Social Justice? I Think I've Heard of Her
Social Justice? I Think I've Heard of Her
Current affairs meets racial justice meets history lesson meets advocating for the overhaul of institutions that do not serve us meets approx. one good joke
It’s been nearly a week since former Minneapolis police officer and potential future Bachelor contestant Derek Chauvin was found guilty on the charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the murder of George Floyd.
Because this is a weekly newsletter and I can’t control the timing of everything (though, rest assured, I am working on it), this story might seem like old news to some of you at this point. But I want to expand the conversation past talking about one cop who was held accountable one time for committing one very public crime.
This week, I spoke with my friend and kind-of boss, Taylor McGhee (she/her), a queer Biracial woman, activist, filmmaker, and the founder of Grayscale Movement, a grassroots social justice organization.
Taylor and I talked about how the Chauvin verdict fits into the larger current racial justice movement, the benefits and detriments of social media activism, and the mindsets we still have to shift in order to keep the momentum of this last year moving forward.
I know I’ve already spent my one sad newsletter of the season and so you may be wondering how I’m going to add any kind of humor to this conversation. But, if you’ll recall, I managed to make use of a Nicki Minaj meme while talking about gun violence and a not-altogether-bad Willy Wonka joke in a newsletter about how shitty our prison system is.
What I’m trying to say is: believe and you can achieve babes!!! xx
Let’s Start By Addressing the Elephant in the Room
I can’t shake the feeling that Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live is an omen for the apocalypse.
But we also need to look at the mixed bag of emotions that followed the verdict in the Chauvin trial last week. Without a doubt, there was a sense of relief for Black Americans if not a little shock that the justice system worked: Chauvin is only the 7th law enforcement officer convicted for murder or manslaughter out of the 140 arrested for such crimes since 2005.
But that very same day, a 16-year-old Black girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was shot and killed by police despite having committed no crime. The collision of the two events was a reminder of how unwavering of an issue police violence remains and how pressing of a need advancing racial justice continues to be.
With all of this in mind, I asked Taylor:
Emily: What do you see as the next steps for progressing racial justice in a moment like this where there was a success?
Taylor: Derek Chauvin’s conviction is not justice or success. It’s accountability. It’s the bare minimum.
The usage of the video footage of George Floyd’s death as evidence in the Chauvin trial was one of the first instances of validating citizen journalism. The only reason why he was found guilty for all three charges is because he got caught and there was worldwide uproar.
Derek Chauvin’s trial will set precedence for future cases on police brutality and racialized violence, but I can’t help but think about all of the other cases where murderers got off with no charges and how many BIPOC are being killed every single day and won’t become a media sensation or their killers won’t have accountability. I’m not giving Chauvin my time or energy. There’s more work to do.
It almost goes without saying that social media played a massive role in launching the wave of social justice that swept through the country this past year. While we were all socially distanced, social media offered an outlet to share resources, educate one another, and launch hard conversations.
But on the flip side, it allowed some (white) people to leave their compassion online while their daily lives went largely unchanged or, worse, circulate horrifying and graphic imagery in the name of advocating for justice. The result was an unsettling blend of genuine activism, performative allyship, and tragedy porn.
As the founder of an organization that prioritizes sharing educational materials on social media, I wanted to know what Taylor saw the function of these platforms as, what she thought the value of a new branding called “social media activism” was, and what the shortcomings of racial justice activism on social media are:
Taylor: Social media isn’t a catalyst for activism— it is a tool. I think this is a key difference to make because the average person uses social media passively and it’s so easy to like, comment, or share a post without taking action steps.
Social media is a form of both public and political education and while that it’s important, that doesn’t do much to actually improve life conditions or circumstances. It draws attention to racial justice without offering a lot of direct action.
I see the value in it, but I don’t think “social media activism” is something that should be heralded or encouraged. Social media gives people credibility and social capital. Racial justice and anti-racism have become cultural buzzwords because of social media. This work is not new: there are plenty of activists offline who are actively engaging in intersectional racial justice work on the grounds that go under-recognized and unnoticed.
The last thing I’ll say is that social media has completely desensitized people to racialized violence and created a game of Oppression Olympics. Resharing a video or photo of a Black man being killed on social media is no different than the circulation of postcards of with photographs of lynchings in the 1800s.
That’s not activism. It accomplishes nothing. It’s being complicit in White power and systems of oppression.
Nouns Gone Rogue (Or: When Sharing About Persons, Places, and Things Isn’t Enough)
One way that I feel social media activism has failed us —in addition to the desensitization— is the depersonalization of who and what we’re even posting about. When we reshare content to show that we are staying aware, we’re focusing on the content first rather than the people it’s intended to amplify and protect.
This isn’t an attack so much as an observation I made in my own sharing habits: in doing research for this very newsletter you’re reading (which is coming out just a month shy of the one year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder), I realized how little I actually knew about George Floyd past his name and a slew of widely circulated photos. It’s uncomfortable to now reconcile the still-growing volume of content I’ve viewed and shared with the actual person whose life it was supposed to uplift who is, despite it all, still a complete stranger to me.
