jones, I wrote:

Part of what it means to be black in America now is watching your neighborhood become the training ground for our increasingly militarized police units. The issue is that while, ideally, police would be interested in maintaining peace, when you turn them into soldiers who believe they’re fighting a war they will do what soldiers in a war zone do: harm and kill indiscriminately. Children aren’t exempt.

Less than a month passed before George Zimmerman was acquitted on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin, and I wrote:

In a statement released the day after the verdict was announced, President Obama said: “I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son.” But I ask him, and everyone else who says we must respect the verdict: How long are we supposed to remain calm when the laws we are called to respect exist in an open assault on our humanity? The arc of the moral universe bends slowly. Our lives are on the line right now.

At the beginning of 2014, a mistrial was declared in the case of Michael Dunn killing Jordan Davis (though he was convicted on other charges), and I wrote:

We desperately reaffirm for ourselves and our children the value of black life in a country that declares us worthless. We cry and renew our hope. And then we move on to the next one.

What then? How many more eye-opening essays must we write? How many more freedom songs must we sing? How many more marches and protests must we organize? How many more bodies must we lay to rest before America gets tired, too?

And last year, after Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, I wrote:

Michael Brown was robbed of his humanity. His future was stolen. His parent’s pride was crushed. His friends’ hearts were broken. His nation’s contempt for black youth has been exposed. A whole generation of young black people are once again confronted with the reality that they are not safe. Black America is left searching for that ever-elusive sense of justice. But what is justice?

Justice for Renisha would have looked like Michael Brown being able to attend college. Justice for Trayvon would have looked like Renisha McBride getting the help she needed the night of her accident. Justice for Oscar Grant would have looked like Trayvon Martin making it home to finish watching the NBA All-Star game, Skittles and iced tea in tow. And so on, and so on. Justice should be the affirmation of our existence.

The point of this is not a survey of my “greatest hits.” I take no joy in having been compelled to write any of this. I take even less joy in the act of finding new words to repeatedly say the same things. It’s not any credit to me as a writer; it’s an indictment of the American refusal to address the roots of the problem. And that refusal has real world consequences, the most visible of which is the still growing list of martyrs of racist/state violence.

With that truth constantly looming in the background, the small victories appear inconsequential. The Department of Justice released its report on the Ferguson police department and confirmed what the residents and activists from the area have been saying since the small Missouri town became a bright spot on our collective maps: the police are shakedown artists, harassing the black community and filling the coffers of local government based on fraudulent and/or unnecessary arrests, summonses and fines, and doing so in a violent manner. It’s good to have this documentation. It’s good to have this evidence. But the desire of the American people to do nothing to address racism, much like climate change, is impervious to facts. No matter how much evidence you throw in our faces, we’ve decided it’s our right as Americans to pretend the problem doesn’t actually exist.

Also, Michael Brown is still dead. And Darren Wilson killed him. The DOJ has decided, as did a grand jury in St. Louis County, that Wilson is not criminally responsible for Brown’s death. There’s a temptation to say that the system worked in Wilson’s case, given the thoroughness of the investigation the DOJ undertook. He was allowed due process. The evidence didn’t support the filing of any charges, whether for murder or the violation of Brown’s civil rights. Wilson committed no crime that the state can prove.

This is not a win for the American system of justice. This is no justice at all. Michael Brown is dead. Let’s say his hands weren’t up when Wilson shot him. Let’s say he charged at Wilson. Let’s say he reached for Wilson’s gun. Let’s say he hit Wilson. Michael Brown shouldn’t have died because of that. His punishment for defiance of a police officer was death. If this is the best system we can think of, we need to be ashamed of ourselves.

There is no justice to be found where there are dead black bodies. There are no congratulations to be awarded when the killers of black people are absolved. This is deeper than Wilson and Brown having an altercation that ended in Brown’s death. It’s about how those two lives came to cross each other’s paths in the first place.

The findings of the DOJ report points us in the direction. The question now is what we will do with the information. The suggestions found in the DOJ report aren’t really transformative—they recommend collecting more data on race and using de-escalation techniques, among other things. They should instead be focused on decriminalizing nonviolent offenses and finding sources of revenue that are not municipal fines—things that will reduce the amount of contact between citizens and the police. If history is any indication, we will change something rather minor, celebrate the victory, and then act as if racism not only disappeared but we never actually had a problem to begin with.

And then I’ll go through my archives and wonder why I’m saying the same things again, and again, and again, and…

Three years ago today, George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. I think it’s important to say it that way, even if it means mentioning Zimmerman’s name. Trayvon’s life wasn’t simply lost, he didn’t just die too soon—he was killed, his life was taken, and despite what a jury in Florida had to say, a person named George Zimmerman is responsible for his death.

In the years since he was killed, Trayvon’s death, and those of other young black men, served as a catalyst for a new generation of activists that seek to dismantle the structures of white supremacy that target and criminalize black youth. New organizations have been formed, new leaders have emerged, the spirit of resistance has been given a reboot, and a new movement has taken hold.

After Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin in the summer of 2013, Alicia Garza, a longtime activist and organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, gave the movement its name—and ideology: Black Lives Matter. It started as a social media hashtag. It is growing into a political force.

The question at the center of this movement is: “What does the world look like when Black Lives Matter?” Not just in terms of policing, which has become a major focus in the wake of the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City (and the state’s failure to bring charges against the police officers responsible for their deaths), but in all areas of our society. What does education look like when black lives matter? What does the economy look like when black lives matter? What does the environment look like when black lives matter? What does our government look like when black lives matter?

It’s difficult to answer those questions when everyday we are handed reminders that, for the United States as a whole, black lives don’t matter. Neither historically, nor right now—even after all of our “progress” as a nation. Instead, we’ve seen just how little black lives matter in the very institutions that are supposed to be an example of this country’s greatness. The Department of Justice just reminded us of this, only two days before the anniversary of Trayvon’s death, when it announced that there was “insufficient evidence” to charge George Zimmerman with federal civil rights violations. Even the laws created to protect us don’t protect us.

How, then, do we imagine a world where black lives matter? If after centuries of asking, demanding and fighting for equal protection under the laws of an already flawed system, we can’t seek refuge and find understanding of the value of black lives there, what choices do we have left? That’s what is at the crux of the Black Lives Matter movement. We need a new system, one where black lives (and yes, all other lives, but the erasure of anti-blackness—the cornerstone of American racism—clears the way) hold the same value under the law as they do within the hearts of black people.

But that requires us to ask more questions: what do black girl’s lives look like when black lives matter? What do black trans women’s lives look like when black lives matter? When the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown can be the catalyst for a mass national movement, but the deaths of at least six black trans women at the beginning of this year can’t do the same, what are we saying about which black lives matter?

We are in a place where there are more questions to be asked than answers to be offered. And that’s fine, but we have to be willing to ask the questions. We have to face the uncomfortable reality that no easy answer is forthcoming—though I happen to think abolishing the police and prisons, while investing more in social welfare, is a good place to start. There’s so much work to be done, and while that’s one of my least favorite cliches, it is a cliche for a reason. There’s always so much work to be done, if we’re truly committed to creating a world where black lives matter.

This movement started when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, but it’s neither defined by or limited to that moment. It will keep, however, keep going, until there are no more George-Zimmerman-killing-Trayvon-Martin moments to remember.

The Nation’s Mychal Denzel Smith moderated a panel at the Schomburg Center last Wednesday entitled “American Policing: Lessons on Resistance,” featuring the voices of activists and organizers Cherrell Brown, Ashley Yates, Phillip Agnew, and Dante Barry.

He began the event by making his intentions clear. “I don’t want anyone in this room to mistake me for an objective or impartial journalist moderator. I have marched with, organized with, and written about everyone on this stage. I feel as much a part of the movement as I do a reporter of it. I have an agenda…we need to abolish the pillars of white supremacy and I think the police is one of those.”

—Cole Delbyck

Net neutrality scored a big win recently when Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler changed course on the issue and put forth, in his words, “the strongest open Internet protections ever proposed by the FCC.” The plan calls for reclassification of the Internet under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, such that the Internet would be regulated as a public utility, much like telecom services. This would prevent broadband companies from potentially charging websites for better, faster uploading and access, setting up a two-tiered Internet in which larger sites with the ability to pay these fees come to dominate the information we all have access to. Considering the odds (Wheeler is a former lobbyist for the cable-TV and wireless industries, while Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others spent over $75 million last year lobbying on the issue), Wheeler’s decision to support an open Internet is more than welcome, if not a little shocking.

It also couldn’t have come at a better time in US history. The idea of fast and slow lanes on the Internet based on a company’s ability to pay for the service would further already entrenched inequalities. But also, given how crucial the Internet has been to political activism for this generation, an open Internet is vital for organizing efforts around the most important issues of our time.

Nowhere is this more true than with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The name itself took off as a hashtag on Twitter and was able to spread quickly in the wake of the not-guilty verdict handed down to George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and again when Michael Brown was killed by Police Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The latter event in particular serves as a case study of just how important the Internet and social media have become to organizing. Brown’s death was first reported by residents of Ferguson who took to Twitter to describe the scene as it unfolded. In the four and a half hours in which Brown’s body lay in the street, more tweets poured in and more people from the St. Louis area traveled to Ferguson. From there, a protest movement was born.

“If we don’t have access to open Internet, and we don’t have net neutrality, then it limits the ability for black people to save themselves,” Dante Barry, director of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, told the Huffington Post. Indeed, the issue is so crucial to the work groups like Million Hoodies is doing that a delegation of organizers went to Washington, DC, in January to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as a commissioner and staffers from the FCC, to speak to them directly about why their support for net neutrality matters. Among those they visited was Representative John Lewis from Georgia, a civil-rights-movement veteran. After their meeting, Lewis said on Facebook: “If we had the technology, if we had the Internet during the movement, we could have done more, much more, to bring people together from all around the country, to organize and work together to build the beloved community. That is why it is so important for us to protect the Internet. Every voice matters, and we cannot let the interests of profit silence the voices of those pursuing human dignity.”

An open Internet that is accessible to all people has become critical to the maintenance of democracy, and, as such, it should remain a level field where voices previously marginalized can find strength and solidarity.

Since its founding in 1865, The Nation has been a home for writers instigating, reporting on and arguing about struggles for social and economic justice. We have held fast to our “Nation Ideals”— from racial justice to feminism, from a fair economy to civil liberties, from environmental sustainability to peace and disarmament—throughout our 150-year history. During our anniversary year, TheNation.com will highlight one Nation Ideal every month or two. We’ll celebrate by asking prominent contemporary Nation voices to read and respond to important pieces from our archive. We kick off our very first Nation Ideal with an essay by Mychal Denzel Smith, in which Smith reads and updates James Baldwin’s seminal essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” published in The Nation on July 11, 1966. Learn more about our 150th anniversary events and special content here.

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If you wish to be taken seriously, there are a few things you need to do before speaking critically of the police. Suggesting that such a vaunted American institution may be fallible is a sin only mitigated by pre-emptively issuing certain caveats. If you’re going to talk about police brutality, for example, you must first say, “The police have a very dangerous job.” If you’re going to talk about unjust laws, you first have to acknowledge that “the police are here to protect us.” If you want to talk about racist profiling tactics, you have to note that “most police officers aren’t racist.” And if you wish to talk about how aggressive policing disproportionately affects black, brown and poor people, subjecting them to daily harassment in addition to pushing them into our nation’s prison system, which has consequences on their economic, political, and social futures, you must first reassure your audience that “not all cops are bad.”

James Baldwin did none of these things.

There is probably no other writer, living or deceased, who has diagnosed the problems of American racism better than Baldwin, and that’s due, in large part, to his refusal to issue those sorts of caveats. We can still turn to him to glean a deeper understanding racism, which he sought to weed out of the American garden, root and branch. He didn’t hedge. He wasn’t especially concerned about being alienated from the mainstream for telling the truth—as a black gay man who had grown up poor in America, he was plenty alienated to begin with. Articulating a vocal and radical critique of the American institutions responsible for that alienation could hardly have left him more powerless than he already was.

In 1966 he turned his big, penetrating eyes toward the police. Here in the pages of The Nation (which has the distinct honor of having been the first publication to carry his work), Baldwin wrote “A Report from Occupied Territory.” A group of young black boys were harassed and beaten by the police, and for their crime of being young black boys, they were punished with long prison sentences. To read it in 2015 is to read an all too familiar story. In some ways, eerily so. I paused in rage upon reading this passage:

…the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him.

Fifty years on, and we’re not only still having a conversation about stop-and-frisk as a tactic (it has been around for as long as policing), but the language hasn’t even changed. If anything, that’s what’s surprising: most racist practices find new, more creative ways of existing while perpetuating the same order. Redlining becomes subprime mortgage loans. Poll taxes become voter ID laws. Plantations become prisons.

But I suppose it shouldn’t be that shocking because policing, as an institution, has escaped the racist appellation that makes even reform-minded liberals offer condemnation. We admonish the “few bad apples” and make villains out of the most egregious actors (the ones we catch saying “nigger” one too many times), but there is no consensus, even in activist circles, around naming the police a violent arm of racist oppression, which means there isn’t the type of indictment that would have us challenge the necessity of the policing profession.

Baldwin was having none of that. He wrote:

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

These aren’t things you could get away with saying today and still be taken seriously as a thinker and a writer. And one might argue that Baldwin only “got away with it” because he was writing these words for The Nation, lefty rag that it was and is. But he also had the advantage of writing this in a pre-Nixon, pre–“law and order,” pre-Reagan, pre–“war on drugs,” pre-Bush, pre-Willie Horton, pre-Clinton, pre–“three strikes,” pre-Bush II, pre-9/11 world. The mythology of police as our national heroes hadn’t quite reached the unimpeachable status it now enjoys. There were certainly consequences for those who dared question the authority of the police—Baldwin writes of one man who observed the beating of the six young boys: “…because he questioned the right of two policemen to beat up one child, he is known as a ‘cop hater’”—but writing that the police have no other function than to “keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests” didn’t keep Baldwin from being invited on The Dick Cavett Show. It’s hard to imagine a writer making a similar statement about the police in 2015 and still chit-chatting from the couch opposite Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.

Perhaps it speaks to Baldwin’s ability to make what would be considered radical politics appear self-evident, a goal any of us writing from a left perspective hope to achieve. That’s what makes reading and rereading his essays so exhilarating and frustrating. You’re happy to have found someone who could clearly articulate the position of the occupied in language so clear that the occupier must stand at attention—“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim,” Baldwin would later write. “He, or she, has become a threat.”—but its continued resonance means that the needle has not shifted as much as our progressive narrative would like to pretend.

