Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Son of Baldwin, on Facebook, 2015-04-29 (quoting entire post, which I'm also seeing passed around in the form of a screencap):

During protest training at the Brooklyn Movement Center, I learned that there is a strategy to organizing and arranging a crowd during a political protest in the United States.

One of the most successful strategies is arranging the crowd in layers: white people in front, then Asian people, then Latin@ people, then Native peoples, then any other non-black people of color, then black people--so that the black people are surrounded, in the middle of the other demographics.

All of the protester-training folk, most of whom were non-black, said that after hundreds of protests between them, all over the United States, they learned that black protestors were always, specifically, the targets of police violence, and so they had learned to use their varying color privileges as a way to protect those without it.

They didn't say that only black people experienced police violence, but they did say they all had this exact same experience over and over again: "Police officers would push past us all of us aggressively and only pull out their billy clubs and guns once they reached the black members of the protest. They seemed to specifically want to be physically violent against the black people in our gatherings. There seems to be a need in American police to get to the black people, attack them, and do them harm in order to feel like they were doing their jobs as police officers. It was as if, consciously or unconsciously, they were carrying out a kind of programming to treat the rest of us like human beings, relatively, but treat black people like a scourge to be stamped out, stomped on, and ultimately destroyed."

How terrifying is that?

(Relatedly, I've read things elsewhere describing how the race of the police officers doesn't seem to alter the racial differences in how groups are policed by them. Also: it is important here to remember that we're talking about patterns of behaviour in police forces, not what every individual cop does. There are problems with systems and culture regardless of whether particular individual cops are bad, or how many are/aren't racist as individuals. So "not all cops" isn't relevant here -- this is about large patterns, not individual officers. Patterns that decent cops ought to want to see changed.)