End Policing to End Whiteness
The police are a fundamental part of white racism, race, and whiteness. Defunding them out of existence is vital. In a recent interview, Angela Davis said, “We knew the role of the police was to protect white supremacy.”
Today, the activists who say the protests are bigger than police brutality and that systemic racism is bigger than police brutality are right. But Davis lays out a strategy map when she says, “the role of the police was to protect white supremacy.”
Davis suggests that white supremacy requires protection. There’s agreement and evidence for that theory. In her book “Thick and Other Essays,” Tressie McMillan Cottom says, “Whiteness can only be defined by state power…[m]ost of all, whiteness requires a police state that can use violent force to defend its sovereignty.”
White identity is a thoroughly fragile identity that needs a police force to sustain itself. You must go through the police to get to white supremacy. But if you end the police, you can get to white supremacy.
The police defend and guard white supremacy. The police keep white supremacy safe from harm, injury, damage, destruction, and exposure. And the police maintain the status and integrity of white supremacy through financial and legal guarantees.
The police are the bodyguard, the bouncer, the muscle, the concierge, the custodian, the hitman, and the henchman of white supremacy. Those roles don't need reformation; they need removal.
Again, if anyone wants a practical way to end white supremacy, ending the police is a start.
In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon said, “The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations.”
The way out and over requires crossing the line with the police, which means crossing the police out.