“Harlem is policed like occupied territory,” Baldwin wrote. He spoke of Harlem because it was home, but he knew that Harlem was everywhere black people existed. Harlem became Selma, which became Watts, which became Chicago, which became Oakland, which became Ferguson. We are still reporting from occupied territory. We are still up against a police force that serves no other purpose than to keep Negroes in their place. We are still called “cop haters” for questioning their authority.

This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

Too many are now conceding to those calls to “respect the law.” We sanitize our truth by adopting parts of the myth. We hope this will make our message more palatable, that we will avoid the sting of our being labeled radical and our ideas unworthy. These are concessions Baldwin was unwilling to make. This is why his work demands our attention to this day. He pointed at the police and told us what they are: a racist occupier that uses violence as means of social and economic control. He offered no excuses.

“These things happen, in all our Harlems, every single day,” he wrote, “If we ignore this fact, and our common responsibility to change this fact, we are sealing our doom.”

Learn more about our 150th events and special content here.

When NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed last December, I thought the city’s police force would react with violence—more harassment, more arrests, more brutality. Instead, they turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at both Liu and Ramos’s funerals, and participated in a month-long “work stoppage.” During that time, overall arrests were down 66 percent and summonses for low-level crimes were down 94 percent, as they were only making arrests “when they [had] to.” Some observers, myself included, welcomed the work stoppage, as cops were essentially putting an end to “broken windows”–style policing, which disproportionately targets black, Latino and poor citizens, arresting them for “quality of life” offenses that are nonviolent and saddling them with court fees and fines. Broken-windows policing generally leads to more day-to-day harassment and abuse. But apparently, the violent reaction was saved for the city’s top cop.

Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of broken-windows policing, announced last week that the NYPD would be forming a new unit, the Strategic Response Group, that would be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.” In his initial remarks, Bratton said this unit would feature 300 to 350 heavily armed officers tasked with combating the threat of terrorism and handling protests. This week, he acknowledged that protests and terror attacks don’t necessarily merit the same response, and said those situations would be handled by two different units.

“They’ll be equipped and trained in ways that our normal patrol officers are not,” Bratton said, speaking of the unit tasked with counterterrorism, though at the time he hadn’t clarified that there would be two different units charged with two different tasks. “They’ll be equipped with all the extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns—unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.”

This week Bratton also tried to convince state legislators that resisting arrest should be upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony. “I think a felony would be very helpful in terms of raising the bar significantly in the penalty for the resistance of arrest,” he said. And since most district attorneys end up dismissing resisting arrest charges—often, police officers use them as a justification for use of force—Bratton would also “ask district attorneys to treat them more seriously than they have been treated in the past.”

With these proposals, Bratton appears to be trying to take the police state to a new level. Is he not content with a city that extracts revenue for its budget from mass arrests, summonses, and fines? Doesn’t look like it. It seems he would also like for the police to operate with unquestioned authority.

It doesn”t seem like special units for counterterrorism and protests would offer any greater degree of harassment and violence to Arab and black communities than already exists, just more specialized and with bigger weapons. But upgrading resisting arrest to a felony gives the police an opportunity to not only be seen as more justified in their use of force when they claim a citizen is resisting arrest but to use the threat of a resisting-arrest charge to make anyone and everyone compliant with any and every directive they issue. There will be little room left to challenge officers (next to none exists as it stands). With resisting arrest left up to the discretion of each individual officer, we could witness entire swaths of the city (I’ll let you guess which ones) turned into land harboring felons.

De Blasio remains committed to both keeping Bratton in as commissioner and sticking to the rhetoric of police reform. If he can’t see that the “reform” Bratton has in mind is a power grab for the police that amounts to a threat to democracy, he’s putting the city at risk of a takeover.

The fact that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a National Day of Service bothers me. It bothers me perhaps even more than when I realized that, as a child growing up in Virginia, we didn’t have a King holiday. We celebrated “Lee-Jackson-King Day”—that is, Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson of the Confederate States of America, alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. But at least Virginia wasn’t pretending to care about King’s legacy.

It’s one of the more unconscionable façades the United States maintains. Today, there is deep reverence for King—or for the King that makes Americans proud of their history. There is deep reverence for a message about love, peace, brotherhood and such easily appropriated themes. King is now an icon for colorblindness, which has become the overriding philosophy on how to deal with racism. No matter your political stripe, you pay homage to the man who was derided as an un-American communist agitator during his lifetime.

In some ways, the commitment to depoliticizing figures of great historical importance in order to fit into the narrative of American exceptionalism is quite impressive. Think of how much erasure had to be done in order to have Reince Priebus honor a man whose life work was to dismantle the system of white supremacy and fundamentally alter the American way of life. We’ve come such a long way.

Sure, every year journalists, activists, academics, and anyone who is committed to the idea of justice trots out their “the real MLK” quotes and articles and books, and we have a short memorial of what has been lost. We can all pat ourselves on the back for that. We are, in our way, doing the work of reclaiming King’s legacy.

But the King holiday still remains a national day of service, and that is upsetting. Because it isn’t a day of service in the way King served his people and his country, by disrupting the status quo. It’s a day of service in which we’re all expected to lend a hand to the “less fortunate” in the grand tradition of charitable giving. We aren’t asked to write our congresspeople, in service, to implement a federally funded program for full employment, as King advocated for in the Freedom Budget. We’re asked to serve soup to the homeless. We aren’t asked to demonstrate in front police precincts, in service, to demand an end to police brutality, an issue King mentioned during that famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but is never brought up in polite conversation. We’re asked to read books to poor children.

And I don’t mean to make it sound as if those charitable works are meaningless, particularly when so many suffer and whatever can be done to alleviate their pain, even momentarily, is surely welcome. But let us not pretend that we are honoring King when we are only assuaging our own guilt.

King’s legacy lives on Ferguson, in Oakland, in Cleveland, in Chicago, in Boston, in New York City and everywhere else where young protesters are taking over highways and disrupting brunches and dying in at malls. Is it annoying some people? Yes. King annoyed people. He was one of the most hated men alive. You don’t get to be that way simply because you preach about loving your neighbor. He was hated because he was a threat to the American empire. He helped to expose America as perpetrator of violence against its own people. His tactics were unorthodox and they made millions of people uncomfortable. There weren’t great swaths of America welcoming the protests he led with open arms. There were police ready to beat, shoot, and kill if necessary to keep black folks in their place. For all the talk about progress, the tactics of suppression haven’t changed.

As a nation, we aren’t prepared to embrace the radical vision of King. We aren’t in a place where we are willing to sacrifice our national identity in order to see the true ideals behind King’s dream. The least we can do until we are is not pretend that our yearly call to service is somehow in line with his legacy. If we’re going to keep that up, we might as well all be celebrating Lee-Jackson-King Day.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/national-day-service-no-honor-mlk/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/conversation-selma-writerdirector-ava-duvernay/Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel Smith,Mychal Denzel SmithJan 9, 2015The director explains why Selma matters now.

We are in the midst of a movement to upend white supremacy. Thousands of people across the country, acting in response to the unpunished killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Michael Brown and so many more unarmed black people who have lost their lives to police or vigilante violence, have taken to the streets to proclaim that “black lives matter.” While this is a powerful proclamation all its own, it can now be strengthened by a vision of what it will take to make those lives matter in America.

In 1966, along with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and other organizers and scholars, Martin Luther King Jr. released the now all-but-forgotten Freedom Budget for All Americans, which included full employment, universal healthcare and good housing for all. “The Freedom Budget is essential if the Negro people are to make further progress,” he wrote. “It is essential if we are to maintain social peace. It is a political necessity.” Dr. King came to espouse this view toward the end of his life, acknowledging that civil and voting rights were a critical but merely partial victory in the struggle for complete equality.

King’s vision, needless to say, was never realized. This is why we propose that, in addition to calls for police reform, it is vital for the defeat of the racist system that the #BlackLivesMatter movement advance an economic program. We cannot undo racism in America without confronting our country’s history of economically exploiting black Americans. Demands from Ferguson Action and other groups include full employment, and this foundational item is one that can and should be fleshed out, as we hope to do here.

Before laying out our proposals, we should clarify why, historically, eliminating racism requires an economic program. America’s story is one of economic exploitation driving the creation and maintenance of racism over time. The inception of our country’s economic system condemned black people to an underclass for a practical rather than bigoted reason: the exploitation of African labor. Imported Africans were prevented by customs and language barriers from entering into contracts, and unlike the indigenous population, their lack of familiarity with the terrain prevented them from running away from their slavers. To morally justify an economy dependent on oppression, in a nation newly founded on the rights of men to freedom, it was necessary to socially construct a biological fiction called race, one that deemed some people subhuman, mere property. “During the revolutionary era,” Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields write in their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, “people who favored slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.” White citizens, making their fortunes and proving their social standing through the ownership of African persons, codified the idea of race into law. Those of African origin would come to form the lowest class of American life, while people of Western European origin were free to extract labor and wealth from their bodies. Material inequality, in other words, preceded the racist rationale.

This didn’t change with Emancipation. The convict-leasing system, the lynching of black business owners, and the razing of economically independent black towns by White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan made it impossible for the former slaves to flourish. After Reconstruction, the ideology of race that erected Jim Crow society was crucial for maintaining class divisions among whites. As the Fieldses write, “One group of white people outranked the other precisely because it was in a position to oppress and exploit black people.” Thus, through the daily experience of this dynamic, “the creed of white supremacy” was bolstered, in the words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, “in the bosom of a white man working for a black man’s wages.”

As a result, black Americans continued to experience racist violence, both physical and economic, and no corrective policy prescriptions were forthcoming. In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, notes that the progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advocated increased government resources for poor immigrant groups, while continuing to attribute black poverty to the alleged cultural and moral deficiencies of African-Americans. This legacy haunts us today in every new injunction that ending racism depends on young black people wearing belts. And it lives in the widespread rejection of the obvious fact that drug abuse, violence and educational failure don’t breed poverty; poverty breeds them. The large-scale relegation of black Americans to poverty is the essential “race” problem.

In the postwar boom, as Ta-Nehisi Coates details in “The Case for Reparations,” his article for The Atlantic, black people were largely locked out of homeownership, the largest driver of the wealth gap in modern America, and further housing discrimination meant that black people were also not allowed to attend the schools offering the highest-quality education—another factor in gaining well-paid jobs. The “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration via the “war on drugs” has replaced vagrancy laws and convict leasing, but with similar results: robbing large numbers of black people of economic opportunities while also denying them access to federal programs aimed at alleviating poverty. A person with a felony record is denied access to food stamps, welfare and public housing. And with no wealth to speak of in a country where political participation is predicated on dollars and cents, black Americans continue to lack political representation; the repercussions include an absence of choice in who is speaking for them in Congress and in which mayor or police chief has jurisdiction over their neighborhood. Inadequate economic security is literally a life-and-death matter for black Americans.

It is vital for the defeat of racism that the #BlackLivesMatter movement shut down the economic engines propelling the continuous reinforcement of white supremacy. Only through the redress of black America’s economic grievances (the pronounced disparities in terms of income, wealth, and community resources like housing, healthcare and education) can we begin building a just society.

1. True Full Employment

Nothing would do more to transform the current political economy than what is at the core of the Freedom Budget and mentioned in the Ferguson Action demands: a policy of full employment.

What we mean by that phrase—an “involuntary unemployment rate” of 0 percent—differs from what mainstream economists mean, even those who nominally support it. By “full employment,” they usually mean nearly full employment. During the most recent period of “full employment” (the also dubiously named “Clinton economic boom”), the unemployment rate never dipped below 3.8 percent. However powerful the boom, millions of people in certain corners of the economy were relegated to a permanent state of bust. The people deepest in those corners, the least employed people in the United States, are teenage black high-school dropouts from poor families, on whom is currently imposed the conscience-rattling unemployment rate of 95 percent.

It is clear that we require more than the conventional policies for boosting job growth if we are to meet the demand for full employment. Luckily, there are two policies up to the task: a federally funded job guarantee and a universal basic income that is unattached to employment. By offering employment as a guaranteed right, the federal government could direct capital to the communities where it is most desperately needed, while employing those communities themselves to do the work needed to improve their own quality of life: cleaning and replacing those oft-decried broken windows, filling potholes, caring for the children of working parents and for the elderly, clearing slum housing and replacing it with decent housing. By paying a basic living wage and normal benefits for a federal employee, the program would effectively set a minimum wage and standard of treatment for private-sector employment. In boom times, when there is danger of inflation, the program and its budget would automatically shrink, and during downturns, when inflation is extremely unlikely, it would grow to fill the gap.

This program could and should be paired with a universal basic income, which Dr. King called “the simplest…and most effective” approach to eliminating poverty, citing three essential virtues of the program. First, poor people, their consumption directly subsidized, will no longer want for basic comforts. Second, the political position of the marginalized would grow stronger: “Negroes,” King wrote, “will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.” Finally, King highlighted the “host of positive psychological changes” that universal material security would yield: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands…. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.” This psychological relaxation is the direct negation of the anxiety and terror that persistently accompany black American life.

A twofold full-employment program would mightily advance the fight against mass incarceration and racist policing. Guaranteeing access to employment and income would also reduce prison recidivism. Employing people to handle “broken windows” would transform the trappings of poverty from an excuse for police harassment to paid community work. And millions of people whose livelihoods are currently dependent on an ever-expanding prison-industrial complex would be able to secure employment and income elsewhere, allowing stronger working-class organizing for a rollback of the prison state. Currently, prison closures have devastating effects on the communities for which these institutions act as economic anchors.

2. A Tax Overhaul

In the current economy, we tax labor and industry, which suppresses employment and offshores profit, and we leave the real-estate sector mostly untaxed, encouraging the accumulation of real-estate fortunes. Real-estate property includes not just buildings but, crucially, the land upon which they’re situated. The buildings themselves—plumbing, woodwork, etc.—deteriorate over time until they require refurbishing, so the speculative commodity in real estate, the investment that stands a chance of appreciating in value over time, is really just land. Speculation in the land market has instituted a great deal of the structural racism that characterizes white supremacy today.

