Megan Ming Francis: We need to address the real roots of racial violence

I had just finished teaching Introduction to American Politics to a group of eager undergraduates. This was my first year teaching, but I had pulled off a slamming lecture, and I was feeling good about myself. As I left the classroom, I looked down at my phone and saw that I had five missed calls from my brother Kenny. At the time, Kenny was a student at Temple University and living in North Philly. For those who don't know North Philly, it's an area that is predominantly black and low-income, with a very visible police presence. When I returned his phone call, Kenny is loud and swearing into the phone. I can tell that something very bad happened, but I'm not sure what. When I'm finally able to get him to calm down, he tells me how he was sitting on the stoop of his building talking to a friend when four police officers ran up on him and threw him and three others on the ground, handcuffed them and then pushed them up against a wall, all the while asking them, "What drugs do you have? What drugs do you have?" Kenny had no drugs. He told the officers this many times, but each statement of no drugs only seemed to provoke more force and make the officers more upset. As Kenny sat, cuffed, and slumped against a brick wall, he quietly told the officers that he was a student at Temple University and without reason, they could not hold him. The officers finally retrieved his college ID, which was in his wallet that had slipped out when he was slammed to the pavement, realized that he was indeed in college, without drugs, and then let him go. After Kenny told me this story, he was still loud and upset. I was shaking, barely able to hold the phone to my ear, all of the joy from my great day of teaching - gone ... and replaced with a deep sense of helplessness and alarm. I wanted to remove the hurt and frustration that Kenny felt, that I could hear so clearly through the phone, but I neither had the will nor the ability to lie to him about the mightiness of American racism. And we both silently knew that this would not be the last time that he would be stopped and frisked by the police for drugs. In an attempt to try to calm him down and to shift attention onto something that he perhaps did have control over, I had this genius idea and suggested that he focused his attention on school work to kind of take his mind off of things. He yells into the phone at me, "What is that going to do? Why should I focus on my school work when the police are allowed to do things like this?" And then he says to me, "I'm not a student in your class, Megan. Your books are not going to save me." I silently nodded on the other end of the phone, In a lifetime of often heated exchanges with him, I've probably never been more wrong, and he has never been more right. Kenny is not alone. This violent interaction between black men and women, and police officers plays out in cities and towns across the United States, often with much more devastating results. According to the most recent statistics, blacks are three times more likely to be shot and killed by police than whites. The question on everyone's mind and the question that I get asked the most is, "How do we solve this problem?" And I confess I cringe at this question, not because it's not a good question, but because I think we're asking the wrong question. I'm not convinced we even understand how we got to this point in the fist place. Better understanding of the root causes of the current place where we are will help provide us with the tools that we need to move us forward. However, I confess that even I sometimes am more eager to solve a problem than I am to understand it. So a few years ago, I adopted a corgi from a shelter and named him President Bartlet, off of The West Wing. (Laughter) Now, he's super adorable! But he was abused, and he's very aggressive whenever he sees another dog. My fix in my first year was to walk him at crazy hours of the day, but this worked only marginally well, and I was stressed and tired. The following year, I decided to hire a trainer to try to figure the underlying issues behind his reactive behavior. On the first day of our meeting, the trainer looks at me and says, "Fixes that do not address the root causes of an issue are not really fixes at all." I realized that in my haste to fix President Bartlet, I actually had made him worse. The present crisis surrounding race in the United States, I think, suffers from a lack of attention to the root causes; Better attention to the root causes, I am convinced, will help us to figure out how to move past where we right now in terms of the current racial climate in the United States. So why does the killing of unarmed blacks to continue to happen? I think it continues to happen because we have the wrong diagnosis and the wrong cure. And what I mean by this is we tend to think the problem of racial violence is isolated to a few stubborn racists that haven't yet drunk kind of this progressive Kool-Aid. And we tend to think the cure to racial injustices in the United States should always revolve around education. In the rest of my talk today, I'm going to challenge both of these ideas and suggest a new way to understand the problem, as well as the solution. First, part of the reason the killing of unarmed blacks continues to happen at an alarming rate is because we haven't properly addressed our long history of racial terror in this country, which has treated blackness as a proxy for criminality, as a substitute for