“BAR Book Forum: Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives and Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing”
So-called “community policing” may actually expand police power, and Canadian racial tolerance is a myth.
“We need non-police based solutions to community problems that treat people and communities with respect and lift them up, not terrorize them.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Robyn Maynard and Alex S. Vitale. Maynard is a Black feminist writer, grassroots community organizer and intellectual based in Montréal. Her book is Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.Vitale is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the college’s Policing and Social Justice Project. His book is The End of Policing.
Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives
“Legacies of slavery and setter colonialism have functioned, together, to shape punitive institutions in Canada.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Robyn Maynard: Policing Black Lives was written, in a sense, to bring Black Canada – and the conditions endangering Black life in Canada – into view. The historical and contemporary as the realities of Black life in Canada are still often overlooked in discussions of globalized anti-Blackness. The book was intended to dispel widely held myths about Canada as a nation characterized by racial tolerance and benevolence, both for Canadian readers and for any readers interested in the politics of the global African diaspora. Specifically, the book draws attention to the historical and contemporary devaluation of Black life, with particular attention to state or state-sanctioned structures geared toward Black death.
“This book addresses the realities of border regulation, child welfare agencies, and schools as important sites of racialized surveillance and control.”
Policing Black Lives addresses the concept of “policing,” and the policing of Black life, from an intersectional framework that brings to light not only the important, life-and-death realities facing young Black men, but also the realities faced by Black cis and transgender women, documented and undocumented migrants, and those living with disabilities (of course, these are not mutually exclusive categories). Further, the work insists that we conceive of policing beyond law enforcement, and looks not only at racial profiling, police violence and prisons, but also addresses the realities of border regulation, child welfare agencies, and schools as important sites of racialized surveillance and control.
Policing Black Lives, while focused on Canada, also undertakes an international perspective on anti-Blackness, using Cedric Robinson’s framework of racial capitalism to address realities of global Black displacement, unfree migrant labor, and structural inequalities. While these realities impact Black communities in Canada, they emerge out of global economic processes that are the outgrowth of slavery and colonialism.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
It’s incredibly important that the maxim “all Black lives matter” guide not only our political analysis, but also, it needs to guide our activism. I believe it’s absolutely necessary for our movements to commit to fighting racialized and gendered policing wherever it takes place; whether this is in the homes of poor Black women being monitored by social services, the policing of trans Black women on streets, the harassment of young boys on the subway, or deportations facing Jamaican farm workers who were injured at work. This is why my work focused on multiple state institutions as sites of state violence against Black communities.
Another important theme in Policing Black Lives was looking at how legacies of slavery and setter colonialism have functioned, together, to shape punitive institutions in Canada – a reality, too, in the United States. While Black and Indigenous communities have faced historical and current forms of oppression that are by no means identical; we nonetheless see intersecting forms of state-sanctioned harm at the hands of police, in grossly disproportionate incarceration rates, in the school-to-prison-pipeline, and the separation of parents from children by child-welfare agencies. Through the lens of “state violence”; it becomes evident that for Black and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island, both our oppression and our freedom are, in many ways, intertwined and interconnected.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
It was my intention to dismantle ideologies of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, neoliberalism, and ableism, as they are enforced by those in power, and also as they are – sometimes unintentionally –reproduced within our own communities. Further, my work takes aim at respectability politics: it argues that we recognize and fight against injustice against all Black folks – not only those perceived as upstanding or law abiding, but also those with real or perceived connections to illicit economies like drugs or sex work. Put otherwise, none of our lives is disposable, and to use the words of Dorothy Roberts, “our very Blackness places us all beyond the bounds of respectability.”
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
My work is deeply inspired by the work of Black feminist scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Beth Richie, Andrea Ritchie, Mariame Kaba and Christina Sharpe. Individually and collectively, their knowledge of race, gender, class-based oppression, and the functioning of capitalism today, has provided us with some of the most important tools to critically address both Black disposability and Black freedom.
Further, I’m deeply inspired by the wealth of knowledge produced Black diasporic intellectuals and activists based in Canada, Idil Abdillahi; (whose intellectual labor includes forwarding the notion of “anti-Black sanism”), as well as Dionne Brand, El Jones, Rinaldo Walcott, Katherine McKittrick, Makeda Silvera, Barrington Walker, Sylvia Hamilton, NourbeSe Phillip, Afua Cooper and Charmaine Nelson, to name just a few. Also, I’ve learned an incredible amount from Indigenous scholars including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Audra Simpson, and Glen Coulthard.
“Movement knowledge is too-often derided as unintellectual.”
I’m also deeply inspired by the brilliant Black organizing happening around the world right now; which is also, we must acknowledge, a deeply intellectual work. “Intellectual” is a category that necessarily includes activists and organizers like the founders of Black Lives Matter – Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, the steering committee of Black Lives Matter - Toronto; as well as the crucial work accomplished daily by community-based folks doing behind the scenes work, whose names are rarely widely known. We need to keep in mind that movement knowledge -- particularly when it is produced by Black women -- is too-often derided as unintellectual, but then co-opted (often un-cited) in the academic world.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
It’s necessary for us to imagine a world radically transformed from that of the present. Conceiving of policing broadly also allows us to conceive of abolition in a broad sense. As our movements increasingly strive, as invoked by the Movement for Black Lives, to create a “world without police”, I urge us, as well, toward the abolition all forms of racialized and gendered forms of control and punishment, embedded so widely across institutions.
Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing
“Community policing, body cameras, increased police diversity, and changes to training have not been shown to improve policing and may just serve to expand police power.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Alex Vitale:The solutions to the problems of policing in the US have to be rooted in an understanding of the political and economic forces that have come to shape the mission of the police. Over the last 40 years we’ve seen the growth of mass homelessness, untreated mental illness, youth unemployment, failed schools, and black-market activity such as drug sales and sex work. Each of these is an expression of the free market austerity politics we sometimes refer to as Neoliberalism. In each case the police have been tasked with managing these problems with punitive methods, in a way that reinforces racial inequality.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Over the last several years many well meaning groups have called for a set of police reforms that are unlikely to help end the burden of policing on communities of color. Community policing, body cameras, increased police diversity, and changes to training have not been shown to improve policing and may just serve to expand police power. We need non-police based solutions to community problems that treat people and communities with respect and lift them up, not terrorize them.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
We have to get out of the mindset that the solution to every social problem is more police. We have come to accept the idea that policing equals community safety, but there’s actually very little evidence to support this. We need alternative ways to deal with our problems such as restorative justice programs, drug treatment on demand, community based violence interrupters, and targeted community investments.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
The social geographer David Harvey has been a big influence on me and helped shaped the structure of the book through his insights on the connection between neoliberalism and repressive policing. James Baldwin has always provided me with a kind of moral compass that has guided me away from superficial strategies of reform that fail to take into account America’s long history of racial exploitation and abuse.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Throughout the book I lay out examples of efforts to produce community safety without relying on police. When we begin to demand real solutions to our problems that treat people with dignity, we create the possibility of world with greater equality and less repression.
Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]