The postwar impetus to maintain segregationist housing policies was the protection of property value. When millions of Southern-born blacks swept into Northern cities, millions of whites fled for new suburban residential developments, taking their capital with them and driving down the land value in black areas. White home buyers (who make up the vast majority of home buyers nationally), with their wealth bound up in real estate, wouldn’t have black people depreciating it with their proximity. Moreover, the Federal Housing Administration, in a policy designed to protect this access to landed wealth, was more likely to guarantee mortgages in communities that adopted racially exclusive charters. This policy “redlined” neighborhoods with low “residential security,” or land value, depriving black neighborhoods of access to financial  services for decades.

The appreciation of land value was at the heart of Wall Street’s recent mortgage bubble and its racist predatory lending, by which 53 percent of all black wealth was destroyed. “Mortgage investors,” meaning land-market speculators, would buy up houses and sell them once the land value had increased, making off with the gain. To keep prices rising, the real-estate/financial complex offloaded garbage loans on unsuspecting black families, who have suffered a massive wave of foreclosures in the years since the crash.

Education is also linked to land value. Pegging school resources to property taxes undermines equality from two directions: well-to-do people are driven to move into ever more expensive neighborhoods for fear that their kids will be conscripted into inferior schools (thereby further concentrating education funding), while schools in poor areas degrade as wealth flees, driving down land value in the already underserved area.

Keeping land untaxed also gives landowners an incentive not to develop properties in poor areas, since it’s thereby free to hang onto an undeveloped plot until white people decide that the neighborhood is “up-and-coming” and bid up the land value. In the short term, this leads to abandoned buildings and vacant lots—that is, to slums plagued with “broken windows.” In the long term, it has a catastrophic effect on communities: while these plots of land remain undeveloped, our tax system holds down the housing supply at a time when a severe urban housing shortage has city land prices skyrocketing. And this, in turn, fuels a community-bulldozing wave of gentrification whose primary beneficiaries are the land-speculating interests.

To stop those interests, we must shift from taxing labor and toward taxing monopoly and land rents. The American political economist Henry George, whom King cited in his economic advocacy, famously proposed a 100 percent land-value tax as the only tax capable of ensuring equality amid economic development. As the board game Monopoly (invented by George devotees) makes clear, even when everyone starts with equal money, private rent extraction inevitably directs all funds into a few hands. George saw taxing the full rental value of land as the only way to develop an economy equitably—that is to say, without producing poverty constantly. And several local jurisdictions in George’s native Pennsylvania tax land, albeit not at 100 percent. No human created the land, and so no one—not an absentee slumlord, not Goldman Sachs—should be extracting its value from the people who live on it.

3. Baby Bonds

In the end, black people in poor areas will always be vulnerable to disastrous community disruption as long as white people control the vast majority of wealth. It is wealth (the stock of overall resources someone controls), rather than income (the inflow someone receives over a year), that ensures true economic security—waiving the income a job provides is less intimidating to a person with independent wealth. As bad as income inequality is in the United States, wealth inequality is even worse, as those born rich get richer and those born poor stay that way. As long as white people can take advantage of lopsided bargaining positions to outbid black people for land use, the land remains whites’ to claim and distribute. The only true and permanent way to alleviate the many ills detailed here is to close the racial wealth gap.

The political challenges to implementing a reparations program—which we support—were daunting from the outset and are now possibly prohibitive. To address this dilemma, Duke University’s William A. Darity Jr. and the New School’s Darrick Hamilton have proposed another innovative program that they estimate would close the wealth gap within a few generations. Even those who cannot concede our premise—that black people have been condemned to poverty by public policy, not by their own lack of ambition and discipline—will surely agree that no newborn child is to blame for his or her impoverished condition, and that each one deserves a fair chance at leading a fulfilling and comfortable life. Darity and Hamilton have thus suggested a “Baby Bond” program aimed at these newborns. Everyone born into a “wealth-poor” family (any family below the median net-wealth position) would be granted a trust fund at birth that would mature when the person reaches 18, whereupon the grantee would obtain access to the fund. The further below median the family is, the larger the fund the infant would receive, such that the lowest quartile would receive a $50,000 or $60,000 bond. Note that although this program is not limited to the descendants of black slaves, its effect is quite similar to the one desired from a reparations program: eliminating the wealth advantage that white Americans command over their black countrymen.

* * *

Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields highlight law professor Derrick Bell’s 1990 essay “After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch,” in which the writer imagines space aliens purchasing all the black people from the United States, whereupon “post-racial America” must truly confront, “straightforwardly, for the first time…the problem of who gets what part of the nation’s wealth, and why.” With white supremacy gone as an organizing principle for social relations, it becomes clear that resource distribution was the question all along. Implementing a program of guaranteed employment and income, a taxation policy targeting monopoly and land rents, and a system of wealth-equalizing baby bonds would eliminate material insecurity for all people—blacks, whites and others—thereby eliminating white supremacy’s reason for existence.

These policies may seem like a long shot in the current political environment. But if the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to increase its political power, it can channel support from Americans who already favor more equitable wealth distribution into a truly transformative program. It seems to us that the thrilling movement shutting down transit and commerce operations has the power not just to get more civil-rights reforms, but to transform the foundation of our society. It has the power to make black lives be treated as though they finally, truly matter.

No one should have to bury a loved one because of violence.

That goes for the families of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Aiyanna Stanley-Jones, Renisha McBride, Jordan Davis, Islan Nettles, Eric Garner, and Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, the two NYPD officers killed on Saturday in Brooklyn. Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley, the man who shot Liu and Ramos, traveled up to New York City from Baltimore, where earlier that day he shot his ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson, in her home (Thompson is expected to survive). After shooting Liu and Ramos, Brinsley went to a nearby subway station and killed himself.

The entire chain of events is tragic. Brinsley’s heinous actions have been condemned from all corners. But that hasn’t stopped some people from placing the blame for Liu and Ramos’s death on the current nationwide anti-police brutality movement, flying under the banner “Black Lives Matter.”

“There is blood on many hands,” said Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, “from those that incited violence under the guise of protest to try to tear down what police officers do every day.” Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, in an appearance on Fox News, said, “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

The organizers responsible for the anti-brutality protests—which began in the wake of the August 9 killing of Michael Brown by (now former) Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in Missouri, grew after a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, and grew larger still when a grand jury in New York voted not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 killing of Eric Garner—reject these connections. In a statement, a group of organizers known as Ferguson Action said:

We are shocked and saddened by the news of two NYPD officers killed today in Brooklyn. We mourned with the families of Eric Garner and Mike Brown who experienced unspeakable loss, and similarly our hearts go out to the families of these officers who are now experiencing that same grief. They deserve all of our prayers.

Unfortunately, there have been attempts to draw misleading connections between this movement and today’s tragic events. Millions have stood together in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is irresponsible to draw connections between this movement and the actions of a troubled man who took the lives of these officers and attempted to take the life of his ex-partner, before ultimately taking his own. Today’s events are a tragedy in their own right. To conflate them with the brave activism of millions of people across the country is nothing short of cheap political punditry.

In a separate statement, #BlackLivesMatter echoed those sentiments and added:

At the heart of our movement work is a deep and profound love for our people, and we are rooted in the belief that Black people in the U.S. must reassert our right to live be well in a country where our lives have been deemed valueless. Together, we champion a complete transformation of the ways we see and relate to one another.

Now is our moment to advance a dramatic overhaul of policing practices. Now is the time to direct more resources into community mental health services and practices. Now is a moment for empathy and deep listening. Now is the time to end violence against women and trans people. Now is our moment to come together to end state violence.

Our movement, grown from the love for our people and for all people, will continue to advance our vision of justice for all of us. Let’s hold each other close as we work together to end violence in our communities—once and for all.

The rhetoric Lynch, Giuliani and others employ only reinforces the message protesters have been trying to get across. Lynch and Giuliani can see the tragedy of Liu and Ramos’s deaths, but do not extend that same sympathy to the families of those killed by police officers. The lives of officers Liu and Ramos are held up as more valuable than the lives of Garner, Brown and so on. That’s the reason the protests must continue, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s call for them to be suspended.

But also, you’d have a hard time convincing me that the reason Lynch and Giuliani mourn Liu and Ramos is because of their humanity. By all accounts, Liu and Ramos were well-liked members of their community, but that’s not what has inspired Lynch to attribute the violence that killed them to nonviolent protesters. Liu and Ramos were police officers. Their jobs represent institutional power. The protests are a challenge/threat to that power.

The protests are not meant to be a challenge/threat to the lives of police officers, which is why it is disingenuous to link the actions of Brinsley to the movement. Activists, organizers, protesters involved in this fight for justice are not looking for more blood in the streets. They are seeking an upheaval of the American system of racism.

And yes, that directly implicates the police. The police are a violent and racist arm of oppression. That’s not because every person hired to be a police officer is a violent racist. It’s simply the job they’ve been given by the American people.

The rejoinder to that assertion is typically some form of “not all police are bad/there are good cops.” There are certainly good people who are police officers. But good people sign up to do terrible jobs every day. They don’t, however, deserve to be killed for doing so.

As such, we all should mourn the deaths of Liu and Ramos, as well as send supportive energy to a recovering Shaneka Thompson, whose shooting has been lost in all of this. But that mourning doesn’t mean we become less critical of the police as a violent and racist tool of oppression.

More than 50,000 people marched on the streets of New York City this past Saturday, December 13, to protest the two recent grand jury decisions—in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York City—not to indict the police officers responsible for the deaths of 18-year-old Michael Brown and 43-year-old Eric Garner, both unarmed black men. The New York march was conceived and organized by Synead Nichols and Umaara Iynaas Elliott, two young performers, with support later coming from Million Hoodies Movement for Justice and Justice League NYC. Similar demonstrations took place in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities across the country. Among the signs and chants that decorated the day, the words “Black Lives Matter” were perhaps the most popular. The simple but powerful slogan was created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, and has moved from a Twitter hashtag to “movement project,” to borrow Garza’s phrase, that has “connected people across the country working to end the various forms of injustice impacting our people” and “created space for the celebration and humanization of Black lives.”

All that is a bit different from what unfolded in the nation’s capital that same day.

Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network (NAN) called for a national march on Washington. They drew a crowd of about 10,000, but among those were some young people expressing anger toward Sharpton and his organization, suggesting that the event was co-opting their struggle for Sharpton’s own aggrandizement, diluting their message and drowning out the voices of the people who have faced down tanks, tear gas and rubber bullets in their efforts to get justice. The tension reached a tipping point when a group of activists, some who had been on the ground in Ferguson from the day Michael Brown was killed, took to the stage and demanded the microphone. Johnetta Elzie, one half of the duo responsible for the Ferguson e-mail newsletter that has kept its subscribers apprised of the latest in movement news, used the moment before the microphone was cut off to say: “This movement was started by the young people. We started this. It should be young people all over this stage. It should be young people all up here.” Sharpton told The Root there were young people invited to speak.

The day after all of these marches took place, reclusive soul singer D’Angelo released the long-awaited third album, Black Messiah. It’s quite a hefty title, particularly for a project fifteen years in the making. In explaining why he chose this title for this new album, D’Angelo wrote: “For me, the title is about all of us. It’s about the world. It’s about an idea we can aspire to. We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah….bIt’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them….’ Black Messiah’ is not one man. It’s a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader.”

In order for us all to be leaders, though, we also need to know what role we play in the movement. I think this is what some of our elders are struggling with most.

Sharpton has been a constant presence in the streets and in the media for nearly thirty years now. There’s no denying that his work, however polarizing he or his persona have been, has kept the victims of police violence in our national consciousness when others would have turned away. But now, at 60 years old with a nationally syndicated radio show, an MSNBC primetime television program and a seat in President Obama’s unofficial cabinet, Sharpton’s days as an outside agitator are over. He is firmly part of the establishment. And being part of the establishment (and wanting to maintain that position) necessitates that you not advance an agenda aimed at radical change, lest you compromise your own privileges. Sharpton has become a leading voice or respectability politics, consistently admonishing black youth for their choices in music and clothing. And his position on police brutality is that the problem is a few bad apples, rather tha the racist and unjust nature of policing in the United States. If all we are left with is Sharpton to lead a grassroots movement from an establishment position, we march toward justice would move along at a pace that Toni Morrison’s “slow walk of trees” would find too stagnant.

But it isn’t all bad. We could use more insiders that understand and/or are sympathetic to the voices of outsiders. From his new position, Sharpton could be amplifying the voices of those young people fighting every day in this new movement, providing them a platform to be heard. The media attention that he once had to fight for he can now hand over to a new generation with relative ease. But he has to understand that he no longer defines the movement.

In saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that Sharpton, or any other leaders/activists/organizers of his generation, should have no say in the movement’s direction. Healthy dialogue, debate and critique from all sides are vital to any movement. But when you’re sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and not using your resources toward the most effective means, you have to ask yourself if you’re being more of a hindrance to progress.

This new movement is being led by mostly young black women who won’t allow us to forget that black women’s lives matter, too (Columbia University Law professor Kimberle Crenshaw was present with a large banner that featured the pictues and names of black women and girls also killed by police). It is drawing in diverse crowds, including white allies who are not calling for gradual change, but a total end to white supremacy. The people in the street have neck tattoos, are dressed in sagging skinny jeans, and curse loudly (among the more popular chants: “BACK UP, BACK UP, WE WANT FREEDOM, FREEDOM, ALL THESE RACIST ASS COPS, WE DON’T NEED ‘EM, NEED ‘EM!” and “WHO SHUT SHIT DOWN? WE SHUT SHIT DOWN!”). The movement doesn’t look or sound like anything our elders remember (or were taught) about the civil rights era. And that’s OK. We have a new fight. We have to create a new model of resistance.

Everyone has a role to play, and in order for a movement to be successful, everyone (young and old) must understand what that role is and not be afraid to shift into a new one when the time for that comes.

That a grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing 43-year-old Eric Garner the same week that President Obama proposed spending $75 million in federal money to outfit 50,000 police officers across the country with body cameras would seem to be hack Hollywood writing with neatly applied plot points. Garner’s death was caught on video—video that the police were aware was being taken—and it still was not enough to indict anyone, least of all the man responsible for choking Garner to death, for any type of wrongdoing. It’s as if this decision was handed to us at this time in order to get us to say, “Now what?”

So… now what? We can move forward with this notion that police officers wearing body cameras will make them more judicious in their use of force, but it seems pretty clear that they just don’t give a fuck, and the court system is content to allow them to keep on not giving a fuck. And we’ll be right back here when they don’t indict the officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland.