criminality. Instead, when confronted with kind of these jarring racial injustices, what we like to do is to point to the bad racist apples. We like to individualize the problem and situate it away from us. This is why we're able to make sense of, let's say, a Dylann Roof, the shooter in Charlston, South Carolina, who shot up the black church and had a white-power manifesto. But the problem with contemporary racial violence is not that we have a few kind of racist bad apples. The problem is that the whole tree, the whole apple tree, is infected. The problem is that the presumption of dangerousness is tightly bound to race for so many in this country. For police officers to justify the use of deadly force, they have to reasonably believe that their lives are in danger. In all the high-profile killings of blacks over the past year, officers attest to feeling under threat. But what does this mean in the context of unarmed citizens? It means that black skin triggers a heightened sense of threat, a life-threatening sense of threat, that then influences the officers' decision to use deadly force. According to the most recent statistics, 33% of blacks that have been killed by police were unarmed. But it's not just police that pop up this myth of black danger. This myth gets reinforced and takes on a truth-like quality through everyday interaction, when a black man passes and a woman clutches her purse or when a group of black friends walk by a car and hear the jarring sound of someone who has just pushed their automatic locks because they are afraid. And I have friends on both sides of this: black men with great jobs, who just want to be viewed as a person and not as a threat after a long day of work; and I have really great white and Asian woman friends, who clutch their purse and walk quickly if they see a black man on a dimly-lit street, and then feel ashamed in the need to over-explain their actions to me. And I've also been on the receiving end of having who I was reduced to someone else's false perception of how much of a danger I posed. Last year, I was coming back from a trip, and I was singled out by the TSA agent. I thought that I had left a water bottle, like I often do, in my bag. But he ushered me to a separate area, and then two more TSA agents surrounded me, and I knew in my gut that something bad was about to go down. The lead TSA agent proceeds to ask - no, accuse - me of bringing a weapon into the airport. When I insisted that I did not bring a weapon into the airport, he produces a piece of costume jewelry, a double ring that I had picked up for $4 on vacation. It was like his "gotcha" moment, and it was my superconfused moment. (Laughter) He then accuses me of bringing brass knuckles, a deadly weapon, into a United States airport. I was almost at a loss of words, which is rare for someone like me, but I politely pointed out to him that the ring was plastic, it wasn't brass, and these weren't knuckles, it was just a ring that went over two fingers instead of one finger. But have you ever talked to someone and felt like you didn't exist, like when they spoke to you, they spoke right through you? Well, that's how I felt. He got more angry at my explanations, looked me in my face, and said, "You people always lie. I know that this is a weapon, and I'm not going to let someone dangerous like you board a plane today." Well, I started to shake, right? Because we've all seen this movie about the brown girl who walks into the airport with a deadly weapon, and it never really ends well for her. It doesn't. It never does. So, I had to do what I hate doing, and I used my credentials to get me out of a bad situation. I told him that I was a professor of Constitutional Law and American Politics. (Laughter) Right? (Applause) Yeah, so - (Applause) I cited US criminal code, landmark Supreme Court decisions, and rules from the Homeland Security Rulebook, because I also teach Civil Liberties. And then he started to get very nervous. (Laughter) He asked what school I worked at. I told him, he Googled my name, and the blood drained from his face. Right? As he realized I wasn't making this up, I knew my rights and I was a college professor. And then, when he looked back at me, he finally saw me, not as a dangerous threat, but as a person. After a few more minutes, he let me go, to catch my much delayed flight, I found a seat in the airport terminal, still trembling with rage at the way that I had been treated. I was only seated for a few minutes when I felt a tap on my shoulder. A woman airport worker said that she saw my whole ordeal, and that he does this all the time to black passengers, and I was lucky to have been released from his custody so quickly. But it shouldn't take a university website profile to be viewed as non-threatening, right? (Applause) Part of the reason I shared this story and some of the other ones is that I think, in talking about the current racial crisis, we tend to focus all of our attention on police and overlook our own complicity in creating an environment in which black lives are not treated as equal. To be clear in thinking about solutions to the racial violence, I'm in favor of body cameras, I'm in favor of a non-militarized police force, I'm in favor of stricter laws that make officers more accountable when they stop and frisk people on the street. But i'm not convinced that we would need something like body cameras if we didn't live in a society that treat blacks as dangerous and suspicious first, and as citizens second. It's not just a few bad racist apples in a police department