People's Science by Ruha Benjamin

Author:Ruha Benjamin [Benjamin, Ruha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780804786737
Google: RHpoPOfZeEcC
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-05-22T04:04:33+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

DEPATHOLOGIZING DISTRUST

The problem of distrusting citizens should be recast or reformulated as an issue of social justice.

—John Johnson, Andrew Melnikov, “The Wisdom of Distrust”1

The organization that owns trust, owns its marketplace.

—Julie Brownlie, Alexandra Greene, Alexandra Howson, Researching Trust and Health2

ON MARCH 14, 2008, a celebrated African American artist, Casper Banjo, walked from his East Oakland home to the nearby police station to seek help. Observing what later turned out to be a replica gun, police shot the seventy-one-year-old Banjo to death. As his good friend, fellow disability activist and artist Leroy Moore, would later explain, Casper’s life chances were determined far less by any biological defect than through a complex intersection of race, gender, class, and disability—that is, by the social disorder that surrounded him.3 In the days leading up to the passage of Proposition 71, this understanding led Leroy to ask whether the California Stem Cell Initiative “would reach his people and other people of color who are wheelchair users because of police brutality?” Then, following the murder of Casper Banjo, Leroy wrote a mournful tribute in the same online venue, Poor Magazine, where he had first questioned the impact of Prop. 71:

Casper was a talented and peaceful black disabled artist who touched the world with his printmaking, brick layering, black activism and . . . his love of stories. . . . Casper Banjo was a great storyteller. . . . however these stories can no longer be heard in Casper’s voice. We, family, friends, artists and members of the National Minorities with Disabilities Coalition, will make sure Casper’s story and the night his life came to an end will be told.4

Indeed, the act of storytelling can open up civic discourse to the experiences of those who struggle to press the levers of power to address the life-and-death issues that keep them up at night. While the everyday policing and penalization of inner-city black life is well documented in the scholarly literature,5 the set of injustices related to Casper’s murder is less well understood.6 In March 2010, Los Angeles police shot an African American autistic man, Steven Eugene Washington, twenty-seven, in the head because he was not responding to their commands and seemed to be reaching for a weapon. Like Casper Banjo, Steven Washington was not armed. Only months after Steven’s fatal shooting, police in Seattle shot John T. Williams, a Native American woodcarver who was partially deaf, four times because he did not respond to the officer’s repeated direction to put a knife, which was later found to be in a closed position, down. What do we make of the growing body count of people who are victimized, in part because of their disabilities, at the hands of those whom we entrust to protect and serve society? How, if at all, do people’s experiences of everyday policing relate to their trust in other social institutions?

Social disorder, which leaves people like Casper, Eugene, and John vulnerable to overzealous policing (itself a symptom of poor government priorities, which

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