So… now what? Not much, so long as the reverence paid to police officers lends itself to deference. They are not regarded as citizens also beholden to the law. They are an armed force charged with maintenance of a status quo steeped in white supremacy and anti-blackness. Key to the reign is the suspension of a belief in the rule of law. Whatever tools they require for to carry out their actual purpose, the public and the courts are eagerly ready to provide.

So… now what? Body cameras seem like a good idea when we think the issue is there isn’t enough evidence with which to hold police accountable. They’re a good idea if we think the issue is accountability. Other things get tossed around, like diversifying police forces (the NYPD is among the most diverse in the country). That sounds like a good idea if we think the problem is sensitivity or cultural miscommunication. We are thinking wrong.

We keep applying the language and framework of accountability, diversity and sensitivity to an issue of oppression. We are attempting to fly an airplane with the keys to a motorcycle. Our tools are woefully inadequate, and until we are ready to admit to ourselves that the police are an inherently oppressive force, and then use the language of anti-oppression and anti-racism in our analysis and solutions, it will not end today, as Eric Garner had hoped. The dead bodies of black folks will continue to line our streets and sidewalks, and they will be treated no better than the roadkill with whom they occupy those spaces.

Last night, at an event addressing racial profiling on the campus of Vassar College, a student told their administration that putting body cameras on security guards was like “Band-Aids to a bullet hole.” I was in attendance and was struck by just how literal that phrasing was. We are being choked and shot with impunity, and yet all that is being offered to us in response is a means to relive the experience over and over again. But we already do.

It has now been announced that Officer Darren Wilson will not be indicted on criminal charges for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. But the writing has been on the wall as well, and on the bodies of protesters who have demanded justice. No one I talked to while in Ferguson believed there would be an indictment. No one I spoke to could bring themselves to trust that the system that killed Michael Brown would care about his life now. All that I spoke to were prepared to continue this fight.

Because even if Wilson had been indicted, true justice would not have come to Ferguson, St. Louis, Missouri or America. It would have meant one cop being tried for the death of one black boy in one town. Wilson’s indictment would not have prevented the deaths of Kajeime Powell, Vonderrit Myers, Tanesha Anderson, Tamir Rice or Akai Gurley. Only a lasting justice that values black life is capable of that.

But what is justice in a nation built on white supremacy and the destruction of black bodies? That’s the question we have yet to answer. It’s the question that shakes us up and makes our insides uncomfortable. It’s the question that causes great unrest.

There is fear in that word, “unrest.” It’s become synonymous with violence. But it is unrest that put Michael Brown’s name into our consciousness, and it is unrest that his kept his memory alive. Unrest is the key to justice.

Protesters in Ferguson should not be calm, as they have been admonished by everyone from the president on down. Michael Brown doesn’t need calm. Black boys and girls who grow up in America need their lives to be respected. They need justice.

Nearly every night in Ferguson, a group of protesters gathers in front of the police department demanding justice for Michael Brown. The size of the demonstration has varied, depending on people’s availability and on the weather conditions, but the dedication to protesting has remained consistent since Brown’s death.

In these days leading up to the announcement of whether a grand jury has indicted Darren Wilson for killing Brown, everyone is on edge. The uncertainty of when the decision will be released to the public, coupled with Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s declaration of a state of emergency, has left plans for action up in the air and the quest for justice without answers. But the people still show up to police department.

The anxiety has only been exacerbated the last few nights in Ferguson, as those protests have been met by a show of force on the part of the Ferguson police department. The night I was there—Wednesday, November 19—there were no more than about forty protesters at any given moment, met with police presence of equal or greater number. Of course, the major difference was that the police stood armed, in riot gear, and the protesters had only their bullhorns, chants and emotion.

It remained relatively calm for a time. The police, lined up as if to block the passageway to the department doors, already unavailable to anyone because of the metal barricade, played a game of cat and mouse, advancing a few feet and backing protesters up, before retreating themselves. Things escalated when during one of their advances they arrested a young man who had shown up to livestream the event.

The police advanced further as the protesters took to the streets, directing traffic away from their action. Protestors ran to what they thought would be a safe space across the street, but a few weren’t lucky enough to make it. At least five people were arrested that night, mostly for unlawful assembly as well as resisting arrest.

Aside from the chanting, there was no provocation of the police on the part of the protesters. There was one instance of an object a being thrown, a water bottle, but other protesters quickly handled it: the person responsible, dressed in all black from head-to-toe, including a black mask that obscured their face, was run off of the protest site and heckled as an agitator who was putting the lives of the protesters at risk.

“If the media wasn’t out here, they’d have arrested us all,” one protester remarked.

A similar scene played out on Thursday evening, with the lesson here being that a militarized police force isn’t necessary to inflict terror. The police have proved themselves violent even without the use of tanks and tear gas. The people’s right to assemble peacefully won’t be protected. The Ferguson police department hasn’t taken any of the national or international criticism they have received to heart. And as the announcement of the decision on whether to indict Wilson dangles in some unknown future, the anxiety builds and takes an unknowable psychic toll on the most dedicated protesters.

But their resolve to see this through is strong.

Not for a second have I believed that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown. Not in the moments after hearing about the shooting, not during the four hours Brown’s body lay in the streets, not when the police attacked protesters in the first few weeks of demonstration, and not during the subsequent three months of organizing and rebellion. And with Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s recent declaration of a state of emergency ahead of the imminent grand jury decision, I have even less reason to believe charges will be brought against Wilson, as the local governments and police forces appear to readying themselves for a strong reaction from activists. But I have every reason to believe this movement will not die.

People are scared. Residents of Ferguson are boarding up their businesses and stockpiling weapons, under the assumption that a non-indictment will lead to rioting and property destruction, on a level that surpasses the initial reaction to Brown’s killing back in August. The tension is thick enough to choke on, but it still pales in comparison to the looming threat of police violence faced by black people everyday across this country. This is why the protesters, activists and organizers who have emerged from this moment will not go away. They know they are disrupting the lives of citizens who never gave thought to the institutionalized violence young black people navigate, but that’s the point. And it will remain the point until something is done.

Indicting Darren Wilson is a start, but it is not the movement. There is the possibility that some who have been involved in these protests would move on in the (unlikely) event of an indictment, seeing that as the ultimate victory. Chicago-based prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba warns against this in a piece for In These Times:

To the young people who have taken to the streets across the country and are agitating for some ‘justice’ in this moment, I hope that you don’t invest too deeply in the Ferguson indictment decision. Don’t let a nonindictment crush your spirit and steal your hope. Hope is a discipline. And frankly, the actions you have and are taking inspire so many daily. On the other hand, a decision to indict Darren Wilson isn’t a victory for ‘justice’ or an end. As I’ve already said, an indictment won’t end police violence or prevent the death of another Mike Brown or Rekia Boyd or Dominique Franklin. We must organize with those most impacted by oppression while also making room for others who want to join the struggle too as comrades.

It’s certainly something these young people have come to understand, and they have used their newfound platforms to speak not just about the killing of Michael Brown but the daily atrocities of police harassment, sexual assault/rape, economic violence and political disenfranchisement.

That’s what Governor Nixon, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay (who is calling for 400 National Guard troops to be posted throughout St. Louis), Ferguson Mayor James Knowles, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, the Ku Klux Klan and so many others don’t understand. You can potentially squash an uprising in this moment, through intimidation and bloodshed. But the resolve of the people has held steady for three months, and these young people are becoming more aware of their history, just how long these battles must be fought, and are willing to risk their lives for their liberation.

Just last week, a group of eight young activists from the group We Charge Genocide traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify before the United Nations’ Committee Against Torture about police violence in Chicago. During that same time, 37-year-old Tanesha Anderson of Cleveland, Ohio, was slammed to the ground and killed by police officers. As the movement grows, the police continue to provide reasons for why. It was never just about Michael Brown or Darren Wilson, Trayvon Martin on George Zimmerman. This has been, and will continue to be, about the protection of black life and the end of the police state. It is about the ability of young black people to move through the world unmolested by a repressive government. It is about bringing to fruition the promise of freedom that our ancestors fought for. It’s about America paying its debts.

Mid-term elections are supposed to be “turn out the vote” elections. Because voter turnout is so much lower than during presidential election years, the aim is not swaying a general mass of undecided voters. Rather, since most of the people who vote in midterms are assumed to be staunch ideologues, whichever side is able to get more of their ideologues to the polls will win. Here, Republicans have the advantage, because their base of ideologues is old white people. There is no history of voter discrimination or suppression among old white people. They are not a group that has systematically denied their rights without redress. They’ve had a pretty good go of it in these United States and find no issue participating in the sacred tradition of voting.

It’s a little different for Democrats. The Democratic Party has a assembled a ragtag coalition of the huddled masses shunned by the GOP. Among that group is young people—called “millennials” this time around—who are supposedly the most apathetic of all voting blocs. Each election cycle, a mix of guilt-tripping, shaming and celebrity-driven get-out-the-vote campaigns attempt to get young people to the polls. And each election cycle someone wonders, “Why don’t young people vote?”

But young people do vote. They vote at about the same rate in most midterm elections, with the 18-to-30-year-old vote making up around 13 percent of the total electorate. But it’s not the 19 percent that Obama brought in during his presidential runs, and therein lies the problem for Democrats. They believed they had an energized new base that they would be able to turn out even in off years, one that would sway elections in the forseeable future. Twenty fourteen was a huge disappointment for them. And now the “Why don’t young people vote?” questions have begun.

If I had the answer for what would have gotten millennials to vote in midterm elections, I wouldn’t be writing for The Nation; instead, I’d be charging exorbitant amounts of money in consulting fees to both major political parties. Besides, what I do have to say is hardly novel. It’s a message Democrats don’t seem to want to hear, but it remains true nonetheless: If you want voters to show up to the polls, you have to give them something to vote for.

Particularly millennials. Democrats have to understand that the coveted millennial vote comes at a greater price than “the other side is horrible.” That’s an old script that works for an old way of seeing the world, where voting is harm reduction at best. millennials want their votes to count. That’s why, in the past few years, you’ve seen people who cast their first ballots for Barack Obama sleep in Zuccotti Park and occupy the Florida state capital. For all the lofty rhetoric about change, the machinations of Washington felt eerily similar after Obama’s election, and local governments no better, even though millennials had been sold on the idea that voting would have this incredible impact. In turn, they’ve found their voice in other forms of participatory democracy.

At the same time, though, things have changed, and this is where it becomes tricky. In their young adult lives, millennials have seen the tide shift on marriage equality, moves toward legalizing marijuana, the largest representation of women in Congress (which has directly impacted the conversation around sexual assault in the military), the election of the first black president, a black nationalist (may he rest in peace) win the mayorship in Jackson, Mississippi and a socialist be elected to city council in Seattle. The understanding of what is possible politically is being stretched and millennials aren’t willing to settle for what is “practical” or “pragmatic.” They’re interested in change happening now.

The issue is, who are they going to vote for?

Progressive policies—that, by the way, enjoy broad millennial support—are winning but progressive candidates aren’t. Why? Because there aren’t any progressive candidates. Democrats are afraid setting out an acutal progressive agenda, for fear of losing the magical center. Maybe that’s a strategy worth adhering to in presidential years, but when the game is “turn out the vote” and you’re not willing to engage the issues that your base wants addressed, of course you’re going to lose.

That’s not entirely fair. They did try. A little. In southern states, campaign literature and radio ads connected Republican-supported policies such as Stand Your Ground to the death of Trayvon Martin. It’s one way of nodding to African-American voters, particularly the young people who have taken Martin’s death and the deaths of other young black people up as their cause. But it’s not then connected to any calls for police reform and decarceration, two looming issues that get to the heart of criminalizing black youth. And it’s a bit hard to swallow this message when a state with a Democratic governor has pointed tanks and thrown tear gas at young black people exercising their right to protest in pursuit of justice for another slain teenager, Michael Brown. Democrats’ lack of self-awareness borders on egregious.

The Dream Defenders, a youth-based organization formed in the wake of Martin’s killing, also did GOTV work, notable for the provocative nature of the campaign. The “Vest or Vote” billboards and videos, a play on Malcolm X’s “the ballot or the bullet,” were meant to make the same connection as the previously mentioned Democratic efforts, but with the images of otherwise smiling and happy children being made to wear bulletproof vests in order to protect themselves. But Dream Defenders didn’t endorse any specific candidates, and they aren’t a large enough organization as of yet to turn out a substantial number of voters.

Millennials know what the stakes are, but aren’t willing to participate in a system they see as inherently unjust, especially if their issues are consistently ignored. I know I’m probably ruining my potential career as a “millennial political consultant” here, but if anyone wants millennials to show up to the polls, even when Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot, they could try running candidates that speak to the issues they’ve taken to the streets to protest.

That’ll be a million dollars, please.

Policing in the United States is racist. The “broken windows” theory of policing is racist. We criminalize people and behaviors based on racist and classist ideas. Police are a problem, not a solution. The diversity of a police department or its community relations are issues that are beside the point. Police are a reactionary force that upholds the status quo of a repressive state.

I make these arguments all the time, but I think it’s necessary to repeat them in clear language because our cultural understanding of police as heroes feeds our political reliance on them as problem solvers. The longer we hold on to these ideals, the longer communities will be terrorized by police.

And lest it be assumed I’m just saying these things because of my own ill-will toward police, we have the numbers to back this up. A new report from John Jay College of Criminal Justice shows that since 1980, arrests for misdemeanors in New York City have increased from 60,000 a year to almost 250,000. Most of these arrests are for “low-level drug enforcement, especially of marijuana, prohibitions against commercial sex work, the many disorderly activities associated with living on the streets, and a variety of minor offenses mostly engaged in by young people such as graffiti and riding a bike on the sidewalk,” writes Alex S. Vitale at Gotham Gazette. In fact, 25 percent of all misdemeanor arrests since 1980 have been for low-level drug violations.

Last year, the arrest rate for black people in New York City was 6.4 percent, down from its high of 7.5 percent in 2010, but almost double that of its low of 3.6 percent in 1990. For Hispanics, the arrest rate was 2.5 percent in 1990 and jumped to 4.7 percent in 2010. White people, of course, have experienced the lowest arrest rate, at 0.7 percent in 1990 and reaching a high of 1.4 percent in 2011.

So, what do these numbers mean?

They mean policing in the United States is racist. The “broken windows” theory of policing is racist. We criminalize people and behaviors based on racist and classist ideas. Police are a problem, not a solution. The diversity of a police department or its community relations are issues that are beside the point. Police are a reactionary force that upholds the status quo of a repressive state.

