Race and Policing: The Contradiction of Liberal Multi-Culturalism

On October 1, 2019, former Dallas police officer Amber R. Guyger was convicted of murdering a black man, Botham Shem Jean after she mistakenly entered his apartment thinking it was her own.  The conviction of Guyger, who is white, is being rightly celebrated by activists such as Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial justice organization, as a potential warning to white people that “hurting black people and, at the end, claiming fear” is no longer a reliable self-defense.  While this moment is a victory for racial justice and for Jean’s family and should be celebrated by everyone who is fighting against police violence, the real problem is systemic.  It is a problem of liberalism and capitalism.  Most importantly, it highlights the contradiction of liberal multi-culturalism.  The contradiction that promises racial justice and inclusion, yet it reinforces racial segregation through the hyper-policing and criminalization of communities of color while prioritizing the wealthiest Elites’ access to and protection of private property in the name of free market liberalism over the protection and rights of the individual.

The New York Times article that reported on the conviction of Guyger demonstrates the deficiencies of liberal multi-culturalism’s attempt to create a colorblind society.  Within this article, the murder victim, Jean, has to be sanitized as a “good” black person.  Rather than Jean simply being a victim of a murder, his life needs to be dissected in order for us to truly see that he was undeserving of this attack. Jean was a regular at church where he participated in the chorus.  He was happy, he smiled a lot.  He had a good job.  His mother loved him.  He drove slowly and cautiously to avoid interacting with the police (read: he behaved, he knew his place).  Jean is on trial just as much as Guyger even though he was the victim.  In order to include Jean into the ideal of liberal multi-culturalism, he has to be perceived as the sanitized black man.  He has to be the opposite of the Michael Browns and Eric Garners of the world, the young black men who, to use a term from sociologist Victor M. Rios, grew up in a culture of punishment: constantly under police surveillance or attempting to avoid police contact.  These young men epitomized the problems of the ghetto and American liberalism.  They were young, black and potential criminals, and they engaged the police rather than avoiding them.  They were potential threats to the pristine image of the liberal system.

The New York Times article goes on to highlight the diversity of Dallas by pointing out that it is a multiracial community.  The article points out that Dallas is 42 percent Hispanic, 29 percent non-Hispanic white and 24 percent black.  It also notes that Dallas’ mayor, district attorney and police chief are black and the “progressive” judge who presided over the case is black as well.  Yet, for all of this racial diversity and communal affirmative action, racial tensions continue to be high between the community and police.  Just two years ago, a black man, Michael Xavier Johnson, shot and killed five Dallas police officers.  Johnson, who had served in the Army and at one point had told his family he wanted to be a police officer, was reported to have stated before the shootings that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white (police) officers.”  Clearly, he was angry and his anger was targeted at the police.  The police responded to Johnson’s attack and used a robot to detonate a bomb that killed Johnson after a 45-minute stand-off.  It should also be noted that Johnson’s attack began during what was initially a peaceful anti-police violence rally.

Even though the New York Times claims that Dallas is a multi-racial city with progressive black leadership, why is it that there is still so much violence and tension between people of color and the police?  Because liberalism promotes a false sense of racial inclusion which in turn, reinforces segregation.  People of color are labeled, no matter their position in society, as antithetical to the liberal American ideal.  Like Jean in the New York Times article, people of color are constantly under surveillance and constantly being judged as to whether they are good or bad, deserving or undeserving.  For all the promise of equality that liberal multi-culturalism espouses, its true intent is to police, segregated and protect private property.

Liberal multiculturalism celebrates racial diversity, yet through mass incarceration, felony disenfranchisement and over-policing of communities of color, people of color are disproportionally targeted for surveillance and exclusion.  They are criminalized at an early age through the culture of punishment and through community policing or “broken windows” policies that allow police, and the general public, to target “suspicious” individuals who are disproportionally of color as potential criminals.  In this environment, it becomes impossible to desegregate and decriminalize communities of color because it is their color that represents the ideal of liberal multi-culturalism.  Racial identity is celebrated in liberalism, but at the same time systemic racial stereotypes reinforce racial segregation in our communities.  To be black in a liberal democracy like the United States is to be condemned as a criminal and it is up to the black person, even after they have been murdered, to prove themselves as the antithesis of black criminality.  It is up to the victim of color to demonstrate their innocence and that they deserve justice. It is in this way that communities of color, in liberal discourse, represent everything that policing needs to control while at the same time they represent the diversity that is embraced and celebrated by liberal multiculturalism as proof of its post-racial success.

Jean’s death, Johnson’s assassinations, and the many other daily acts of violence that are committed in our communities are truly tragic.  Liberal multi-culturalism, for all its promise of inclusivity, fails to address its major inherit contradiction of racial exclusion.  Policing, within the context of a capitalist society, has always stood for the protection of private property over the protection of the working class.  The history of the U.S. has always been premised on the division of people by the socially constructed idea of race.  Multi-racialism has existed on this continent since 1492.  Racial identity has been historically used by elites to create a hegemonic racial hierarchy and divide the lower classes of people.  It has only been since the 1960s that racial identity has been become a celebrated critique of liberalism.  But, as much as liberalism has embraced multi-racialism, it has also continually built up the systemically racist and violent carceral state that has increasingly targeted people of color and labelled them criminal and expendable to the liberal state.  That is why a conviction of a police officer for murder, such as Guyger’s conviction even while off-duty, is an exception and not the rule.

Sources:

Helsel, Phil (July 7, 2016). “Dallas Police ‘Ambush’: 12 Officers Shot, 5 Killed During Protest.”  NBC News. Retrieved July 7, 2016.

Kohler-Hausman, Issa. Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age             of Broken Windows Policing. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2018.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness.” Cambridge: Harvard University    Press, 2010.

Rios, Victor M. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York           University Press: New York, 2011.

Trahan Martinez, Marina & Sarah Mervosh and John Eligon. “Former Dallas Police Officer Is     Guilty of Murder for Killing Her Neighbor.” New York Times, October 1,           2019.