Demilitarize the police

This summer, I wrote for a website called ForceChange.org. There, I've written about topics ranging from social-economic issues (salary caps for highly-paid CEOs) to medicine (e.g., the importance of changing patient-doctor relationships and the need for better care for patients with disabilities) to the environment (urging policymakers to increase taxes on gas and encouraging people to stop eating meat). But to my own surprise, the issue I was most compelled to write about this summer was a very basic human right: the right to exist freely in this country without regard to skin color.

Police militarization is on the rise in the United States, with a person of color (typically male) dying at the hands and guns of police officers at a rate of once a day, on average. Brutal treatment in and out of jail (as in the case of Nubia Bowe) and inconceivable treatment of individuals during arrests (as in the case of an elderly woman doing nothing wrong other than standing at the side of a highway) are also more likely to target people of color. Of course, some of these incidents make national news, while others don't (such as the death of 16-year-old Victor Villalpando earlier this summer).

What is equally striking is the incarceration rate of men of color compared to white men. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes about the new system of slavery that abides in this country: incarceration. The mire of the U.S. law system makes it nearly impossible to argue that an arrest took place based on race, leaving victims of racism very few avenues to escape the maze of the jails and courts that await them. The so called "war on drugs" has been a huge player in this racist frenzy--since the 80s, law enforcement agencies have been incentivized to make drug arrests and have been given access to (guess what?) paramilitary equipment as their arrests for drug charges increased.

Some the issues are described in more depth in my most recent petition on Force Change. Check it out if you like (and please sign, if you agree!). I close that post with a snippet of a poem from Langston Hughes--I include it in its entirety here. I find the poem to hit deeply but to find a place of hope that may be difficult. The system is broken. We must take steps to change that.

Let America be America Again
Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!