Calling the police on black people isn't a Starbucks problem. It's an America problem. ... - 0 views
-
white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem
-
Black people in this country have long known that disturbing white Americans in white spaces can mean death.
-
“In the early decades of the 20th century,” author Isabel Wilkerson noted in the New York Times, “a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule.” Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, almost 4,000 black people died this way, mostly in Southern states.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
What the Starbucks incident has in common with the lynchings of the past — as well as the police brutality and mass incarceration of the present — is the basic fact that black people in America can be physically eliminated at any time, in any place, for little reason — whether that means being kicked out of stores, suspended from school, priced out of their neighborhoods, locked up in jail or put in the grave.
-
Johnson proposes a legal remedy. “You can get arrested for pulling a fire alarm, making fake bomb threats and making false claims of an alien invasion — why not a false police report that results in death?” he wrote. “We should be pushing for prosecution against these callers just as much as the cops who pull the trigger.”
-
how can we up the social and legal costs for people who make life-threatening decisions by calling the police on peaceful black people?
-
To echo pop singer Solange Knowles, the fundamental question I am asking white America is: “Where can we be free? Where can we be safe? Where can we be black?