Dictionary of the Undoing by Valeria Luiselli

Author:Valeria Luiselli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Police

We cannot live without law enforcement. Some people will simply break the law until stopped. So our societies must deputize some people to stop, detain, and arrest those who are flaunting the law. With force on occasion and lethal force in very rare instances. In this way, the police should be the handmaidens of justice. Many people become police officers in order to be just that. In societies tipping toward tyranny, however, the police begin to act more like iron maidens. The permission to use violence draws out job applicants who want to use force, or have preconceived notions of who to use it on. Patrolling our towns and cities, unobserved or simply unaccountable—as very few police officers are ever indicted for, let alone convicted of, murder—they have done horrific things to innocent people.

Over the past decade, as mobile phones were updated with video cameras, the cruelty most communities of color have experienced was exposed to a white audience. Throughout the world, but especially in the United States, the police have not always been enforcing the law. They have often been enacting racialized cruelty and death sentences upon the bodies of black and brown citizens. There is no decency here, no justice, and very little cause for optimism. Just obvious, vicious racism entitled by a badge. Boys shot in grocery stores, parking lots, playgrounds. Men stopped and shot before they had a chance to raise their hands. Men on the ground, shot for moving; men on the ground, shot for not moving. Mentally ill men shot for being disturbed. Men choked to death for selling cigarettes; women tackled for driving with a broken taillight. In 2018, the police in America killed almost one thousand people. On average, one police officer is killed per week.

One thousand to fifty—any general would call that a bloodbath. And we’re watching it happen. Indeed, now we’re even seeing it live, sometimes, as a man bleeds to death in his own car. How has U.S. society not tipped into full-blown revolt? Thirty years ago, one video of police brutality caused a riot that cost scores of lives. Now, we see one such video a day, sometimes more. The forces of tyranny have discovered something awful in aerated trauma. If they can move the public from shock to apathy, they can continue their behavior unheeded—which is precisely what has happened in America. The videos of John Crawford and Tamir Rice and Walter Scott being killed caused shock, alarm, and massive protests. The resistance movement Black Lives Matter arose through this trauma and gave birth to splinter groups that watch and report on police brutality, organizing protests and more in the aftermath of killings. Freeways were closed by bodies marching to agitate against these abuses. Spectacles of solidarity were created in high-end shopping plazas and train stations. Bodies of all colors lay down for justice.

Yet how much has been changed?

It is the ethical responsibility of white people to attend such protests because the killing is often done in their name.

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