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Unearthing the Silence: Police Brutality & Anti-Blackness in the United States

Updated: Feb 15, 2021

The history of police brutality in the United States is long and wretched and inhospitable. It is a reality we are trapped in but have yet to truly understand: the depths of warped perceptions, dehumanization, and constant profiling that fuels 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a knee on someone’s neck. With the recent murder of George Floyd and the wave of protests that followed, America has again been forced to consider the undeniable link between race and police brutality. We are currently faced with no choice but to acknowledge that the driving force causing officers to pull the trigger, follow the boy home, mistake a wallet for a gun, or skittles for a weapon -- is color, and all the twisted American notions that accompany what it means to be Black. It is clear that a misperception rendering Black bodies predisposed to criminality is what often fuels so many fatal encounters between officers and citizens.


According to multiple empirical studies, there is an enduring association of violence and aggression with Black citizens; and on this basis, encounters with the police are more likely to trigger racial stereotypes and rationalize excessive use of force (Carbado and Rock, 2016). To elaborate, issues such as shooter bias and police insecurity play a huge role in incidents turned deadly. Regarding shooter bias, social psychologists have often found that officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed African-American than an unarmed non-Black person (Carbado and Rock, 2016). Similarly, they are quicker to shoot an African-American holding a gun than a non-Black person holding a gun (Carbado and Rock, 2016). This study focuses on perception, quickly revealing that for most, it is easier to perceive Black citizens as a threat than any other demographic (Carbado and Rock, 2016). Even if the officer in question is able to overcome their bias on an ideological level, it still manifests in the presence of tangible split second decisions, which is often where the situation becomes dangerous (Carbado and Rock, 2016).


On this same note, police insecurity is often identified as a compilation of a few primary factors that, if threatened, will lead to brutality: social dominance, physical safety, race, and in some cases masculinity (Carbado and Rock, 2016). For the sake of concision, this post will focus on the idea of social dominance. Social dominance at its core seeks to uphold a hierarchy -- when put in the context of racial profiling and the death of unarmed Black citizens, social dominance opens the door to any desperate attempt to maintain this hierarchy.

“Police officers implicitly or explicitly invested in what we call ‘social dominance policing’” -- that is, policing that consciously or unconsciously maintains the officer’s sense of authority, control, and power as well as the officer’s sense of the suspect’s vulnerability, diminished agency, and powerlessness. In other words, social dominance policing is predicated upon police/civilian encounters in which the police and the suspect know who is in charge, know where power and vulnerability reside, and know how to conduct themselves in ways that “affirm and re-inscribe this hierarchy” (Carbado and Rock, 2016).

Through the lens of 2020, this is how one comes across a cop like Derek Chauvin, who asserts that a Black man, even one in chains, poses a potential threat to his position of dominance. If he is equal -- if he gets an adequate judge, impartial jury, and fair trial -- then the hierarchy can no longer exist in the way it did before. It is the reckoning, terrifying, and blatant reality that one’s superiority is a facade that implores them to pull the trigger or to lynch a man in broad daylight. This way, one can maintain a superiority complex by playing judge, jury, and executioner on the streets -- and leave no one alive to tell the tale. In the eyes of that desolate recognition, the bodies begin to pile: Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown, Freddie Grey, Laquan McDonald, Rayshard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Antwon Rose, Stephon Clark, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, and so many others. In the world as it is, this has become the never ending story: either unsung or diminished. But maybe, finally, all [our] buried corpses begin to speak (Baldwin, 1968).

References

Baldwin, J. (interviewee). (1968). The Dick Cavett Show [Television broadcast]. https://youtu.be/WWwOi17WHpE

Carbado, Devon W. and Rock, Patrick, What Exposes African Americans to Police Violence? (October 10, 2016). 51 Harvard Civil Rights- Civil Liberties Law Review 159 (2016), UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 16-43, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2850600

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