Thinking about this in regards to Breonna Taylor, a woman whose name and iconography have essentially become fully detached from advocating for justice in her honor (although, hopefully, the tide on this is turning with today’s announcement that the Justice Department will be investigating the Louisville Police Department)1, I asked Taylor about some of the limits to well-intended social media tactics like hashtagging:
Taylor: The hashtag #sayhername is something that was originally created by Black women to draw specific attention to the violence targeting Black women and trans people. It was quickly co-opted by Black male and white activists as a way to draw attention to “larger” incidents of racial violence and just became a way to continue silencing Black women and trans folks suffering.
Even the hashtags #stopAAPI and #blacklivesmatter have been co-opted by “social media activists.” In the beginning, these digital spaces were created as a way for people within AAPI and Black/LatinX communities to identify essential resources and build a sense of community that would be silenced otherwise.
And now, people use hashtags on any post that has any connotation so BIPOC or racial justice. A prime example is the “blackout” day last summer: it decentered racial justice efforts and exchanged it for performative activism.
The phrase “doing the work” spread just as quickly as COVID last year (too soon?), but now it kind of feels hollow, especially considering what was all just said in this section. While sharing graphics or screenshots of Tweets may not be the only way you’re engaging in conversations around social justice, it is probably the most public part of your activism.
I asked Taylor how to keep this sentiment from becoming totally empty, and her response offered both the most obvious and the most effective solution:
Taylor: The next time you want to post something on social media about social justice, stop and ask yourself, “Why am I posting or sharing this? Will it be helpful? Is there something else I can do?”2
Ella Eyre Singing “Let That Motherfucker Burn” on a Loop
Before I talked two weeks ago with Liz Pittenger about America’s prison systems, I was looking at prison reform as the solution to our pesky PIC problem. After working on that newsletter, I remembered a conversation I had over the summer with my family about Greek Life in colleges. Come along for this storytime, won’t you:
Some members of my family, myself included, are members of a Greek organization while others are not. At the time of this conversation, my chapter was considering disbanding as a way to send a message that we could no longer condone the racism, classism, and discrimination that the foundation of Greek life overall was built on.
The conclusion my family came to was that while there are merits to Greek life (like leadership opportunities, networking potential, and some really great friends— things I enjoyed about my sorority experience), the roots of the institution were so rotted that Greek life as it currently exists should be abolished. Then, if people wanted to still have the good parts, getting rid of the old structures would allow for a fresh start to create a better kind of organization.
That’s how we need to approach police and prisons. We need to abolish police and prisons.
Saying that we should abolish the police puts a lot of (primarily white) people on edge because this is an institution we (speaking as a white person) have been taught to believe exists to protect us from harm; if we do away with it, won’t we be in danger?
But it is that ingrained belief that cops are inherently good and there to protect that has allowed them to define what harm is and who deserves to be protected from it.3
Hi, My Name is Emily and I Was a History Major in College
It’ll trouble the American exceptionalists in the room to hear this (and for those keeping score at home, we did just hit the jackpot of American exceptionalism callouts) but if we’re talking about rotted roots, America is like the Tree of Life.
The origins of policing in America are, like Greek life, racist, classist, and discriminatory: the institution as we know it today largely began as two different entities in the early-to-mid-1800s, unsurprisingly differing between the North and the South.
In the North, police were hired to protect property in trade ports; wealthy merchants assembled an organized force and then “came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the ‘collective good.’” And, you will all be shocked to hear this, in the South, policing was set up to preserve slavery (but even in the North, the earliest police forces were tasked with “suppressing slave rebellions” lest you start forgiving anyone for not being, like, the most into slavery).
Policing took a different shape in American territories with vigilante groups acting in the place of formal police forces, and these groups largely focused on patrolling and controlling immigrant populations (a kind way to say they targeted racially-non-white groups for lynchings). The U.S. Army also started a police-like militia to basically challenge (or “combat”) Native Americans; “today, according to the CDC, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.”
By the mid-1900s, police units were professionalized and formalized. According to Jill Lepore, an American history professor at Harvard, this process started in
“1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military… [stating that] ‘for years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks… After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.’ Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.”4
The Vollmer training model was subsequently adopted and used across the country, codifying his problematic beliefs (as well as many Jim Crow laws) as the basis for modern policing as we know it today. To put all this very simply: policing began as a way for white men to protect their property (a word which is carrying a lot here) and their dominance in society from harm.
While I’m not saying there is nothing good within the institution of policing (because I have seen Ms. Olivia Benson do some really fab things), the roots are so rotted that policing as it currently exists should be abolished.
I can talk about American history for another 100 pages (and yes, that’s a self-burn), but I want to focus instead on the future and how we can start to make things better. I asked Taylor about shifting our mentality and why doing so may be essential to enact change:
Emily: It’s clear that a lot of institutions don't serve everyone equally and, by default, don’t serve our society. Do you have an abolition mindset and if so, why do you see that as important? What do you think the relationship is between reform and abolition mindsets, and which do you see being more productive in creating lasting change?
