Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D., Associate Dean and Foundation Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University writes, "The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing." Read more:
An 1839 woodcut depicts a slave patrol capturing a fugitive. Source: Anti-Slavery Almanac/Public domain
Not all scholars agree that modern policing can trace its origins to slave catching.
In an article on the Conversation, Connie Hassett-Walker, Assistant Professor of Justice Studies and Sociology, Norwich University writes "There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement" (numbers added below):
In either case, Hassett-Walker adds in her expert opinion, "these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans." (emphasis added)
In a conversation about policing and political control, Harvard Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad says "...there's no way to separate the goodness of policing from the messiness of the context in which it's born." Listen to the interview at the Throughline episode link below to learn more.
As this April 24, 1851 poster illustrates, police even in Northern cities like Boston sometimes acted as slave catchers.
In the Throughline episode below, Harvard Kennedy School professor, Khalil Gibran Muhammad addresses the origins of modern policing in Northern US states:
"And part of the context for early modern policing by the late 1840s was that the immigrant population of Europeans, particularly the Irish, were generating in their own way a similar kind of social anxiety, xenophobic, nativist, racist reaction to what African Americans certainly were used to in the South with slave patrols and what antebellum black folks had been used to who were free in northern cities in terms of being surveilled and controlled."
According to a Gallup poll from July 2020, 58% of Americans believe policing in the US needs to be reformed, and according to a Reuters' article, "'Most Americans, including a majority of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, support sweeping law enforcement reforms such as a ban on chokeholds and racial profiling after the latest death of an African American while in police custody', according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday."
After the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the U.S. national conversation has turned once again to police reform. According to this news release from Nature: "Many have been arguing for years about the need for better data on the use of force by the police in the United States, and for rigorous studies that test interventions such as training on how to de-escalate tense interactions or mandating the use of body-worn cameras by officers. Those data and studies have begun to materialize, spurred by protests in 2014 after the deadly shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death by chokehold of Eric Garner in New York City." (emphasis added)
A Pew Research Center survey from 2017 provides a snapshot of what police think: "Behind the Badge: Amid protests and calls for reform, how police view their jobs, key issues and recent fatal encounters between blacks and police."
Here is just one of the many survey data results from the Pew Research Center Study "Behind the Badge" from 2017:
Read the "Police Under Scrutiny: Can law enforcement restore public trust?" by Christina L. Lyons from CQ Researcher at the link below.
Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement by
Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals, but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.
According to an NPR article, When LA Erupted in Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots (2017), the L.A. Riots of 1992 were a reaction to the news that "four Los Angeles policemen — three of them white — were acquitted of the savage beating of Rodney King, an African-American man. Caught on camera by a bystander, graphic video of the attack was broadcast into homes across the nation and worldwide." The riots were especially violent in South Los Angeles where "[t]ension had already been mounting in the neighborhood in the years leading up to the riots: the unemployment rate was about 50 percent, a drug epidemic was ravaging the area, and gang activity and violent crime were high. [...]"
National Guardsmen cross the street near Barbara Kruger’s mural on the fourth day of the Los Angeles riots in 1992. (LA. Times/Gary Leonard)
Although the photograph shows National Guardsmen, the police were also outfitted with military gear: "The LAPD at the time was almost an occupying force, particularly biased against people of color, says lawyer and civil rights activist Connie Rice. 'What we had was aggressive paramilitary policing with a culture that was mean and cruel, racist and abusive of force in communities of color, particularly poor communities of color,' Rice says in an interview with NPR's Grigsby Bates."
Equipping of police with military gear and tactical training in the U.S. dates back before the 1990s.
According to an International Business Times article, Police Militarization History Stretches Back To Civil Rights Movement, "Experts say there is a long history of militarization of the police, dating back to race riots that broke out in a handful of U.S. cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Some believe that the seeming success of SWAT teams deployed to curtail the 1965 Watts Riots -- a six-day race riot sparked by conflicts with the Los Angeles police that resulted in 34 deaths -- gave way to the trend of arming and equipping police forces with battlefield weapons. A massive expansion of police militarization came after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, where law enforcement agencies stressed the readiness of local police forces, in the event of another domestic terror incident."
Police in Ferguson use a variety of crowd-control equipment including teargas following the killing of teenager Michael Brown in August [2014]. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images via The Guardian
Do Not Resist [Film] by Start exploring this topic by reading an overview of the issues from Gale's Opposing Viewpoints database:
According to an ACLU report, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, "every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color."
Additionally, according one study in the peer-reviewed research article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), used data from SWAT deployments to study the issue. The author concluded, "militarized police units are more often deployed in areas with high concentrations of African Americans, even after adjusting for local crime rates and other community traits. But I find no firm evidence that SWAT teams lower an agency’s violent crime rate or the rates at which officers are killed or assaulted. Using survey experiments, I show that citizens react negatively to the appearance of militarized police units in news reports and become less willing to fund police agencies and less supportive of having police patrols in their own neighborhoods." (emphasis added)
Read the study:
After Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police reform conversations in the US were focused on police wearing body cameras. Here is an article in The Atlantic from December of that year:
Since that time numerous polls and studies have been done to determine if body-worn cameras would be an effective tool for police accountability.
