Do You Have The
Courage To Take A Stand?
By Anthony Bouyer, PhD
Guest Column
Education is power; a good education develops critical
thinking skills that help people make decisions in their
lives, makes them good citizens and helps them contribute to
the overall betterment of society.
Education provides us with knowledge about the world.
Education paves the way for character-building, leads to
enlightenment, and enriches people’s understanding of
themselves. Thus, the quality of life tends to be highly
correlated with one’s educational attainment. Moreover, many
people see education as the potion for achieving social
mobility in industrialized societies.
The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but
of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as
one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of
marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own
personhood. A direct effect of education is gaining
knowledge. Education gives us knowledge of the world around.
Education develops in us a perspective of looking at life.
Education helps us form opinions and develop a point of
view.
Information we encounter cannot be converted into knowledge
without the catalyst called education. Education helps
create a clear picture of things around, and erases all
confusion. Education kindles the flame of curiosity and
helps awaken the abilities to question and reason.
Education has allowed me to expand my world view not only
through knowledge, but has also put me in the position to
have experienced a verity of occupations; therefore,
education
has kindled the
flame of curiosity and helped awaken my abilities to
question and reason,
and knowledge to speak on social issues.
So before I go further in my discussion on the article, I
want to share my educational background not from a bravado
boastfulness, because I understand that I was able to
overcome many obstacles and I do not think less of those who
obstacles may have been too high to overcome, but to show
that my opinion comes from a well-informed, expert point of
view.
I have firsthand experience in the areas of social issues. I
have been a police officer, a parole officer, a probation
officer, a mental health professional, and a counselor, both
with adolescents and adults. I currently hold two licenses
with the State of Ohio, the Ohio Chemically Professional
Board and I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor with the
State of Ohio Counselor and Social Worker Board and I held a
LSW, Licensed Social Worker. I have the expertise to and
life experience to share a qualified opinion about social
conditions that Black Americans have faced and continue to
face.
So, the new buzz words that have resulted from the current
crisis are systemic racism, explicit bias, conscious and
unconscious bias. These words are being thrown at the
American public, as if to explain the reason for the
mistreatment of Blacks not only by police, but also by other
institutions. Let us not forget how America got its first
wealth and power, which derived from the institution of
slavery. The key word is institution; it is through
institutional discrimination that allows continuing denial
of rights of Black people and subjects them to a different
quality of life.
Racism, sexism and elitism are systems of interdependent
cultural, individual, and institutional behaviors, which
affect a pattern of negative socioeconomic discrimination
based on race, gender, and class. This discrimination is
rationalized through a network of prejudice founded largely
on myths, stereotypes, and biases which are passed on
consciously. The formula for institutional discriminations
proceeds in this manner.
During my academic studies, the most descriptive definition
of institutional discrimination was developed by Vega, F.
(1978) the effect of human and intergroup relations on
race/sex and attitudes. The Vega model describes
institutional discrimination as “Cultural Bias” (The values,
norms, and standards of the dominant culture “White” which
reflect what is prized, normal and customary in our society
and which are transmitted to the individual through the
socialization process).
The next step in the process of institutional discrimination
is “Individual Prejudice” (The beliefs, attitudes and
opinions which reflect the cultural values, norms, and
standards of the dominant cultural “White” transmitted to
social institutions through interaction). The last part of
the formula is “Institutional discriminations” (The
policies, practices, and standard operating procedures that
reflect the public beliefs opinions, and attitudes which
perpetuate the original cultural values (The institution of
slavery), norms, and standards of the dominant culture
“White.”
Police abuse in Black and Brown communities is generations
old. It is nothing new.
Law enforcement was used as a monitoring tool of Blacks
right after slavery, during reconstruction, the civil rights
movement and to present day. Putting a face on Institutional
racism one only has to look at what happened to the great
mass of ex-slaves, threatened with arrest for “vagrancy” and
leased as convict laborers if they refused, to signed their
contracts and returned to work in the fields, much as they
had before emancipation.
Blacks were declared ineligible for U.S citizenship in the
Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, remained a
disfranchised peasantry, laboring under conditions that
differed little from, slavery ” (The policies, practices,
and standard operating procedures that reflect the public
beliefs opinions, and attitudes which perpetuate the
original cultural values (The institution of slavery),
norms, and standards of the dominant culture “White.”
Michelle Alexander’s (The New Jim Crow, 2010), gives
a pungent illustration of institutional discrimination in
our criminal justice system. She notes that in McCleskey v.
Kemp, the Supreme Court held that racial bias in sentencing,
even if shown through credible statistical evidence, could
not be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment absent
clear evidence of conscious, discriminatory intent, thus
comes the justifiable language of unconscious bias.
The Court’s opinion was driven by a desire to immunize the
entire criminal justice system from claims of racial bias.
According to Justice Jackson the best evidence in support of
this view can be found at the end of the majority opinion
where the Court states discretion plays a necessary role in
the implementation of the criminal justice system, and that
discrimination is an inevitable by-product of discretion.
Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was
something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal
justice system, provided no one admits to racial bias, The
policies, practices, and standard operating procedures that
reflect the public beliefs opinions, and attitudes which
perpetuate the original cultural values norms, and standards
of the dominant culture “White.”
In 1994, John Erlichman affirmed Nixon’s racist agenda to the
journalist Dan Baum. Erlichman told Baum that “the Nixon
campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had
two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You
understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it
illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana
and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their
leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and
vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we
know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police
department in 1994 had many defenders of law enforcement
stating that this was an isolated incident and that,
overall, Blacks are treated no different than any other
groups. Looking back in history, the majority of Black
rioting in the U.S, have been tied to police misconduct,
with the exception of few.