or at an airport; it's all of us, who in big ways through our actions and in small ways by our silences, support this lie - because that's what it is, it's a lie - that somehow black folk are more dangerous than the rest of us. So not only do I believe that we've misdiagnosed the problem, I also think we have the wrong cure to it. We keep offering up education as a solution to all racial injustices in the United States. It's kind of what I call sometimes in my classes as the "Robitussin of civil rights." Like, when I was little, my mom loved Robitussin. She would give me it. I got a cold, Robitussin; flu, Robitussin Like, allergies? Robitussin. Like, where's the Penadryl? (Laughter) But just like Robitussin is not a cure-all for all types of sicknesses, education is not a cure-all for all of America's racial sins. And yet, education is still how most Americans understand the responsibility to fixing contemporary racial injustices. Our measure of how far we have come in the area of race relations is most often calculated in how integrated our schools are, how many inovative education experiments are currently going on, and how many federal dollars are committed towards education. But the contemporary problem surrounding the killing of unarmed blacks is not a problem that boils down to providing greater educational opportunities to blacks. This is a misdiagnosis. A book is not going to stop the bullet barreling through a gun at Rekia Boyd in Chicago, and longer classroom times are not going to save Freddie Gray from being illegally stopped and manhandled by police in Baltimore. This is what I know for sure: that in order to combat continuing racial injustices today, we must expand our vision and our responsibility to what civil rights actually means. We must include the battle against racist violence in our understanding of civil rights. Instead of education, what if we placed freedom from racist violence at the crux of what it means to be free and equal in the United States? Doing so does not mean that we necessarily dislodge education, but it means that if racism and white supremacy are a rock fortress, we assemble greater arsenal weapons to break the damn thing down. (Applause) I know this is not an easy task, but I know that it can be done. So in my real life, I'm a political scientist and a historian, and I've spent the last 10 years focused on a surprising finding: that before the civil rights group the NAACP focused on its historic campaign against segregated education, the NAACP spent the first two decades of the 20th century focused on fighting escalating levels of racial violence that blacks endured as a result of the actions from police, politicians, and private white citizens in the south and in the north. In order to wage this big campaign against racial violence, the NAACP organized mass demonstrations in the streets. They lobbied Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill. They litigated and won a landmark decision in front of the Supreme Court. And they petitioned three different presidents to make a statement against lynching. It was this massive, extraordinary, in-your-face campaign that forced America to confront lynching and mob violence against African Americans. It asked America how strong was its commitment to protecting black lives. As a result of this work in early 20th century, the rates of lynching and mob violence dramatically decreased. I tell this story about the NAACP's historic kind of campaign against racial violence because I believe our past history can light a way out of the present darkness. If we listen to what this history tells us, then we must struggle through this current moment. We must confront the ways that our actions and our institutions lead to a differential treatment of blacks, even if done unintentionally. Today, people across the United States are taking to streets and are demanding to be seen, not as dangerous but as people whose lives have value and deserve protection. Some of these groups are associated directly, and some indirectly, with the Black Lives Matter movement. Without the efforts of these groups, so many of these killings of unarmed blacks would have been swapped under the rug, and we would have lost attention long ago. But so many of these activists have denied the comforts of silence, and they are being active around this issue. Their message and my message to you today is that we must pay closer attention to the way that black people are treated. The story of police brutality and killings of unarmed blacks is not a story about black people. It's a story about all of us, about racial progress and the stubborn durability of American racism. It's about if we will stop making the mistakes of our past and confront our own complicity in this great American lie that somehow black people are more dangerous than others. And finally, it's about if we have the courage to take a collective stand against racial injustice today. This year, nearly half of my students in my race and politics upper division course participated in a walkout in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Halfway through my lecture, I could hear the swelling crowd of students, teachers and community members in the Quad at the University of Washington. I smiled to myself as I had a flashback to the conversation that I had with Kenny, now five years ago. He was right, of course. My books and my silence will not save these students, but their activism, their courage in challenging the status quo, and this movement just might. Thanks. (Applause)