Above Photo: Whether you feel safe around cops depends on who you are. Photograph: Wang Lei/Xinhua Press/Corbis.
There are dire consequences for racial justice where politicians and advocates seek to put more police in more places with a culture of constant surveillance
Intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US tell Americans that there is no credible threat from Isis inside the United States, but continue to create structures and use resources to track black, immigrant, Arab, Muslim and South Asian communities in their daily lives and over social media under the guise of public safety and national security.
The New York Times reported this week that at least three dozen people in the US are under surveillance, even though the large majority of them have never traveled to Syria to fight with or receive training from Isis.
All this comes after reports that have shown that white supremacists are the number-one domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Yet far less attention is ever paid to cracking down on white racist vigilantes and white supremacists, even as right-wing racism, hate groups and rhetoric are all clearly on the rise.
For instance, in Charleston, South Carolina this year, we were reminded that racist vigilante attacks against black people are a part of this country’s legacy of using terrorism to incite fear in already subjugated and criminalized black communities. A white man in Chapel Hill, North Carolina was charged with fatally shooting three Muslim neighbors over parking, yet it was dismissed as a personal dispute. There was a white supremacist mass shooting of Sikhs at Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. And more recently after Paris, white supremacists were charged in a plot to bomb black churches in Virginia.
Rather than addressing the legacy of white supremacy, public responses to these incidents almost immediately focus on the concern for stronger gun regulations and mental healthcare. Meanwhile, presidential candidates claim that the country’s largest racial justice movement is inciting violence against law enforcement, federal agents monitor constitutionally-protected protests as the police make mass arrests (and even arrest reporters) and the economic marginalization and mass criminalization of black and brown lives continues apace.
Law enforcement will claim that their actions are intended for the safety of the public, but the question of who gets the right to feel and be safe in this country is an open one. In response to Charleston, for instance, New York Police Department patrols were set up across the city at black churches – surfacing a culture of fear and surveillance practices of black communities.
When half of young black Americans don’t expect to live through their 30s, and when undocumented immigrant families have to live in fear of losing their loved ones due to detention and deportation and when Sikhs and Muslims regularly face threats of violence, it becomes clear that there is a monopoly on who has the right to feel and be safe in this country. That monopoly is regulated and enforced by multiple government entities, from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to local, militarized cops and even corporations that run private security and private prisons.
Talking heads and politicians use tragedies like Paris as an opportunity to perpetuate false images of black, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities riven with violence that must be controlled through more policing and more surveillance, but respond to the crisis of gun violence – particularly the crisis of mass shootings largely perpetuated by white men – with calls for better mental health services.
There are dire consequences for racial justice where politicians and advocates seek to put more police in more places with a culture of constant surveillance. Increased policing in black and brown communities contributes to mass criminalization and leads to calls for the implementation of policing tactics like stop and frisk and broken windows.
That isn’t what it means to be safe.
Safety looks like a crack-down on and investigation of white supremacy. Safety looks like a direct reinvestment in black and brown communities and a social safety net. Safety looks like a move away from mass criminalization and a move towards fewer police and less surveillance.
Safety and security look different when you’re constantly identified by the state as the enemy. But making us safe, and making our communities safe, is actually the only way for all of us to achieve security.