After more than a month of nationwide protests demanding action against police violence targeting people of color, Congress appears to be moving forward on that agenda. On a party-line vote on June 25, Democrats in the House passed legislation that would reform law enforcement policies, in an attempt to address some of the public outrage manifest in the streets after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 that passed by the House, would ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct, prohibit certain no-knock warrants, eliminate qualified immunity, making it easier to sue police for violation of civil rights and limit the transfer of military equipment to local police departments. Democrats defeated a much weaker Republican-sponsored reform bill in the U.S. Senate, resulting in the current congressional deadlock.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Kevin Alexander Gray, a lifelong social justice activist and author who served as Jesse Jackson’s South Carolina presidential campaign manager in 1988. Here Gray, who is co-editor of the book, “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence,” assesses the substance of the House-passed police reform bill and President Trump’s ongoing use of social media to disseminate his followers’ racist and hate-filled messages and videos.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: No question chokeholds, no-knock warrants, those things and eliminating those things are important. To me what’s most important is ending the war on drugs. Everybody seemed to want to avoid that subject and the subject of drug legalization — and the fact that the war on drugs, which for the most part just started under the Clinton administration that we have to go back and look at all the laws that have been promulgated since the war on drugs has been really ramped up to include the increasing number of SWAT teams. And I think I wrote in the book “How to Legalize Drugs” that was edited by Jefferson Fish back in the late 1990s, I wrote a piece called, “A Call for New Antiwar Movement.” I wrote about the militarization of Mayberry and the rise in SWAT teams for even the smallest jurisdictions. You know, the other issue that goes with that is this whole warrior cop mentality and the hiring of police that come from the military – like Fallujah (in Iraq) is a training ground for working in from Mayberry to the inner city.
So what we have to tackle first is this idea of the war on drugs and everything that comes out of it. The other part for me that’s most important legislatively that really puts pressure on police officers to do the right thing is eliminating qualified immunity and making police be on the same footing as everybody else. I mean, it is to add nobody is above the law. Nobody is below law and nobody is the law. I think that will make police think twice about whether or not they’re going to brutalize or be sadistic or bring their white nationalist or white supremacist feelings to their jobs and think that that’s going to be the order of the day. So everybody’s kind of letting that one fall by the wayside. But out of all of it, to me, the war on drugs and decriminalization and legalization is where we have to go with it.
The legalization is happening in a lot of majority white states and liberal jurisdictions, primarily in the West and in the North. But, you know, the South where the majority of people of color live, it’s been hard to get people to organize to make these changes happen that need to be happening. So I applaud people being in the street and protesting. But at some point in time, folks are going to go sit in those meetings. They’re going to go into executive session or county, city council meetings, state legislatures and they’re going to make decisions and you have to be there. And the other thing is that you have to organize to get out the vote and vote for people that are going to carry your goals and your needs and your aims along with them that you can hold accountable.
SCOTT HARRIS: Kevin, we’ve seen President Trump come out opposing the tearing down of all symbols of the Confederacy. And we’ve also seen Trump retweet a video with a man shouting “White Power” in Florida, and another video of a couple brandishing an AR-15 rifle and a handgun aiming at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis. It seems that Trump is doubling down on his megaphone appeals to race, hatred and bigotry. And it seems like this election in November is going to come down to a referendum, not on so much politics, but racism itself. What do you think?
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: When Trump got elected, I said this to a lot of people, “This is about white folk and who they are, what they want to be in this country. I’ve grown up, you’ve grown up under the system of racism and white supremacy and by racism, I mean, systemic racism, I don’t mean simple bigotry. I mean the system that decides where you’re going to live, where you’re going to go to school, how people are going to look at you, how the power structure is going to look at you.” I think my brother tweeted something in regards to the police. He said, “In white communities, police are about serving and protecting. And in the black communities, it’s about law enforcement.” So the fact that Trump’s a white nationalist and he comes from that lineage with his father being who he was, that doesn’t surprise me.
It’s what white America is going to do, if that’s who they want to be and the world is seeing that, then we’re headed for calamity. And, it doesn’t take long for a calamity to set in. I think if Trump is re-elected, we’re headed for a real problem in this country and how the world treats us. But no, nothing Trump does as it relates to race surprises me. I would much rather Trump let me know who he is upfront with his racist tweets, than for him to harbor those feelings and enact policies and people debate whether or not he’s racist. I say that all of us are racist because that’s the water we drink.
For more information, visit Kevin Alexander Gray’s website at kevinalexandergray.com and follow him on Twitter @KevinAGray.
