Reimagining Black Safety

Note: This essay will appear in the author’s forthcoming book, 10 Easy Steps to Creating a New Society.

One of the most notorious crises in the United States is the ugly and never-ending confrontational relationship between the State (the police) and communities of color, particularly African Americans. Before we take another step into this centuries-old dance of violence, let’s clarify a few points:

• While one can trace the practice of policing as far back historically as 27 BC in ancient Rome, the heart, soul and meat-on-the-bones of modern policing in the United States was inspired by the slave patrols of the southern states.
• Although more white people are killed by the police in the United States than other ethnic groups because of their sheer numbers, a much higher percentage of Black people are shot in high profile and questionable extrajudicial killings.
• The practice of authorities or police killing unarmed Black people has a 400 years old history in the US.
• The nation’s extraordinarily high incarceration rate of Black men relative to the overall incarceration rate in the world reflects a punitive, industrial construct.
• The dramatic level of income inequality in 2020, especially as it relates to race, is rooted in systems that have worked against Black wealth creation for centuries.
• Ongoing neighborhood segregation, under-funding of schools, under-employment, and general racial discrimination fuel a permanent underclass in the African American community that police departments are used to “keep in check.”

In many ways, police violence against Black people stems from an infrastructure that doesn’t value Black lives and that seeks to actively thwart efforts by Black and Brown people to create lives of quality and dignity.

I was recently invited to moderate an online panel discussion organized by Tilt West, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering conversation on art, humanity, and community. My fellow panelists included Wisdom Amouzou, an activist, diversity expert, and principal of Empower Community High School; Bianca Mikhan, a poet and artist who focuses on mental and spiritual health in marginalized communities; and Lady Speech, a spiritual coach and advocate for LGBTQ communities. We were invited to reflect on Black safety in the face of ongoing police violence. I started our conversation by asking that we reimagine what safety might be. Is it solely about protecting ourselves from those who seek to kill us? Or does the notion of Black safety provoke a deeper question about finding true security in the quality of our lives? Is it both and more?

Mikhan argued for an idea of safety that reaches beyond our individual selves so that we may survive and thrive collectively. She believes that true safety is found in compassion. Mikhan’s remarks raised hard questions about humanity. She reflected on the fact that some people have responded to the COVID19 pandemic by buying guns, while others have baked bread. She said that we’ve been forced to ask the question of who we want to be as a society when we grow up, which provokes further questions such as whether we believe that people are fundamentally good. For Mikahn, it is our ability to apply our greatest selves to small domestic challenges that prepares us to create a bigger, better version of humanity.

Amouzou asserted that a truly safe environment requires three essential elements: freedom from threat, or not having to deal with the possibility of death on an ongoing basis; freedom from fear, or accepting that threat is part of the human experience; and peace, or living in a world where you can successfully manage threat and fear.

Lady Speech made the case that true safety is rooted in our relationship with Mother Earth. The broken relationship between humanity and the Earth creates the conditions which lead to state-sponsored violence. White supremacy and capitalism have disconnected us from Mother Earth and have resulted in a fear-based approach to life that shows up in all of our institutions. Lady Speech added that the 400 years of violence inflicted on African Americans has not been lost on Mother Earth, who is responding to the energy of this pain and trauma.

Our conversation also touched on what it feels like to walk around in a state of constant fear. Amouzou suggested that he manages this fear by mentally and emotionally departing from America. Mikhan responded that this kind of mental departure is essential to survival in American society. By contrast, Lady Speech believes that we must first come to terms with our traumatic history; we must acknowledge the effects that our violent history has on the present, by seeing the ways that the rapes of children and adults that were a common part of the African American slave experience impact our community even today.

My conversation with these three seers led me to create a list of seven ways that we might establish true safety and make it a way of life going forward.

1. Bring back our connection to our ancestors. One of the most common indigenous African philosophical constructs is the idea of ancestral veneration. A basic scientific principle is that energy is never destroyed; it is simply transformed. This principle must also apply to human energy. Ancient people understood this as a basic truth of human experience and felt profound, ongoing connection with their ancestors. This connection helped them face challenges from a position of strength and with a perception of protection and safety.

2. Embrace Ubuntu. Ancestral veneration is rooted in the concept of Ubuntu. This idea says that “a person is a person because of other persons.” In other words, none of us exists alone; we are not really individuals. We belong to a collective of people who have existed for millenia. This understanding stands in direct conflict with the Western notion of rugged individualism. True safety may be found by tapping into the genetic memory of that indigenous wisdom.

3. Take the painting off the wall. If you go back far enough (and sometimes not that far) almost every ethnic group has used song and dance, not for the purpose of artistic display, but as an integrated part of daily life. Somehow, in Western civilization, art has become something we collect and view at a distance, like a painting on the wall of a museum. Perhaps re-engaging with spontaneous music and dance would bring us closer to a way of life more in keeping with a safe environment. There is safety in the release provided by song and dance.

4. Focus on quality of life. One of my own anecdotal observations is that when people have a decent quality of life, they are less likely to accept an unsafe environment. They become committed to maintaining their safety, the safety of their family, and the safety of their community. Conversely, when people’s lives are precarious, they will often end up in unpredictable, perilous, and unsafe circumstances. The math here is not that hard.

5. Defund the police. Yes, I know this phrase is a lightning rod, but that’s only because it has been highly politicized. Something is genuinely amiss with police funding. According to a New York TImes report from June 12th, 2020, city police budgets across the country have risen by millions of dollars annually — even during lean years for city finances, and even despite a steep nationwide decline in violent crime that began in the early 1990s. More dollars are being funneled to police departments to fight the “ghost” of an out-of-control crime rate, and this has come at the expense of funding for other city services. Police departments have also grown more militarized, equipped with assault-style weapons and even tanks from arms makers. “Defunding the police” doesn’t mean eliminating police from your city. It simply means that resources should be focused on necessary services that address mental health, food scarcity, addiction, and other challenges that have been exacerbated by massive income inequality, and not merely on adding more armed men and women on the streets, which often only invites violent altercations. Police budgets should not be tied to political whim, but to overall crime trends and statistics. Science, data, and truth should still matter.

6. Support Relationships. The more we devote time and resources to developing and strengthening relationships among family and friends, the more we can tap into those relationships to help family members overcome challenges instead of leaving that responsibility to the police. Traditionally, family has been the first line of defense in a crisis. Without this support, we call on the police to step in where family could be the first call. Of course, there are times when the police should be called, but imagine a society that supports families and provides more family-based services.

7. Stop creating the “Procariat.”If you combine the words precarious (unstable) with proletariat (working class), you create the word Procariat. Millions of Americans live the life of the Procariat — the unstable working class — especially African Americans. If you cannot plan for the next eighteen months, you are living an unsafe life. If your household is food insecure, you are living an unsafe life. If you don’t know where your next paycheck will come from, you are living an unsafe life. When we start to address these issues, we will improve safety for African Americans and halt the perpetuation of the Procariat.

We have opportunities to do something about safety; they are not beyond us. They don’t even require us to leave the comfort of our homes. They do, however, require a shared philosophy of Ubuntu that helps us understand that when others around us are unsafe, we are all unsafe.