So where do we begin to undo all of this?

We first have to be honest that police are not capable of solving all of the “problems” we have made them responsible for solving. We then have to admit that not every “problem” we have defined as such is a problem that needs solving. Not everything needs to be or should be a crime.

A step in this direction is legislation like Proposition 47 in California. Prop 47 is The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act of 2014, a voter initiative “that will change sentencing for low-level nonviolent crimes such as simple drug possession and petty theft from felonies to misdemeanors and direct financial savings to K-12 schools, mental health treatment, and victim services,” as explained by the group Artists for 47. It won’t decriminalize drug possession, but it does provide an important stop gap measure, where (mostly young) people will not be saddled with felony charges for low-level drug charges, and the money that is saved from not arresting and prosecuting will be funneled into services that actually go toward building strong, healthy communities.

More importantly, it begins to move us from an over-reliance on police and criminalization as solutions to our societal ills. And hopefully, once we see that the world won’t fall apart if our first response to everything is not “more police,” we’ll be more willing to sit down and talk about how to dismantle the rest of the racist, oppressive police state.

If you’re a serious person, having a serious discussion about police and policing in America, you better pay deference to just how difficult a job the police have, or else your ideas about police reform are not taken seriously.

I was reminded of this unspoken rule while reading this conversation between former NAACP president Ben Jealous and Slate’s Jamelle Bouie.

And… OK. If we’re all required to talk about how difficult and dangerous a job the police have, let’s get that out of the way: police have a difficult and dangerous job. Sometimes people do horribly violent things and we expect the police to respond. ABC News says being a police officer is the third-most-stressful job in America. It’s tough being a cop. Sure.

But a few things bother me about the constant injection of this caveat into discussion about racist and violent policing. First is that the process of humanization seems to work only one way. When a cop shoots an unarmed black person, we’re asked to consider the position of the officer—how difficult their job is, how they must make split-second decisions in order to save their own lives, how their high stress levels can be expressed in aggression, how they’re working-class citizens who only want to make a living. It’s a redeeming narrative never afforded to the victims of their violent behavior, violent behavior that is conducted in the name of the state, with legal justifications at the ready, and with little or no recourse available to those who suffer behind it. It’s the job of the person beaten or shot or killed to prove they didn’t deserve to be beaten or shot or killed because, hey, police just have it so hard.

Further, when we’re reminded of how difficult a police officer’s job is, the speaker seems to be telling us that they’re a compassionate person who cares deeply about the police as people. They’re not interested in denigrating the many brave men and women who don the uniform and protect our communities, just those “bad apples” that make it into this otherwise honorable profession.

But if we can’t have a conversation about the ways in which police target, harass, beat, shoot and kill black people at alarming rates without making it about individual police officers, we repeat the mistakes we make in every other conversation about racism. The personal morality of some police officers is thought to override institutionalized racist violence, and it simply doesn’t work that way. To echo the sentiments of a popular online discussion around the harassment of women, it may not be all police officers, but nearly every black person must fear that any interaction they have with police could end violently.

Let me propose a solution, for those who care about how stressful a police officer’s job is: give them less to do. In 2011, law enforcement made 12.4 million arrests, a rate of 3,991 arrests per 100,000 inhabitants of the US, a number that doesn’t include citations or traffic violations. Of those arrests, 1,531,251 were for drug-abuse violations. Imagine how much less work the police would have to do if drug use/possession was decriminalized (actually decriminalized, not the way New York City has said it would end marijuana arrests and hasn’t). There are between 70,000 and 80,000 people (mostly women) arrested on prostitution charges every year. If sex work were decriminalized, there’s another thing police don’t have to worry about, reducing their work and stress loads. If we invested in an adequate mental health care system, instead of making police our primary mental health care professionals, and provided housing for all people, instead of asking police to dispose of the homeless, they could just be police and not social workers, cutting their workload down significantly. And if they weren’t charged with preventing crime by arresting and serving citations to people for petty, “quality of life” crimes that pose no actual threat to safety, as is the prevailing theory behind the continued existence of “broken windows” policing, they might have time for a little relaxation.

If police weren’t responsible for keeping the city budget afloat through fines collected through traffic violations, as is the case in places like St. Louis County, or their own department’s budgets through civil assets forfeiture (legalized theft), or preventing people from exercising their First Amendment rights of speech and assembly through protests and rallies, they’d almost have a vacation on their hands. Subsequently, with so many fewer responsibilities, they wouldn’t need as many weapons, and therefore the stress of having to decide when are where to use them wouldn’t enter the equation.

To be clear, I think Ben Jealous would agree with most of what I’ve laid out here. But he still returned to that “police have a tough job” narrative without laying out why their jobs are so tough. We have created a police state, criminalizing innocuous behaviors (largely those associated with blackness) or those harmful only to the person participating. We have handed over responsibility of solving social problems like mental illness and drug abuse to police officers who are not equipped to do anything other than arrest or shoot. We think we can stop violent/serious crime by tasking police officers with cracking down on petty crimes, rather than address root causes of violence and inequality. We still have a society predicated on the control of black bodies. That’s enough to stress anyone out.

Instead of offering it up as an excuse for a job done poorly, give police less work to do. Then we can all relax a bit more.

While attending NYU Film School, Darius Clark Monroe got an idea for his first feature-length film. He would tell the story of how he robbed a bank when he was 16 years old—which, in fact, he did—but not just the story of the robbery, and being punished for it. Monroe wanted to tell the story of his a Southern black family, the effects of generational poverty, trauma, desperation, the prison system and redemption. He captured all of this in his autobiographical documentary, Evolution of a Criminal. Executive-produced by Spike Lee, Evolution of a Criminal, which took Monroe seven years to complete, features interviews with the family members, friends, teachers and some of the victims affected by Monroe’s action, all sorting through the root causes and figuring a way to deal with the aftermath. I spoke with Monroe recently by phone; during our conversation, Monroe told me what he hopes people take away from his film, which opened this past weekend in New York City.

The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mychal Denzel Smith: You robbed a bank when you were 16 years old. What made you want to make a movie about it?

Darius Clark Monroe: I think it initially just started from me wanting to go back and find the customers inside the bank. I realized I just was so soaked up by the case and prison and my life then, I just never dealt with [the fact] that I had a hold on these individuals. Then I talked to my mom about it and I realized my family, we haven’t talked about any of it. The whole reason behind me getting into trouble in the first place and me wanting to do the robbery, [our economic situation] definitely influenced my behavior. We really didn’t talk about it. So I think the film almost gave her an excuse to sit down and have a [conversation we wouldn’t] ordinarily have.

The film is called Evolution of a Criminal. But anyone who watches probably isn’t going to come away with the sense of you being a criminal in the way we typically understand who is a “criminal.” So why name the film Evolution of a Criminal?

I wasn’t speaking necessarily to my own definition of who I am or who I was back then, but more to how black and brown boys are painted by society. Just being a young black male is already worthy of being criminalized. So I wanted to subvert the audiences’ expectations of who and what we think a criminal is. What does a criminal look like to you? Who is that person? Because there is no singular or broad stroke that just boxes everybody into. There are thousands and millions of individuals who find themselves in really hard situations and tough predicaments and they have sometimes to make unfortunate choices. Are these people criminals? These are people who are complicated, may have made a bad mistake or made a bad choice. For me the title subverts expectations. You go in and you’re expecting to watch this show about a “criminal,” this kid going bad. And what you see is an individual who has been consistent, personality-wise, throughout his life. It makes it difficult trying to force you into a category. Human beings are way more complicated than that.

And what are the factors that led you to make the decision to rob the bank?

My whole life as long as I could remember, my mother would get up and work. My stepfather had two jobs. These were working people. And I just couldn’t get over the fact that they would work all day, be exhausted, and I couldn’t really see how there was any light at the end of the tunnel. I was getting old enough to see [economic] disparity in [my hometown of] Houston. And you see what struggle and stress looks like. Even though we had clothes and food, a roof over our head, I could tell things were precarious when it came to our finances. I was always well aware of that.

In 1996 we had a home invasion. My house was robbed. The neighbors’ house was robbed. We didn’t have a lot of money to begin with, and that just seemed so invasive. I was working part-time at Jack-in-the-Box, and none of the small money I was making just seemed to be making hell of a lot of difference. I couldn’t figure out how to respond to [the burglary] at 16, but I knew that I did not want to retaliate by robbing other people’s homes. Robbing a bank [didn’t] feel at the time as extreme, because it felt like an institution. The money belonged to this institution; they will be able to replace it. So in my mind I tried to rationalize the whole crime as now I go take the money, it won’t hurt anybody. It’s a huge bank. We’ll get away. So that was just the being young and short-sighted. It just started as this thing we can pull off and get little money, and be done with it.

At one point in the film you say your family was doing okay. You weren’t on the path to wealth, but you could pay your bills. It was the home invasion that set off this robbery, that set off the idea that you had to do something, because one little incident like that can set you back. Not just financially—it can demoralize you.

People think that you have to be destitute to know what that feeling feels like. I’m not ashamed that we weren’t. I felt in my gut that we were a situation away from slipping down further into a worse situation. I couldn’t tell what that was, I could just feel it. I felt it was really fragile. We were looking for stability, but it just never felt like stability was a real option. The car breaks down, it needs brakes—and where are you going to take that money from? How are you going to cover this—are you going to pay with a credit card? It’s strenuous, for a family with children and lives to protect and provide for. It seemed like a lot for mom and my stepdad. Both of them were trying to do their best, and just couldn’t get a leg up. It wasn’t because of a lack of effort—these people were hard-working people.

And you went to prison. How long were you there?

I was in prison for three years of a five-year sentence.

What people could take away from your story is that you’re exceptional. You went in prison already having been a straight-A student. So it doesn’t seem too far fetched for you to go into prison and continue your studies and get your GED and start college classes. But those aren’t opportunities available to everyone in prison.

What you said is true—I was not a perfect student, but I definitely had an interest in school before I went to prison. In prison, the guys who were in trouble in school before they went to prison, they were decent students [academically]. Once they got into prison and decided to focus, they were able to do well. [Others] were people I knew instantly had been allowed to slip through the cracks repeatedly. Even if they weren’t in an environment like a prison, when it comes to just getting their reading levels together, getting their math skills up, taking a GED test—it felt like a huge challenge. It’s embarrassing to say, “Hey I need help. I need assistance.” There’s just so many distractions [in prison], so many things in there to stop you from bettering yourself. A lot of these guys want to do it. Some don’t know how to do it. If they find out how to do it, it’s a long, long process. If you don’t really have the tools before you go in there, it could become a complete wasteland.

You were compelled, as part of a mandatory prison labor program, to pick cotton, and that ‘s the most striking image I took away from the film—of the cotton fields, and listening to you talk about your experience while in prison, being a black man in the South, picking cotton. If you can’t convince people any other way that the prison system is a continuation of slavery, I think that image does it.

I knew I wanted to use [the cotton fields] to convey [my experience] because it is shocking. At 17 years old I didn’t know that cotton still grew. Going up to the prison, and I’m looking out of the window, I see way out in the distance fields of white. I was trying to wrap my head around what the hell that was. The fact that it was cotton and having to go out and pick it blew my mind, man. It blew my mind. I knew I was in that place because some bad choices I made, but this is surreal. It was like another level and it really opened my eyes to what the whole system was. I felt it was all planned and mapped out. It was no coincidence. I was at a place on a farm or a plantation as they call it. [Out of] 2,000 inmates, the majority are black and brown. Only had a handful of white boys. Only a handful of Asians. Even in prison the whites typically had the better jobs. And in the fields, you see a sea of black men working. Back-breaking work, picking cotton. There are people working in the fields, picking cotton and just working in general, getting paid zero dollars [and] other companies are profiting from that. So I don’t know what you want to call that, but it is a system and it’s a system inspired by another system set to oppress. And it’s a trap. If people leave [the film] with nothing else [they should] understand [that] this whole system is a trap to defeat you, and keep you down and to turn off your light so you can’t contribute to society, so you can’t bring forth new ideas and new experiences.

What do you want people to think when they see this film?

I want people to think about their own experience. Just their own lives, the choices we’ve [made] as human begins and the mistakes we have made that we have regretted. I hope they would think about the fact that they don’t want to be judged forever by that mistake, by that event and hopefully it will provide a sense of compassion.

And what do you want them to feel?

I feel like some folks cannot empathize with people who look different, who have a different [experience]. I hope the audiences are able to empathize. I’m not asking for people to like me or like the story to prove. I’m saying empathize with something other than yourself, something outside yourself. Think beyond your own singular experience, and understand that we all have our own different walks and different journeys. It’s not all the same.

Who needs to see this film?

I want to say “everybody.“ Is that too broad? I know that there are 2 million people who are currently in the [prison] system or getting out of the system, and that’s a large population of folks. And these people have records now. They have a history. These people still have dreams. They still have desires. They still want to live their life. They’d still like to vote. They’re still going to pay taxes. And they need to be given the tools to do that. I feel like you can’t send somebody [away for] some time and once they’re out continue to dramatically creating incarcerated individuals surviving in a free society. And that’s exactly what happens. And so I’m hoping I’m talking to the people who have been down a similar path I’ve been down, [saying] don’t give up, don’t feel discouraged, and move forward. And they don’t have to be stuck in that situation. We need people [who] are not just a part of the system, we need folks who make decisions, people who rent out apartments, people who give out cars loans, people who [do hiring]. We need everybody to understand. I’m not saying we need a parade or a welcome wagon. I’m just saying these people have served their time, and in most cases served too much time, and they should be allowed to be back in society. I don’t know how else to say it.

Evolution of a Criminal is showing at the IFC Center in New York City.

Kajieme Powell told the St. Louis police to shoot him. He told them repeatedly to shoot him, and the two police officers who were called to the scene quickly obliged. But they didn’t shoot him because he told them to. The official reason St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson gave for why the officers shot Powell—which they did at least nine times, including several shots fired after Powell had already fallen to the ground—was that Powell was carrying a knife and charged toward the two officers holding that knife with an overhand grip.