Martin Luther King Jr. stated: “Riots are the voices of the
voiceless.” The Black Panther Party was born out of police
misconduct against Blacks in Oakland, California. Black
communities all across America were
besieged with White police departments that used brutality
with impunity. Social scientists
study society and social relationships, and it is through
social conditions that leadership is born, hence the civil
rights movement and now Black Lives Matter.
Technology has only proven what Blacks have been saying for
decades about institutions, schools, hospitals, social
service agencies, and particularly police departments in the
mistreatment of Blacks in their daily lives. Nevertheless,
many Americans believe that police officers are generally
good, noble heroes.
The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth
about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of
what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look
like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix
the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our
criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture,
though often flatly denied by the many police apologists
that appear in the media now, has been central to the
breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in
spite of good people doing police work.
Hiring minority people and White women as police officers
and increased responsibility changes color and sex
composition but does not necessarily change its oppressive
use. It takes courage and a strong since of morality to not
follow the crowd, and it takes courage to turn in fellow
officers who has violated his/her oath.
The idiosyncrasy of some police officers is extremely
disturbing, and the oxymoron to police misconduct is, if you
are hired to stop law breakers, how do you break the law in
the performance of your duties? I graduated from Saginaw
Valley State College in 1982 with my undergraduate degree; I
completed Michigan Law Enforcement officers Training Council
Academy in November 1982.
During my training at the academy officers were trained not
to use excessive force, including striking suspects in the
head with batons, choke holds, and other illegal deadly
force procedures that do not clearly justify the use of
deadly force. We were also instructed that if we witnessed
officers using excessive force, or violating our oaths, that
we were to report their behaviors.
We spent a day on cultural diversity, as if that was
significant time needed to address cultural diversity.
During our training we were trained that no matter what
people say to you, or what names they called you, this was
not an excuse to retaliate with physical violence.
Many will say that citizens should respect the police,
granted disrespecting police officers is wrong, also
officers should not verbally disrespect citizens, and
respect goes both ways. Police officer should hold
themselves to a higher standard, no one should become police
officers who have anger issues and poor control of their
emotions, if you cannot take being called names then you
should not become a police officer and choose another
profession.
After completing the academy, I was hired as a compass
police officer at Grand Rapids Junior College, in Grand
Rapids, Michigan. I was one of two Black officers in the
department. I was tested right from the beginning of my
employment, when one of the white officers made an
insensitive ethnic joke about Polish Americans, even as
24-year-old young man, I knew the comment was inappropriate.
I stated if I was not present that joke would have been
about Blacks, which social scientist calls White bounding.
One day as I reported to work and stepped out of the
evaluator, I encountered a scuffle of three of my White
co-workers handcuffing a Black suspect for trespassing. I do
not know how the scuffle started, but this individual had
been trespassing in the college. He had his hands cuffed
behind him, and to take him to the holding area in the
department there were two heavy doors that had to be pushed
open.
The officers used his face to open the heavy glass doors.
The suspect looked me in the eyes and said you see what they
just did too me. The following day I received a call from
the man’s mother and she asked if I witnessed what my
co-workers did to her son. My reply to her was “yes I did
see what they did to your son.” She asked me if I would
testify in court and I told her “yes.” I testified against
those officers in open court, regardless of the blowback I
received from my co-workers.
Several weeks later one of the officers who I testified
against asked me if I wanted to go hunting with them, my
reply to him was that I don’t hunt, more than likely if I
did hunt and went with them I probably would have been an
accident.
So I say to police officers, it does not matter what your
race, gender or ethnicity is, do you allow or are you
yourself implicit in the excessive use of force and
violating the rights of Black people? Where is your
courage? It has not been too long ago that many cities
across the country had to submit to federal decrees to hire
Black police officers and Black fire fighters.
When the federal government ordered theses decrees, many in
the Black communities thought, finally, we will have police
officer who looks like us and maybe the brutality will stop:
One’s race and ethnicity does not make for good character as
there are many brutal Black, Hispanic and other racial
minority police officer as there are Whites. It’s what’s in
an person he art that counts. So I ask how you can be a
police officer if you witness another police officer
breaking the law, and refuse to report his /her behavior?
There is a debate that people who live in urban areas have a
code of not snitching when crimes are committed and the
police have on many occasions called out this behavior. The
same goes for police officers when they see their co-workers
breaking the law and refuse to “snitch.”
I spent the majority of my professional career as a
probation officer – 21 years with Toledo Municipal Court.
Institutional discrimination provides every area of the
criminal justice system. Most Black males can attest to
experiencing institutional discrimination. A White female
probation officer stated to me that I looked like a
defendant due to having a hat on during January. When this
was brought to the assistant chief attention who happened to
be Black, she replied maybe she did not know she was being
offensive.
Now let’s talk about changing institutional racism. Racism
is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our
history has there been a national consensus that everyone
should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted
in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all
races to change that. Because of this legacy of racism,
police abuse in Black and Brown communities is generations
old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to
mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of
personal recording devices, cellophane cameras, video
recorders — they’re everywhere. We need police officers. We
also need them to be held accountable to the communities
they serve.
The one thing that is clear is in order to change the
current racial climate in this country, institutions have to
change and in order to change institution, and we must
address cultural biases, to reflect what is just for all of
society. This process can be transmitted through
individual socialization, beliefs, attitudes that reflect
none bias perspectives. The policies, practices, and
standard operating procedures must reflect the improvement
of life for all citizens.
As the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and countless
others proves, we still have a long way to go before we
attain anything close to justice in this country. But we can
work toward it, every day.
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