You will recall yesterday I spoke about Colin Kaepernick’s series of essays called “Abolition for the People.” In the series’ seminal essay “The Demand for Abolition,” Kaepernick makes some very troubling observations about not only policing, but the criminal justice system as a whole. I wanted to make a point today that I think we are getting off on a tangent with this, and getting to a place that isn’t very positive.
One part of Kaepernick’s essay is called “Police and Policing.” The opening statement reads “The central intent of policing is to surveil, terrorize, capture, and kill marginalized populations, specifically Black folks.” He goes on to say “The political project of anti-Blackness has always been central to the enforcement of laws and legal codes in the United States” and “The more that I have learned about the history and evolution of policing in the United States, the more I understand its roots in white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”
Kaepernick continues saying “My hope is that you, the reader, will have confronted the white supremacist underpinnings of policing and prisons and the state-sanctioned oppression, destruction, and execution of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. You will understand the ways that reform has further legitimized policing and prisons into society. You will learn about the ways that abolishing policing and prisons can create a society able to invest in the well-being of the people.” A lot of people will write this off as mere mutterings from Kaepernick, but when you look across our country, you’ll see a troubling pattern developing, particularly in our universities.
News broke yesterday that the university of Minnesota is offering a 12 step recovery program for ‘whiteness.’ The virtual lecture series aims to teach white people how to counteract their white supremacy using a 12 step program mirrored after the one used in Alcoholics Anonymous. The two hour “Recovery from White Conditioning” lecture featured a therapist who talks about her years of struggle navigating the role of whiteness in her personal, academic and professional journeys. The lecture can earn viewers continuing education units for this. The program says it helps white people recover from their whiteness, and the lecturer claims “I also want to hold that alongside the tension in this model, we are in fact centering whiteness, but centering it differently to expose it, study its patterns and transforms its violent legacy.” She also says she is lecturing from is traditional Dakota land, the territory of Native Americans who settled in Minnesota. She acknowledged that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others were stolen from the world by police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. She finishes saying the goal of her lecture is to decenter whiteness.
What does that mean? Whiteness means you are afflicted with a disease and now we have to be re-educated to better understand the color of our skin? I'm not sure where they are going with this, but if you think it's not going to end up in universities across the country, you’re kidding yourself.
There’s a new math class at Wake Forest designed to help students combat racism. The Department of Mathematics and Statistics there is offering a “Racist and Anti-Racist uses of Math and Statistics” class in order to combat racism in the discipline of mathematics. “The time has come for us to focus on fighting racism and creating plans to make a more equitable educational space,” they say. Wake Forest gives one credit to look into gerrymandering, racist predictive policing.
Of course, when the media calls these people, they don’t want to talk. They don’t want to answer any tough questions about any of this, but when you go to their website or social media pages, you find out they are affirming Black Lives Matter, involved in micro-aggression training, all kinds of things related to social justice, but it’s all about the fact that the plight is only brought about by whites. There are no other plights presented other than those brought about by white people.
But it isn’t enough to indoctrinate collegiate students, so now the University of Pittsburgh has introduced an initiative of “Justice Teaching” in public schools. So now they’re teaching college students to impose their political agenda on everyone else in K-12. The faculty at Pittsburgh has put together a three-year working group called “PittEd Justice Collective.” The group was created in response to the loss of Black lives through police brutality and other forms of institutional justice. Remember now, every institution in this country is racist and we must dismantle every one of them! The stated purpose of this group is to “situate” equity and justice (what does that mean?) across all levels of our schools operations, culture, climate and academic engagements.”
Do you see where this is all going? Are you concerned? I am.