Cellphone video captured by a witness standing nearby throws this official account of events into question, including the overhand grip, whether Powell “charged” at the officers and even the distance Powell was from the officers. But what does seem clear is that Powell was not well. In the video, he paces back and forth outside the store speaking incoherently, the two stolen energy drinks sitting on the sidewalk. The first thing he says that makes any sense is when the police arrive and he yells, “Shoot me!” The police do nothing to de-escalate the situation, hopping out of their car with guns drawn. Perhaps this is protocol, but at no point, after recognizing that Powell is only holding a knife and is not threatening the lives of anyone around him, do they attempt any non-lethal means of subduing him. They do not recognize his barking “Shoot me! Kill me now!” as suicidal. They ended the ordeal, and Powell’s life, without much consideration of any alternatives.

But this is to be expected when far too many police officers aren’t being trained to handle suspects with mental illness, but are increasingly called to do so. As mental-health services disappear across the country, it is the police departments, the court system and the prisons that, more and more, are charged with care for those with mental illnesses. But that care often takes the form of what happened in St. Louis to Powell, or of incarceration without treatment.

This is true for a number of social problems that America would rather not deal with. It’s a system that’s not only unsustainable, financially and morally, but does little to ameliorate these issues. Fortunately, there are alternatives, and in the absence of any national policy shift, America’s cities have been on the front lines of implementing new and better programs that get people the help they need without sending them through the criminal justice system. Still, more can be done.

At any given moment in the United States, there are some 2.3 million people who are incarcerated. This country has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And this persists even as the crime rate has dropped. The main driver of the explosion in prison population (in the 1970s it was somewhere around 300,000—a number prison activists said was too high even then) has been the War on Drugs, which in addition to locking more people up for nonviolent offenses, has led to mandatory minimums and longer prison sentences across the board. While we may lag behind in math and science, we lead the world in innovating new ways to maintain our prison system.

Last year, Brave New Films, the ACLU and The Nation teamed up to bring you a video series about the corporations and industries profiting off our massive prison population. In her introductory essay, Liliana Segura wrote that “when corporations seek to profit from prisons, it creates a powerful financial incentive, not just to push for policies that fuel mass incarceration but to cut corners in the services they’ve been hired to provide.”

This year, we’re launching a new video series, OverCriminalized, that focuses on the people who find themselves being trafficked through this nation’s prisons and police precincts with little regard for their humanity and zero prospects for actual justice. They are victims of an unwillingness to invest in solving major social problems, and the consequent handing off of that responsibility to the police, the courts and the prisons. They are the mentally ill, the homeless and the drug addicted. Sometimes they are all three.

Instead of treatment, those living with severe mental illness are often subject to arrest and police violence. It’s estimated that half of the people shot and killed by a police officer have some type of mental-health problem. James Boyd was killed in Albuquerque, New Mexico after a five-hour negotiation with police, who were trying to get the homeless man to leave an illegal campsite he had set up. Boyd only had two small camping knives, but he was shot in the back after the officers set off a stun grenade

When they aren’t killing people with mental-health issues, the police are arresting them, a harrowing and harmful experience in its own right. “Jails are the number-one mental-health facilities across the country,” San Antonio Police Officer Joe Smarro explains in this video series. And that’s no surprise, considering that from 2009 to 2012, $4.35 billion in public mental health spending was cut from state budgets. According to Leon Evans, president of the Center for Health Care Services in San Antonio, nonviolent mentally ill persons are on average incarcerated for three to four times longer than violent offenders without mental illness. And the type of treatment they receive when they are imprisoned is no less violent than what they experience on the street.

A four-month investigation by The New York Times found that brutal attacks on inmates, especially those with mental-health issues, are routine at the nation’s second-largest prison facility, Rikers Island. They found that over an eleven-month period in 2013, there were 129 incidents where inmates suffered “serious injuries” caused by jail employees, and that 77 percent of those who experienced “fractures, wounds requiring stitches, head injuries” had also been diagnosed with a mental illness. According to the Times, “Rikers now has about as many people with mental illnesses—roughly 4,000 of the 11,000 inmates—as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined. They make up nearly 40 percent of the jail population, up from about 20 percent eight years ago.”

At the same time mental illness is being criminalized, so too is a related public health problem: drug abuse. The War on Drugs was sold to the American people as targeting drug kingpins, but in actuality it has resulted in the arrest and incarceration of mostly low-level dealers and addicts. The criminalization of drug use has also disproportionately affected black people. An ACLU report from 2013 found that, even with similar rates of usage, black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. The report also said: “The findings show that while there were pronounced racial disparities in marijuana arrests 10 years ago, they have grown significantly worse. In counties with the worst disparities, Blacks were as much as 30 times more likely to be arrested. The racial disparities exist in all regions of the U.S., as well as in both large and small counties, cities and rural areas, and in both high- and low-income communities. Disparities are also consistently high whether Blacks make up a small or a large percentage of a county’s overall population.”

Ultimately, we are locking people up for either recreational drug use that is harming no one, or for self-medicating an undiagnosed mental illness. In the same way people become addicted to drugs, we have become addicted to using incarceration to treat problems without addressing the underlying causes.

The same holds true for homelessness. In New York City, arrests of peddlers and panhandlers—crimes associated with homelessness—are triple what they were only a year ago. Earlier this year, the NYPD came under fire for raiding a homeless shelter, Freedom House, and arresting twenty-two people. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, city commissioners recently passed an ordinance that prohibits “camping”—or sleeping outside—and carries with it the potential penalty of a $500 fine and sixty days in jail.

There is a longstanding history in this country of imprisoning the most vulnerable populations. The criminalizing of homelessness harkens back to the days of post-Reconstruction, when vagrancy laws that had not been enforced for decades were suddenly being applied to the newly freed black populations. The “black codes” targeted the formerly enslaved and arrested them for violations such as not being able to produce paperwork showing employment. The result was their being arrested and shuffled off to prisons that had sprung up on former plantations, effectively re-enslaving them.

This legacy has continued in our era through broken windows policing, stop-and-frisk policies and discriminatory immigration enforcement measures such as Secure Communities. All of these have the potential to criminalize everyday behaviors (often based on race) and maintain police officers’ role as the preferred tool to address too many of society’s problems.

What the homeless need is housing, first and foremost, and prison is not an adequate substitute. “So many major social problems come to the criminal-justice system to be fixed because there isn’t something else out there. But don’t ask the criminal justice system to do it all, because the only thing we really know how to do is send people to prison,” prosecutor Dan Satterberg told our film crew.

That’s why this video series is not just about presenting the problem, but about how you can take action. The criminal-justice system is racist and corrupt. Mass incarceration creates more problems than it solves. Prisons are more violent and expensive than the alternatives. The entire system is less humane that it should be.

These videos focus on solutions that are not only cost effective but actually work in bettering people’s lives and making us less dependent on prisons. These programs could certainly go further, by more effectively keeping these social problems out of the criminal-justice system. But they go a long way toward rethinking the efficacy of treating homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness as nails that can be hammered down simply with more arrests.

Take Action: Call on Congress to Support Critical Mental Health Services

These approaches save money and save lives. But implementing them in more of our communities will take a concerted political effort. As a first step, you can sign this petition calling on Congress to pass the Strengthening Mental Health in Our Communities Act. A better way is not only possible, it’s necessary.

Read more:

It’s Time for the NYPD to Stop Treating Mentally Ill New Yorkers Like Criminals: How a crisis intervention program pioneered in Memphis could save lives and prevent arrests.
by Agnes Radomski

What Happens When A City Decides to Offer Addicts Services, Not Prison Sentences? Inspired by Seattle, Santa Fe adopts the LEAD program to divert people arrested for drug possession away from the criminal justice system and into treatment.
by Aaron Cantú

Can a ‘Homeless Bill of Rights’ End the Criminalization of LA’s Most Vulnerable Residents? After years of harassment by the police, homeless Angelenos and their allies fight back.
by John Thomason

Watch all of the videos in this series:

A Psychotic Episode Shouldn’t End in a Jail Cell

Jail Time Is a Terrible Way to Treat Substance Abuse

When Not Having a Roof Over Your Head Is a Crime

* * *

As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive innovation. This article is part of Cities Rising, The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.

It’s been estimated that half of the people shot and killed by police officers in the United States have some type of mental-health problem. James Boyd was killed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after a five-hour negotiation with police, who were trying to get the homeless man to leave his illegal campsite. Boyd had only two small camping knives, but he was shot in the back after the officers set off a stun grenade.

When they aren’t killing people with mental-health issues, the police are arresting them, a harrowing and harmful experience in its own right. “Jails are the number one mental-health facilities across the country,” San Antonio Police Officer Joe Smarro explains in a new video series about overcriminalization, which launches at TheNation.com on October 9. Produced by Brave New Films in partnership with the ACLU, the series explores alternatives to the criminalization of social problems like mental illness, homelessness and addiction.

There’s a long history in America of imprisoning vulnerable populations. The criminalizing of homelessness harks back to the days after Reconstruction, when outdated vagrancy laws were suddenly applied to the newly freed black population. The “black codes” targeted formerly enslaved people, who were arrested for violations such as lacking proof of employment. They were then sent to prisons that had sprung up on former plantations, effectively re-enslaving them. This legacy carries on through stop-and-frisk policies and discriminatory immigration enforcement measures. Such policies criminalize everyday behavior, are enforced in a racist fashion, and designate police officers as the first and only solution to society’s problems.

That’s why this series is not just about describing the problem, but about how you can take action. These videos focus on innovative and cost-effective solutions that actually improve people’s lives, making us less dependent on prisons and policing to address problems that are far too complex to be beaten into submission.

Voting is an important feature of democracy, it is a mechanism for accountability, and the right to vote should be extended to all who desire to do so. That being said, I wish we could demystify voting as the single most important political act a citizen does.

I say this as the push to get Ferguson, Missouri residents to vote is underway. In the almost two months since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson (who still has not been arrested), 3,000 Ferguson residents (total population is 21,000) have registered to vote. And that’s good. Certainly some of the problems that led to Brown’s killing have to do with a political system that is not representative of the citizens it is charged with governing. In a town that is two-thirds black, only one of its six city council members is also black. If more than 6 percent of the black residents had voted, there would likely be a different mayor, and perhaps a different police chief.

That doesn’t mean, however, Darren Wilson would not have shot Michael Brown.

As I said, voting is a means by which we hold elected officials accountable, but it does not guarantee they do the right thing. In the aftermath of Brown’s killing, there was much reporting on the daily interactions black residents of Ferguson have with police. Much of it has to do with persistent traffic stops and ticket writing, the fines from which make up a large part of the city’s budget. It’s noticeably racist when a largely white city government and court system prey on working-class black families in this way, but as Radley Balko reported for The Washington Post, it isn’t that much different for surrounding municipalities, even those with proportionate black representation in government. People in office uphold structures of oppression.

Voting can change the makeup of who is in office, but in order for there to substantial change, the people who run for office must accurately reflect the values of the community they represent. That’s where activism, direct action, organizing and movement building come in.

“For all the righteous indignation it inspired,” writes Charles Cobb, a a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, in The Washington Post, “the Ferguson turmoil has become the latest in a series of flash-in-the-pan causes that peter out without inspiring lasting movements for racial justice.”

I have more than a few issues with this assertion. It’s the reason I wrote a few thousands words about the work that a new generation of activists have been doing, before Michael Brown was killed and Ferguson became recognizable shorthand, in organizing and building a movement. Cobb nods to this toward the end of his op-ed, but doesn’t seem to take these young people seriously.

But he also admonishes the residents for their low voter turnout. “Just two generations ago, black Southerners endured arrests and beatings in order to vote,” he writes, “And yet, it seems we’ve already forgotten the immense power of the ballot.” I don’t believe that’s true. Young black people in particular, the ones who showed up in record numbers in 2008, 2010 and 2012, know well the power of the ballot. They also know the limitations. They have watched the past six years unfold, on a national and local level, and understand that voting on its own is not enough. And that’s why they’re in the streets building a movement.

I want to stress that I’m not anti-voting. I’m anti-rhetoric that posits voting alone as the supreme political act and does not recognize the other influences in politics that diminish the power of the vote. Our two-party corporate-funded elections are not a balm on our most pressing political issues. Activism, organizing and direct action are crucial, and the work young people are doing on those fronts can not be easily dismissed.

Voting is way of holding politicians accountable. Movements are a way of producing politicians we’d actually want to vote for.

Yesterday, Michael Dunn was found guilty of first-degree murder for the 2012 killing of 17-year-old Jordan Davis. It was the second time Dunn was tried with murder, after a jury in February of this year was unable to rule unanimously for conviction or acquittal. Dunn was already going to spend the rest of his life in jail, having been convicted of three counts of attempted second-degree murder for the other passengers in the car with Davis; each count carried with it a twenty-year minimum prison sentence. The first-degree murder conviction for killing Davis will add a life sentence to Dunn’s punishment.

Meanwhile, in Ferguson, Missouri, Officer Darren Wilson still has not been arrested for shooting and killing 18-year-old Michael Brown. It has been almost two months since the incident, and a grand jury (which is now under investigation for misconduct) has until January to decide whether to charge Wilson with anything.

I return to the question that plagues me every time we reach a resolution in these cases, be it a guilty verdict of (Dunn) or a not-guilty verdict (George Zimmerman), and as we await action in another case that involves the killing of young black person: What is justice?

Because if the definition of justice is confined to the meting out of punishment for individual acts of wrongdoing, more young black people will be killed. Punishment alone is not enough of a deterrent, particularly where black bodies are concerned. Murder convictions, as we see in the case of Michael Dunn, and Theodore Wafer, who was convicted of murder killing Renisha McBride, are rare. In America, almost always, you’re allowed to kill black kids with impunity.

If justice is merely an arrest, a trial, a conviction and a prison sentence, then there is no reason to contest the ways in which the criminal “justice” system operates. The goal, in this system, is not to build the type of society where murder (and other serious offenses) does not occur, but to catch, trap and do harm to the perpetrators. There’s no need to concern ourselves with the factors that led to those actions, about the emotional well-being of the victimized, or the mental well-being of the offender. We’re allowed to wash our hands of the entire affair because we can simply remove them from polite society and hope they learn their lesson on their own.

But if that is the basis of our understanding of justice, it’s no wonder Michael Brown was killed. And it won’t be surprising when the next young black person is shot and killed by a police officer or vigilante. We think justice is a matter of individual accountability. We, at our best, think the injustice lies in a not-guilty verdict.

But a “not guilty” in a courtroom trial is the least of our concerns when black children are born with the presumption of guilt. If they exist in a world where blackness marks them as targets, where racism defines their experience and where white supremacy is the law of the land, what good is a jury saying “guilty’ when they die?