Taylor: I am an abolitionist with a liberationist approach. I think abolition is the only logical conclusion you can come to once you actually understand institutional and systemic forms of violence and oppression.
Here’s why: think of institutions like a house.
The foundation is people making social hierarchies by a process of “othering” people in different (or even adjacent) social conditions and identities. The scaffolding and walls are power holders making decisions that codify, legalize, and/or justify their beliefs. The roof is (re)enforcing those decisions in praxis and reality by embodying violence and supremacy.
Reform is doing renovations: maybe adding new roof or an open-concept floor plan, some new paint colors and home décor to make the house not seem as oppressive as it actually is. Most of the time, it’s a temporary solution or an HGTV makeover for institutional racism.
Abolition is tearing the house down, digging up the foundation, and building a better house than existed before on more solid, just ground.
You cannot just liberate the people being actively oppressed by systems of violence. You must also liberate the oppressors and people upholding those same systems.
There is no easy process forward but there are actionable ways to get there. One way forward is to start by defunding the police (which seems to elicit more of a defensive response than even abolish the police for some reason).
To be sure, “reallocating funds to organizations prepared to handle issues like mental health disturbances, crisis intervention emergencies, and like, the DMV, even” sounds a lot more palatable and pragmatic than defund the police, but those steps are not possible unless there is defunding to make funds available to reallocate.5
Fundy how that works.
But more importantly, the culmination of today’s conversations is this: social media allowed for the widespread circulation and subsequent outrage over the video documenting George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police which led, in large part, to the guilty verdicts in Derek Chauvin’s case. But we cannot celebrate progress when it happens on a case-by-case basis, and we cannot rely on social media activism to defend our society against institutions that were never designed to protect everyone in it.
There needs to be large-scale change offline in order to achieve racial and social justice:
Taylor: The first step is responding to the dire needs of BIPOC communities, redistributing economic resources, and implementing alternatives to policing (like increasing access to mental health professionals, crisis intervention lines, social workers, etc.)
The next step is policy change and reform which means becoming actively involved in local, state, and federal government policies being debated. Call your representatives and senators to voice your opinion on bills and legislation being passed.
The last step is abolition, which means replacing unjust systems with new, equitable ones. To me, racial justice is accomplished when the systems that are causing and upholding racialized violence are dismantled and replaced with ones of equity and reconciliation.
Here are some of Taylor’s favorite resources for further learning about policing and police abolition:
Books
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
Accounts
And, of course, I am nothing if not a walking advertisement for all the cool things my friends do
A couple of months ago, Taylor asked me if I would like to join her team at Grayscale and help produce social media content to share research and educational resources on their Instagram. Maybe, then, I’m a little biased when I say that I’m really in awe of everything the team Taylor has put together is doing:
Emily: Talk to me about Grayscale as if I weren’t a part of it and didn’t know and love the mission. What is it and what is its overall objective?
Taylor: Grayscale Movement is a grassroots organization that uses education and storytelling to advocate for racial justice and equality. We’re led by an interracial, queer collective of scholar-activists and pop culture fiends.
It began as a short film about me and my friends’ experiences growing up Biracial in the South, and definitely still emphasizes shared experience and building community. We mainly post Instagram content on intersectional racial justice issues and are starting to author our own anti-racism resources.
I host our podcast In Full Color which is all about having everyday conversations about race, identity, justice, and culture. Some other projects are spotlighting fellow racial justice and advocacy groups and an amazing blog with longer writing pieces.
I really want Grayscale Movement to be a space for people to feel empowered and realize that racial justice isn’t all conceptual or theory. Racial justice is for everyone, and it’s just a matter of learning how to incorporate it into your everyday lives. And that begins with having conversations and changing the way to live your life in the smallest ways. That’s what Grayscale is all about!
Thank you to Taylor for joining me today, as well as for asking me to be both a guest on her podcast and a member of her team. Make sure to check out Grayscale Movement!!!
According to the Washington Post, Attorney General Merrick Garland “said the federal ‘pattern or practice’ probe will seek to determine whether the Louisville police have engaged in a history of abusive and unlawful tactics with little accountability.”
For me, reading an article published by my favorite writer and historian would have solved some problems.
Note my intentional use of the words we/us which indicate that there is a them that is, linguistically, different than us. You know, like othering.
This entire article by Jill Lepore is phenomenally written and jam-packed with so much history on the subject. It’s a long read but definitely worth it.
While I was not able to find more recent data, in 2017, “state and local governments spent $115 billion on police” according to the U.S. Census of Governments. Defunding the police will not result in massive waves of violence because of a lessened police presence (that’s fear-mongering). It will instead lead to less police violence as those who are equipped to respond properly to certain emergencies will be deployed instead of police officers who often are not adequately trained to handle them.