Brilliant article, at least for me. I had thought about the history of the police in specifics, and many of the detail s changed my way of thinking. Unfortunately, it made me think there is even more work to be done in the name of justice and inequality than before. It appears the systemic part of systemic racism is far more entrenched in the practices of police sand government than I had previously understood. And I was already thinking it was quite deep.
I learned of course about yet another massacre, the Houston massacre, which you are right they don’t teach in schools. I haven’t yet looked at my daughter’s text book, as we are in Houston, I need to ask for it. Although I attended a northern public school, I don’t think there was any mention of massacres, brutal policing methods, slave patrols. Certainly no mention of black military men being shot at and killed. Disgusting. All these lynchings, extra judicial killings and massacres that occurred after the Civil War, after slavery officially ended, go deep into the 20th century right up until 1964 and 65. Sure, they didn’t stop completely then, but my point is that the call for reparations is typically just for slavery and not for the state sanctioned killings after slavery ended. The core of reparations I think is the state sanctioning of mistreatment of blacks, which is slavery of course, but goes far beyond that. State sanctioned mistreatment can take the form of extrajudicial killings when the state or central U.S. government abdicates its responsibility to punish those violating federal law, i.e. lynching a black man for example or massacring as well. I’m just talking about murdering, and not the beatings, arrests and daily brutality that is ongoing. The police unions are the culprits of protecting those violent police from prosecution and also in creating the very system of violence that gets protected when committed without justification or proper legal review.
The picture of the “police” badges, the slave patrol badges, however, were the first time a picture has really brought home the full effect of systemic racism as it was then. It started in 1702 or so as I recall, before northern systems of policing with private companies. Both systems were to protect property, the northern system was interested in protecting a different type of property primarily, that of ports and industry. The southern “property” was humans though, which are not stationary and fixed, and harder to patrol.
Of course the north has slaves, and George Washington himself hired a slave patrol, bounty slave hunters, to capture one of his family slaves who fled. The young woman escaped and went to a freed town of blacks about 300 strong in New Hampshire as I remember. She got married and was hunted the full time of his second term as president, right up until he died in 1899. I guess he couldn’t stand the thought of “escaped property.” It would have detracted from the economic value of his and Martha’s estate and it showed how he couldn’t control the individuals in his own house—an embarrassment for a general and first president. Fortunately a dead man can’t pay a bounty and his “house slave” lived a life of a freed married woman who escaped his wrath and left him a touch humiliated on his deathbed. I’m not sure what that means symbolically or metaphorically but I just liked the thought of it as it somehow contains revenge (“the greatest revenge is a life well lived).
Too many other thoughts in this article as well for me to digest. Thanks much again.