Justice, real justice, is not impossible. It’s elusive. It hides from us because our current definition is oriented toward revenge. But a real justice system, one that would have protected Michael Brown and Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin and every black child waiting to have their name added to the roll call, is not outside of our reach. It is, at the time, outside of our collective will and imagination. And we’re too afraid of upsetting the unjust order of our world to to grasp for it. Capitalism, white supremacy and retributive “justice” provide comfort for those who will never experience the sting of their lash. Justice would be divesting from these systems and investing building supportive communities focused on access to stable home lives, education and recreation.

For Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, Jordan Davis’s parents, I hope this guilty verdict brings some peace to their lives. For Michael Brown Sr. and Lesely McSpadden, Michael Brown’s parents, I hope an arrest of Darren Wilson could help them sleep a little better at night. But none of it is justice. Justice would ensure their pain is never felt by any other parents.

But I know we’ll be back here again.

According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Institute, 51 percent of white Americans agree that black people and other racial minorities are treated unfairly in the criminal justice system. That’s up from 42 percent in 2013. If one of the consequences of the last year of high-profile trials—in which justice for black victims was hard to find—and subsequent outrage and protest is that a slight majority of white people now understand that the justice system is racist, then perhaps everything hasn’t been in vain.

However, this data point isn’t reason enough to become totally optimistic, particularly when paired with a study out of Stanford University, “Racial Disparities in Incarceration Increase Acceptance of Punitive Policies.” Two psychologists, Rebecca C. Hetey and Jennifer L. Eberhardt, conducted two experiments in which they presented white people with varying images or statistics, either reflecting the actual percentage of black people who are incarcerated or an exaggerated number. Their study “found that exposing people to extreme racial disparities in the prison population heightened their fear of crime and increased acceptance of the very policies that lead to those disparities.” When white people believed that the number of black people incarcerated was higher than it actually is, they were less likely to sign petitions in favor of making California’s “three strikes” law less harsh or for putting an end to stop-and-frisk. In other words, when the criminal justice system harms more black people, is more racist, white people are more likely to support the policies that perpetuate this system of racism.

From the Stanford study, we learn not only that awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to action to fight racism—it may lead, even unconsciously, to greater racial bias. That white people can be aware that the criminal justice system is racist and still wish for it to be more punitive toward black people speaks to how entrenched racist ideology is in our society, figuring into our perceived best interests. Blackness and criminality are synonymous in so many people’s minds, and the natural correctives are the police and prison. But because they would never explicitly say “arrest black people for being black,” most people would never say their views are racist. They tell themselves they’re simply looking out for their own safety.

It’s that specter of black criminality that means that even though stop-and-frisk has all but disappeared in New York City, police continue to be a major presence in majority black communities and, under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his “broken windows” philosophy, still harass black residents under the suspicion of committing minor offenses. Yes, it’s racist, but does anyone think that’s actually a problem?

Awareness is not enough. Knowing that racism exists is not enough for white people to want to see its destruction. So often they’re more interested in not being labeled a racist than in actually fighting racism. That means it isn’t enough to present the facts. Racism will have to disrupt the lives of white people before they are moved to action—that’s part of the reason some activist groups stress the crushing financial costs of maintaining the current criminal justice system—after all, it’s white taxpayers’ money, too. Until then, they seem content on doubling down.

The NFL’s reaction to two of its players’ off-the-field misconduct has sparked some important national debates about domestic violence and, most recently, child abuse. And because these players—Ray Rice, caught on video beating his wife, and Adrian Petersen, accused of beating his son—are black, it has also prompted us to examine how these issues intersect with race.

Let’s take the corporal punishment of children. Spanking kids as a form of discipline is not unique to black American culture. That’s an obvious statement, but it still needs saying. However, there is a certain justification for spanking that is a reaction to the specific experience of being black in a racist American society.

In his New York Times op-ed on the subject, Michael Eric Dyson writes:

Adrian Peterson’s brutal behavior toward his 4-year-old son is, in truth, the violent amplification of the belief of many blacks that beatings made them better people, a sad and bleak justification for the continuation of the practice in younger generations. After Mr. Peterson’s indictment, the comedian D. L. Hughley tweeted: “A father’s belt hurts a lot less then a cops bullet!”

The idea here is that a child who is properly disciplined is less likely to incur the wrath of an armed police officer. Brittney Cooper expands on this type of thinking in her piece at Salon:

The loving intent and sincerity of our disciplinary strategies does not preclude them from being imbricated in these larger state-based ideas about how to compel black bodies to act in ways that are seen as non-menacing, unobtrusive and basically invisible. Many hope that by enacting these micro-level violences on black bodies, we can protect our children from macro and deadly forms of violence later.

But she also adds:

The thing is, though: Beating, whupping or spanking your children will not protect them from state violence. It won’t keep them out of prison. Ruling homes and children with an iron fist will not restore the dignity and respect that the outside world fails to confer on adult black people.

Corporal punishment is an extension of respectability politics, the idea that with the correct behavior one can avoid the harshest aspects of American racism. This line of thinking has not and will not ever protect any black person from state-based racist violence, but it continues to hold weight as legitimate counterpoint to dismantling racism. It speaks to a collective idea that the problem is not a country beholden to racist policies but rather a deficiency among black people and within black culture.

But how much discipline would have been required so that the black women allegedly sexually assaulted by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw never would have been targeted? How many switches should Rekia Boyd have fetched to have been able to dodge Chicago’s Officer Dante Servin’s bullets? How many whippings did Marlene Pinnock need to endure in her fifty-one years so she could avoid California Highway Patrol Officer Daniel Andrew’s fists?

We continue to place the responsibility of correcting racism and avoiding racist violence on those who are victimized by it, and our black children continue to the pay the biggest price, at home and in the streets. It may engender helplessness to believe that you cannot protect your child from harm, but it’s no more helpful to inflict that harm yourself under the belief that spankings at home will shield them from racism outside.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, testified before a grand jury this Tuesday, September 16. Wilson testified for four hours and was “cooperative,” a source told the Post-Dispatch. At the direction of St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, the grand jury will have until January 7 to decide whether to indict Wilson on criminal charges. As of now, Wilson is still on paid administrative leave.

With each day that passes without Wilson being arrested, the citizens of Ferguson become (rightfully) more angry. Witnesses keep coming forth, the evidence continues to pile up, and yet Wilson still walks around free. More and more it looks as if no one will be held accountable for killing Michael Brown.

And we should all prepare ourselves for such an event. Police officers are rarely arrested for on-the-job killings—from 2005 to 2011, only thirty-one were—let alone convicted. Brown’s family may file a civil suit, and perhaps they could win. But even with a victory there, Michael Brown would still be dead, and black children in Ferguson, St. Louis, and all over the country would still have to live in fear that they could be next.

Brown’s individual death matters, because all lives matter, but it’s what his death represents that will be of greater significance the further Ferguson recedes from the news cycle. Brown’s death represents America’s failure. For the entirety of its existence, this country has failed to respect black people’s humanity. Our laws and customs have aggressively denied black people the full rights of American citizenship. And worse, when black people have stood up to demand equal treatment, this country has pretended that there was nothing wrong.

Michael Brown died because we failed to deal with all of this when it happened to… pick a name. We failed them all.

And we will fail more black children if we don’t find a way to confront some basic truths. We can start with this one: America routinely criminalizes black youth. Whether it’s the disparities in drug arrests despite similar rates of drug use as white people, or the rates of school suspensions and arrests, or arresting kids for dancing on the subway, one thing America does not fail at doing is making it illegal to be young and black in public spaces. And that’s why the police can get away with killing so many young black people. Everyone thinks they’re a bunch of criminals receiving their just desserts.

In the weeks and months to come, the details of the investigation into Michael Brown’s killing will likely continue to infuriate anyone who wants Darren Wilson arrested. The “justice system” will fail (or succeed, if you see, as I do, the purpose of the American justice system as the maintenance of racism, white supremacy, and black people’s second-class citizenship). But we can’t allow that to dampen the fight. America must be pushed to account for its failures. This country has to admit to itself not only its past sins, but its current ones as well. Then it has to reverse course.

Continuing to fail all the Michael Browns out there can no longer be an option.

“Hands up, don’t shoot!” has been the cry of the thousands who took to the streets seeking justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old who was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by Officer Darren Wilson on August 9. According to multiple witnesses, Brown had his hands in the air—a gesture generally understood to signal surrender—when Wilson shot him to death. The police have a different story: they say Brown was the aggressor, having reached for Wilson’s gun while the officer was still in his vehicle, and later charging toward Wilson. This version of the story, frankly, sounds ridiculous. And now there’s more reason that ever to doubt the police’s explanation. CNN has reported on two witnesses that had not previously given statements to journalists:

Two men, shocked at what they saw, describe an unarmed teenager with his hands up in the air as he’s gunned down by a police officer. They were contractors doing construction work in Ferguson, Missouri, on the day Michael Brown was killed.And the men, who asked not to be identified after CNN contacted them, said they were about 50 feet away from Officer Darren Wilson when he opened fire. An exclusive cell phone video captures their reactions during the moments just after the shooting.

“He had his f**n hands up,” one of the men says in the video. The man told CNN he heard one gunshot, then another shot about 30 seconds later. “The cop didn’t say get on the ground. He just kept shooting,” the man said. That same witness described the gruesome scene, saying he saw Brown’s “brains come out of his head,” again stating, “his hands were up.”

At this point, I need someone to answer this question for me like I’m stupid: What else is needed to arrest Darren Wilson? I’m not asking what a prosecutor would need to for a murder conviction, or even what a grand jury would need to bring formal charges. What else is needed for police to say, “Darren Wilson, you shot and killed someone, you are under arrest”? What more?

At least six witnesses have given near-identical accounts of what happened to Michael Brown. A shot was fired, Brown ran, Wilson kept firing, Brown put his hands in the air, and Wilson kept shooting. The autopsy shows Brown was hit six times. He was unarmed. What more do you need to make an arrest?

And I’m not of the belief that arrest, a trial or even imprisonment constitute real justice. That punishment model does not create a more just world. But currently, it’s what we have. If under this system, the value of black life is such that an 18-year-old can be shot and killed in cold blood and the police can’t even place the person responsible in handcuffs—a month and counting later—I find it difficult to maintain faith that we’ll one day move to model of justice that respects black humanity. Our lives are too expendable.

While riding the subway the other day, I overheard a mother and daughter discussing the police. The two of them had just boarded the train after witnessing an officer stop a young man whom the officer believed didn’t pay the fare. Apparently, the young man had explained to the subway booth attendant that he didn’t have any money, and the attendant took pity on him and let him through. The young man became defensive when the police officer didn’t believe his story.

The mother, a black woman who looked to be in her 50s, was upset about the interaction she witnessed. “As a police officer, you should be out trying to catch people doing murders and robberies, not things like hopping the turnstile,” she kept saying. “I feel like they’re just picking on these kids.” The daughter, also black and probably in her 30s, had a different view: “They’re doing their job. They know enough to know which kids are the ones coming on the train stealing iPhones. Not paying the fare is the beginning of mischief. These kids are bad,” she said.

“These kids are bad” isn’t solely the opinion of that one woman I overheard on the train. And as such it wasn’t surprising to read the findings of this Quinnipiac University poll that shows that 57 percent of black voters support “broken windows” policing. It’s one reason why folks like President Obama and the Rev. Al Sharpton can go before black audiences and, as The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart argues, “air the dirty laundry” of black America and receive rapturous applause. “These kids are bad”—and if we don’t set them straight early on, the thinking goes, they’ll be worse adults. Even given the adversarial (at best) relationship between black folks and the state, many black Americans still view police as part of the solution.

It’s important to note, though, that this particular poll surveyed registered voters. As Kristen West Savali points out at The Root, “Older black people are more likely to be registered voters than younger black people, and in populations most affected by police brutality—low-income, black communities—access to a landline or cellphone is not assured.” She adds: “When reading these results, one also has to take into consideration the disenfranchisement restrictions placed on black voters on parole.” In other words, the people not as likely to face police harassment are the ones who support a crackdown on so-called “quality-of-life” crimes.

Fact is, black people can also be complicit in upholding the system of racism, having internalized the idea of black criminality and inferiority. Consider that during the 1980s, at the dawn of the crack epidemic, the War on Drugs had the support of many black activists. They saw it as a means of cleaning up their neighborhoods; in reality, it was a way of creating a new racial caste system through mass incarceration.

I understand where the impulse comes from. We look around our neighborhoods, witnessing despair and desperately wanting a solution. But the police aren’t it. They are not disciplinarians. They are agents of the state whom we have authorized to use force, often with impunity, against mostly black youth. But when you believe the answer to “these kids are bad” is police intervention, and then don’t take into account what those interactions often entail—harassment and disrespect, sometimes violence—you’re damning those children even further. Instead of pushing for more police intervention, while simultaneously chastising black youth for their behavior (much of which is not, or should not be, criminal), we need to find the political will to invest in the things that actually work. Affordable housing, recreation, education, food security. These are things that will build the type of neighborhoods and communities we want to see.

Even if we were all to concede that “these kids are bad,” more policing won’t make them any better.

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On August 22, almost two weeks after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris titled “Will Ferguson be a moment or a movement?”

I started working on my piece about the new era of black activism (which you can read here) months ago, and so I read Harris’s op-ed with the same level of irritation that made me want to write that piece in the first place. Not that there isn’t any value in what Harris wrote, because there certainly is. But if you’re asking the question “Where is the movement?” you simply haven’t been paying attention.

“A moment of trauma can oftentimes present you with an opportunity to do something about the situation to prevent that trauma from happening again,” Charlene Carruthers, national coordinator for Black Youth Project 100, told me in an interview for that piece, and the millennial generation has been presented with trauma after trauma. The killing of Sean Bell, the over-prosecution of the Jena Six, the killing of Oscar Grant, the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many more moments that may not have captured the national media attention but those events have defined the late adolescence and early adulthood of black folks of the millennial generation. As part of that demographic, let me say: the trauma has been fucking exhausting.

So, too, has been the haranguing from older generations that we have been too apathetic, that we have been too “post-racial,” that we have not done our part in upholding the legacy of the civil-rights movement. And so I wanted to write a corrective to that narrative, as I’ve seen my generation take up the fight and organize and begin along the hard road to movement building. It’s happening at this very moment. It was happening before Michael Brown was killed.