The National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) is a non-profit organization dedicated to "creat[ing] a community of support for independent, civilian oversight entities that seek to make their local law enforcement agencies more transparent, accountable, and responsive to the communities they serve."
Read the article below to learn more:
Get Involved!According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization, "'Defund the police' means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether."
Listen to this episode from the New York Times' The Daily that explores systematic barriers to disciplining officers:
In this interview from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization, Rashawn Ray and Adrianna Pita discuss shortfalls in the ways law enforcement is held accountable for misconduct. Listen to the full episode or read the brief article, both linked below:
According to Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia, "'lynching' refers to the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action. Lynching differs from ordinary murder or assault because it is a killing that is committed outside the boundaries of due process by a mob that enacts revenge or punishment for a perceived offense. Lynching derives its name from Colonel Charles Lynch, an 18th-century judge and Virginia landowner who had a habit of holding illegal trials of local lawbreakers in his front yard; Lynch would whip the accused while they were tied to a tree in his yard." (emphasis added)
Read more from Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia:
Learn about the history of lynching in the US from the Equal Justice Initiative:
In the novel, Tracy's family is the victim of a cross burning, a typical terror activity of members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
According to the EJI report (link, above), the "earliest seeds of violent white resistance to Reconstruction were planted in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865, when six Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan."
Oxford's A Dictionary of Contemporary World History, the Ku Klux Klan is defined as "A US terrorist organization with a complex system of secret and ceremonial hierarchy established in the defeated states of the south in 1866. It had the aim of intimidating African Americans and preventing them from exercising their legal rights as US citizens to vote, hold property, run for office, or enjoy equal access to economic opportunity. Following the publication of the definitive book by D. W. Griffiths, Birth of a Nation (1915), the Klan re-emerged in altered forms while displaying its distinctive symbols—burning crosses, white robes, and hoods. Klan violence and murder spread across the entire country in the 1920s, when it boasted four million members." Read more:
According to an August 2020 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, "The government’s response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient." Read the report:
In fact, there have been documented cases in which law enforcement officials are actively involved in extremist organizations or active in condoning or covering up their behavior. According to a June 1, 2020 article posted on Just Security, an organization based at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, Danielle Schulkin analyzes documented evidence of links between law enforcement and White Supremacist groups:
In 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative opened The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial commemorates the names of victims of lynching in the United States.
Content Warning: This video contains gruesome images of murder and violence.
See photos from the opening of the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice at the following links:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by
As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status, much like their grandparents before them, who lived under an explicit system of control.--Book jacket.
Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by
Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. Placing stories of individual women—such as Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall—in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, it documents the evolution of movements centering women’s experiences of policing and demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by
Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The co-authors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court?s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. Policing the Black Man is an enlightening must-read for anyone interested in the critical issues of race and justice in America.
Chokehold: Policing Black Men by
Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer--without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler's controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it's better for a black man to plead guilty--even if he's innocent--are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations.
Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation by
Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized--at best--and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change. Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized--at best--and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.
The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation by
What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them--and treating them--as criminals. The post-Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality. Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.
Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary by
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation's past by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America. Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause--allowing for enslavement as "punishment for a crime"--has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery. Childs seeks out the historically muted voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such as Louisiana's "Angola" penitentiary. Slaves of the State paves the way for a new understanding of chattel slavery as a continuing social reality of U.S. empire--one resting at the very foundation of today's prison industrial complex that now holds more than 2.3 million people within the country's jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.
Punishing Race: a Continuing American Dilemma by
How can it be, in a nation that elected Barack Obama, that one third of African American males born in 2001 will spend time in a state or federal prison, and that black men are seven times likelier than white men to be in prison? Blacks are much more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, and are much less likely to have confidence in justice system officials, especially the police. In Punishing Race, Michael Tonry demonstrates in lucid, accessible language that these patterns result not from racial differences in crime or drug use but primarily from drug and crime control policies that disproportionately affect black Americans. These policies in turn stem from a lack of white empathy for black people, and from racial stereotypes and resentments provoked partly by the Republican Southern Strategy of using coded "law and order" appeals to race to gain support from white voters. White Americans, Tonry observes, have a remarkable capacity to endure the suffering of disadvantaged black and, increasingly, Hispanic men. Crime policies are among a set of social policies enacted since the 1960s that have maintained white dominance over black people despite the end of legal discrimination. To redress these injustices, Tonry offers a number of proposals: stop racial profiling by the police, shift the emphasis of drug law enforcement to treatment and prevention, eliminate mandatory sentencing laws, and change sentencing guidelines to allow judges discretion to take account of offenders' life circumstances. Those proposals are all attainable and would all reduce unjustifiable racial disparities and the collateral human and social harms they cause. A damning indictment of decades of misguided criminal justice policy, Punishing Race takes a crucial look at persisting racial injustice in America.
Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas by
Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late 17th century through the end of the Civil War.
The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago by
With his colleagues at the People's Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city's political machine, from aldermen to the mayor's office. [TAYLOR's BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark--and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed--through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department's "code of silence" that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.
Lynching in America by
Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday's haunting song "Strange Fruit," lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional. Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings. Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.
Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by
The extraordinary true story and basis for the Academy Award winning film BlacKkKlansman, written and directed by Spike Lee, produced by Jordan Peele, and starring John David Washington and Adam Driver. When detective Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department, comes across a classified ad in the local paper asking for all those interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan to contact a P.O. box, Detective Stallworth does his job and responds with interest, using his real name while posing as a white man. He figures he'll receive a few brochures in the mail, maybe even a magazine, and learn more about a growing terrorist threat in his community. A few weeks later the office phone rings, and the caller asks Ron a question he thought he'd never have to answer, "Would you like to join ourcause?" This is 1978, and the KKK is on the rise in the United States. Its Grand Wizard, David Duke, has made a name for himself, appearing on talk shows, and major magazine interviews preaching a "kinder" Klan that wants nothing more than to preserve a heritage, and to restore a nation to its former glory. Ron answers the caller's question that night with a yes, launching what is surely one of the most audacious, and incredible undercover investigations in history. Ron recruits his partner Chuck to play the "white" Ron Stallworth, while Stallworth himself conducts all subsequent phone conversations. During the months-long investigation, Stallworth sabotages cross burnings, exposes white supremacists in the military, and even befriends David Duke himself. Black Klansman is an amazing true story that reads like a crime thriller, and a searing portrait of a divided America and the extraordinary heroes who dare to fight back.
According to their article, "The Environmental Context of Racial Profiling," in the peer-reviewed journal The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science authors Warren and Ferrell explain "Racial profiling describes the practice of targeting or stopping an individual based primarily on his or her race rather than any individualized suspicion. Such profiling came under considerable public scrutiny beginning in the 1990s when the media drew substantial attention to racial profiling in traffic stops." Furthermore, according to the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, 2008, "Some suggest it occurs when police routinely use race as a negative signal that, along with other signals, causes an officer to react with suspicion."
According to the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, "It seems reasonable to expect that citizens who believe that police use race in determining whom to place under suspicion will be more likely to hold unfavorable attitudes toward police. For example, Weitzer and Tuch reported that in 1999, 82% of African Americans believed that racial profiling is a widespread phenomenon [....] Although the belief in racial profiling is likely to undermine trust in the police among all citizens, it is likely to have a stronger effect on the African American community given their negative historical and sometimes contemporary experiences with the police."
Black parents in the U.S. have "the talk" with their kids about how to handle themselves in an encounter with the police.
Content warning: This video contains strong emotions.
The "black codes" were laws that governed the behavior of Black people after slavery. As Bryan Stevenson points out in his 1619 Project essay, "Mass Incarceration:" "New language has emerged for the non-crimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while black. All reflect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white."
Driving While Black: Highways, Shopping Malls, Taxicabs, Sidewalks : How to Fight Back if You are a Victim of Racial Profiling by
A practical handbook for people who want to be safe and do something. Racial profiling does happen. And while cases where victims find themselves looking down the barrel of a policeman's gun make the six o'clock news, dozens of less extreme, yet troubling, examples occur every day. Cabs that whiz by only to be seen stopping for "safer"-looking people just up the block; being asked for multiple pieces of identification when making purchases with credit cards; being followed around a department store by salespeople and security while never being asked if they need any assistance; being detained for hours and extensively searched in an airport or train station--Driving While Black clearly defines the system officially known as CARD (class, age, race, dress) and offers advice about how to handle potentially life-threatening situations with the police, as well as recourse for readers who suspect their civil rights have been denied due to racial profiling. A book written to save lives, Driving While Black is not just for people of color, but for anyone who likes to wear a baseball cap, baggy jeans, sneakers, and a tee shirt and finds they are often treated like a "suspect." From the Trade Paperback edition
In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, rapper Ice Cube reflects on N.W.A.'s 1988 song, "Fuck Tha Police":
"Over the years, Ice Cube has echoed Ren’s viewpoint.
'That song is still in the same place before it was made,' the rapper said in 2015. 'It’s our legacy here in America with the police department and any kind of authority figures that have to deal with us on a day-to-day basis. There’s usually abuse and violence connected to that interaction, so when ‘Fuck tha Police’ was made in 1988, it was 400 years in the making. And it’s still just as relevant as it was before it was made.' [...]. [Ren]: 'It was like, if you black, you young, you in the hood, you in the ghettos of America, you just get fucked with. What you hear on the record is all the frustration, all the times getting harassed, getting pulled over for no reason at all, getting disrespected, having them try to disrespect your parents all because of your skin color.'” (emphasis added)
Rolling Stone Magazine, July 2020 | "American Uprising" Black Lives Matter by Kadir Nelson
Read the interview:
For more on art, activism, and resistance, check out the page in this guide on Black Creativity.
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