Obama’s ‘defund the police’ comments showcase a radical cynicism
That was a quintessential Obama move, endorsing comity over confrontation. But in an interview with CNN’s April Ryan, the former president went all “Fear of a Black Planet,” revealing a remarkably hard-edge assessment of White anxiety.
The relationship between Black people and police is “always a hot topic,” Obama observed, because it “unearths or excavates or escalates fears within the White population that somehow the African American community is going to get out of control in some way or is not respecting authority.”
Wow. This is a pretty remarkable view of “the White population” coming from the man who made his big debut on the public stage proclaiming that “there’s not a Black America and a White America.” Maybe four years of President Trump can do that to you.
Still, as much as Obama may be correct about White anxiety, he is wrong about the supposed toxicity of “defund the police” as a slogan. The people it turns off were unlikely to support the effort anyway, and the phrase carries with it the power to compel attention — and, with it, long-overdue change.
White backlash has been the response for decades to every single assertion for equal rights by African Americans. If Black political aspirations were limited by fear of turning off many White people, African Americans would never have fought for voting rights, equal access to quality schools or integrated housing. If Black folks had depended on “a big audience” of White people to support civil rights, we would scarcely have made any progress at all.
Certainly, many Americans do not support defunding the police, whatever meaning they attach to that term. But it may be not only the rhetoric that they bristle at, but the reform itself. For example, some of the very senators who complain most loudly about “defund the police” have not supported the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which provides money to police departments for implementing some common-sense reforms. Explain how it makes sense to be against defunding the police and against funding them?
The good news is that the United States is evolving into a multiracial democracy, where conservative and moderate White people don’t call all the shots. President-elect Joe Biden won because of support from large majorities of people of color, along with a significant minority (42 percent, according to the exit polls) of White voters. This same coalition now has the power to translate a “snappy slogan” into law and policy. In fact, this work is already underway.
According to polling data, most Americans interpret defunding the police not as a call to abolish police departments but rather to change the way those departments operate — they are more sophisticated than Obama assumes. A Gallup survey in July found that 70 percent of African Americans support “reducing the budgets of police departments and shifting the money to social programs,” along with 41 percent of White Americans and 49 percent of Hispanic Americans.
Cities across the country have responded to “defund the police” by doing just that. Since this summer, New York, Los Angeles, D.C., Minneapolis and many other jurisdictions have allocated money away from the men and women with guns, and toward community development and crime prevention. The pace of change — stemming from an idea that most people became aware of just a few months ago — is unprecedented.
Indeed, in the Snapchat interview, Obama advised activists to focus the message on providing resources to treat homelessness and addiction. Then, he said, “suddenly a whole bunch of folks” start listening.
Actually, Mr. President, they don’t. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted, “The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore. It wasn’t until they made folks uncomfortable that there was traction to do ANYTHING even if it wasn’t their full demands.”
To that point, the concept of switching some criminal justice expenditures to health care and community development has been around for years, circulating among scholars and policymakers under the moniker “justice reinvestment.” Never heard of justice reinvestment? I rest my case.
Obama has earned his status as one of the most respected people in the world. I have missed his presidency every day since Jan. 20, 2017. Now our country’s long and lurching path toward racial justice would be advanced if the former president set aside his longtime project of schooling activists on their rhetoric, and instead devoted his formidable political skills to the urgency of achieving their goals.
Including defunding the police.
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