Harris writes:

What may keep Ferguson from becoming a national transformative event is if “justice” is narrowly confined to seeking relief for Brown and his family. If the focus is solely on the need for formal charges against Wilson, a fair trial, a conviction, a wrongful-death lawsuit—rather than seeing those things as part of a broader movement that tackles stand-your-ground laws, the militarization of local police, a requirement that cameras be worn by police on duty and the need for a comprehensive federal racial-profiling law. If justice remains solely personal, rather than universal.

But that work had already begun before Ferguson erupted. The Dream Defenders traveled to the United Nations to present a case against “stand-your-ground” laws, and BYP100 recently organized an action at the Chicago Police Department headquarters to address discrepancies in marijuana arrests. The movement is here. The pictures are not as arresting as what comes from a moment like Ferguson, and therefore aren’t as compelling to media outlets only interested in the sensational. But the criminalization of black youth has emerged as the central focus of organizing efforts for the millennial generation and the work is being done.

On Twitter, filmmaker/writer/activist dream hampton called millennials the “Movement Generation.” It fits.

On July 13, 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty in the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American 17-year-old walking home from a 7-Eleven. What The Washington Post and other media outlets had dubbed “the trial of the century” was over, with a deeply unsettling verdict. In the fifteen months between Trayvon’s death and the beginning of the trial, people across the country had taken to the streets, as well as to newspapers, television and social media, to decry the disregard for young black lives in America. For them—for us—this verdict was confirmation.

A group of 100 black activists, ranging in age from 18 to 35, had gathered in Chicago that same weekend. They had come together at the invitation of Cathy J. Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics, and her organization, the Black Youth Project. Launched in 2004, the group was born as a research project to study African-American youth; in the decade since then, Cohen has turned the BYP into an activist organization. The plan for this meeting was to discuss movement building beyond electoral politics. Young black voters turned out in record numbers in the 2008 and ‘12 elections: 55 percent of black 18-to-24-year-olds voted in 2008, an 8 percent increase from 2004, and while a somewhat smaller number—49 percent—voted in 2012, they still outpaced their white counterparts. But how would young black voters hold those they had put in office accountable? And what were their demands?

This group, coming together under the banner Black Youth Project 100 (“BYP100” for short), was tasked with figuring that out. As with any large gathering, people disagreed, cliques were formed, and tensions began to mount. The organizers struggled to build consensus within this diverse group of academics, artists and activists. And then George Zimmerman was acquitted. The energy in the room changed.

“A moment of trauma can oftentimes present you with an opportunity to do something about the situation to prevent that trauma from happening again,” said Charlene Carruthers, one the activists at the conference.

Carruthers, a Chicago native, has been an organizer for more than ten years, starting as a student at Wesleyan University. She has led grassroots and digital campaigns for, among others, the Women’s Media Center, National People’s Action and ColorofChange.org. She heard all types of sounds emanating from the people in the room that day, from crying to screaming. “I don’t believe the pain was a result, necessarily, of shock because Zimmerman was found not guilty,” Carruthers said, “but of yet another example…of an injustice being validated by the state—something that black people were used to.”

Some members of BYP100 went into the streets of downtown Chicago and led a rally. Others stayed behind and drafted the group’s first collective statement. Addressed to “the Family of Brother Trayvon Martin and to the Black Community,” it read in part: “When we heard ‘not guilty,’ our hearts broke collectively. In that moment, it was clear that Black life had no value. Emotions poured out—emotions that are real, natural and normal, as we grieved for Trayvon and his stolen humanity. Black people, WE LOVE AND SEE YOU.”

The group recorded a reading of the letter and released the video on July 14, one day after the verdict. “That was the catalyst,” Carruthers said, “that cemented [the idea] that the people in that room had to do something collectively moving forward.”

* * *

The police department in Sanford, Florida, was slow to act in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s killing. It took forty-five days for the police to arrest George Zimmerman; although he had admitted to killing Trayvon and had been brought in for questioning the night of the shooting, the police appeared to have accepted his word that he’d shot Trayvon in self-defense and failed to charge him. As the weeks passed, thousands of people took to the streets in frustration. One of them was Phillip Agnew, who worked at the time as a pharmaceutical sales representative. Along with a couple of friends, he organized a group of college students and recent graduates from across Florida for a three-day, forty-mile march from Daytona Beach to Sanford to demand justice for Trayvon. When the marchers arrived, Agnew said, the police sat down with some members of the group, who demanded that they arrest George Zimmerman and form a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the shooting. The department’s response was to shut the police station down for the day. “That march solidified our bonds,” Agnew said. Shortly thereafter, he organized a conference call with nearly 200 other activists to discuss how to pressure the police to arrest Zimmerman. This was the start of the Dream Defenders.

The day the verdict was announced, Agnew was in Miami, having dinner at a neighbor’s house. Like so many others, he had followed the trial intently. Agnew got back home just as the verdict came in. “I saw George Zimmerman celebrating, and I remember just feeling a huge, huge, huge… collapse,” he said. “I’ll never forget that moment…because we didn’t even expect that verdict to come down that night, and definitely didn’t expect for it to be not guilty.”

The injustice of the acquittal shook the Dream Defenders, and on Sunday morning, members of the group convened in Tallahassee, where they occupied the state capitol building. “We thought of the tactic before we even thought of what we were going to demand,” Agnew said. Initially, that didn’t matter: their mere presence in the capitol was enough to garner national media attention. Civil-rights legends like Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond joined them, as well as hip-hop artist Talib Kweli.

“We were going on the fly a lot during that time,” Agnew said. “But we knew we had to go to a seat of power and confront a person or a body of people that could give us what we wanted.” Over the course of the monthlong protest, the Dream Defenders crafted “Trayvon’s Law,” an ambitious package of bills calling for an end to the school-to-prison pipeline and racial profiling, as well as the repeal of “Stand Your Ground,” the self-defense law that had come under scrutiny after Trayvon’s death. While the bills were not introduced, the Dream Defenders met with several supportive legislators to discuss them.

* * *

As a nation, we find ourselves celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of many of the achievements of the civil-rights generation, which won major legal victories against institutionalized American racism. We have commemorated (or will soon) the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Civil-rights leaders of the 1950s and ’60s have become the African-American version of the Greatest Generation: throughout my childhood, I was taught to revere them. Each generation of African-Americans born after this period owes its opportunities for success to the brave men and women who organized on the front lines of violent racism and oppression to secure even a semblance of freedom.

But as I got older, the message became less about respecting our elders for their sacrifices and more about chastising my generation for not doing more. We were selfish and apathetic. Why hadn’t we lived up to the standard set by our civil-rights-era forebears?

Despite its undeniable impact, the civil-rights movement didn’t solve the issue of racial injustice. The world that young black people have inherited is one rife with race-based disparities. By the age of 23, almost half of the black men in this country have been arrested at least once, 30 percent by the age of 18. The unemployment rate for black 16-to-24-year-olds is around 25 percent. Twelve percent of black girls face out-of-school suspension, a higher rate than for all other girls and most boys. Black women are incarcerated at a rate nearly three times that of white women. While black people make up 14.6 percent of total regular drug users, they are 31.2 percent of those arrested on drug charges and are likely to receive longer sentences. According to a report issued by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which used police data as well as newspaper reports, in 2012, a black person lost his or her life in an extrajudicial killing at the hands of a police officer, security guard or self-appointed vigilante like George Zimmerman every twenty-eight hours.

Carruthers and Agnew, both 29, are members of that post-civil-rights generation, as am I. We millennials are charged with continuing the fight against the system of racism that has been the defining component of the black American experience for centuries. We come after civil rights, after Black Power and after the hip-hop generation. And the perception that millennials are apathetic isn’t entirely fair. We protested the war in Iraq. We volunteered our time in clean-up efforts after Hurricane Katrina. We took to the streets in support of the Jena Six. And we’ve joined organizations fighting for progressive causes. But this work had been taking place in isolated pockets. What millennials had yet to achieve was the formation of a sustainable national movement.

Then Trayvon Martin was killed. Protests sprang up all across the country, and his name became a rallying cry. Trayvon’s death ignited something durable in a considerable number of black youth. Whatever apathy had existed before was replaced by the urge to act, to organize and to fight. Millennials were ready to build their movement.

* * *

The demise of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1970s left a void in black political organizing. The Panthers weren’t without problems (the sexist nature of their leadership was a big one), but they represented the last gasps of a national black organizing that combined radical political education, direct action, youth engagement and community services. In the years since, racial-justice groups have struggled to effect change as profound as they managed to achieve during the heyday of the civil-rights and Black Power movements. The Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network is mostly visible to the extent that Sharpton is able to leverage his own platform and personality for the causes he cares about. The same is true of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Until Benjamin Jealous took over as president in 2008, the NAACP—the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization—was battling perceptions of irrelevance. Under Jealous’s leadership, the NAACP changed course, but the question lingered as to whether it was equipped to fight the new challenges faced by black America. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has existed since 1993 without much fanfare; the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, started in 2004, fizzled. “The times we live in,” Carruthers said, “call for a resurgence of national black-liberation organizing.”

This past May, I traveled to Chicago for the “Freedom Dreams, Freedom Now!” conference, hosted by a number of organizations, including BYP100, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference was intended as an “intergenerational, interactive gathering” of scholars, artists and activists commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer and discussing contemporary social-justice organizing. The opening plenary featured a keynote address by Julian Bond, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and former board chair of the NAACP. He presented a history of Freedom Summer, the SNCC-led movement to register voters and get black people to the polls in Mississippi, before a premiere screening of the PBS documentary Freedom Summer, directed by Stanley Nelson.

But the aim of the conference wasn’t just to reminisce. It was a precursor to Freedom Side, a collective that includes members of BYP100, the Dream Defenders and United We Dream, an immigrant-youth-led organization, as well as more established groups like the NAACP and AFL-CIO. Before the conference, as part of the Freedom Summer celebration, the Dream Defenders hosted “freedom schools” throughout Florida, talking to young people about criminalization, mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline. Voter registration drives were also held across the country.

The day after the conference ended, BYP100 hosted an organizer-training event at the University of Chicago. Early on, the attendees were split into two groups, and the two sides engaged each other in a call-and-response chant that referenced historical greats like Nat Turner, Angela Davis, Ida B. Wells, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Fred Hampton. But even as they paid homage to their history in song, these young activists had their eyes on the future. Members led sessions on personal narratives in organizing, how to handle interactions with police officers, and building political power.

* * *

“I think we’re seeing different types of organizing [taking] shape, and I think we’re going to continue to see that—especially with the evolution of social media and technology,” said Dante Barry, deputy director of the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice. The group, founded in 2012 by Daniel Maree, drummed up attention for a Change.org petition, created by Howard University Law School alum Kevin Cunningham, calling for a criminal investigation into Trayvon Martin’s death. It collected over 2 million signatures—at the time, the fastest-growing petition ever on the Internet. Barry, 26, joined the Million Hoodies Movement in October 2013. He points out that if not for social media, Trayvon Martin’s death could have languished in obscurity.

While the audiences for these new groups may not be larger than the older ones’—the Dream Defenders has more than 27,000 Twitter followers; the NAACP has over 74,000—the newer groups use Twitter to hear from, not just talk to, their members. The Dream Defenders hosts Twitter discussions about its key issues, including gun violence, the criminalization of black youth and the prison-industrial complex. Community cultivation is vital as these organizations take on the challenge of long-term movement building. In February, Agnew and others put together a Tumblr called “Blacked Out History,” featuring members’ artwork. “We were born out of [the Trayvon Martin] murder, but that didn’t become our focus,” Agnew said.

Trayvon Martin’s killing deserved all of the attention it eventually received, but elevating Trayvon as a singular martyr risks portraying the struggle of this new generation of activists as the exclusive domain of black men. That would repeat the missteps of past generations. While black women were often responsible for most of the practical work involved in organizing, they were poorly represented in leadership positions, and their concerns were all too frequently sidelined.

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Carruthers sees this dynamic playing out today. “A lot of people rallied across the country in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin,” she observed. “Not as many rallied around the killing of Renisha McBride.” McBride, age 19, was killed on November 2, 2013, in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Looking for help after being injured in a car crash, she appeared on the porch of 54-year-old Theodore Wafer, who opened his front door and shot her. Wafer is white; his defense team argued that he believed McBride was breaking into his house. A rally was held that weekend, with local residents calling for Wafer’s arrest, but the level of outrage and media attention didn’t come close to what it was for Trayvon Martin.

“That’s a reality,” Carruthers said, “and as an organization invested in freedom and justice for all black people, we are equally as committed to elevating the stories of black women and girls.” To this end, BYP100 uses a “queer, feminist/womanist and economic-justice approach” to consider issues from the position of how they affect the people most marginalized in their community. It’s a deliberate rebuke to the charismatic male leadership that centers on the concerns of black men.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, exploded after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer on August 9. Brown, who would have started college the following Monday, became the latest unarmed black person to be killed by police. In the wake of his death, and with little information forthcoming from the Ferguson Police Department, residents took to the streets, first for a vigil, later in protest. The underlying crisis—economic and educational disparities, the lack of political representation, constant harassment by the police—boiled over. Nights of unrest followed, characterized by the aggressive presence of a militarized police force as well as some rioting and looting, as the nation once again came face to face with its centuries-long tradition of criminalizing black bodies. In response to the shooting, BYP100 asked supporters to submit videos describing how they have been profiled or harassed by police. “Beyond our current frustration and anger, our memory hums as our ancestors call out to us. We will redeem their suffering through collective work for liberation,” the group said in a statement. “Stoicism, respectability politics and piecemeal measures of progress are not working.” Here, perhaps, is the new movement’s first big test.

Editor’s Note: This piece initially credited Daniel Maree with creating the Change.org petition calling for a criminal investigation into Trayvon Martin’s death and then was incorrectly changed to say a group of Howard University students created it. In fact, the petition was created by Howard University Law School alum Kevin Cunningham. The text above has been corrected and we regret the errors.

Read more from our special issue on racial justice

The Editors: “Renewing the Struggle for Racial Justice, Post-Ferguson”

Paula J. Giddings: “It’s Time for a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement”

Rinku Sen: “As People of Color, We’re Not All in the Same Boat”

Dani McClain: “Obama’s Racial Justice Initiative—for Boys Only”

Frank Barat: “A Q&A With Angela Davis on Black Power, Feminism and the Prison-Industrial Complex”

Melissa Harris-Perry: “Obama Is Responsible for the Protests in Ferguson—but Not in the Way You Think ”