When I first heard the phrase “defund the police”, I was skeptical. I heartily support the extraordinary movement for racial justice that is happening across the country, but I was worried about how the phrase would land with, well, people like me. White people. Especially those with power – even those who seem to be cautiously open to the idea of bold changes in the wake of the protests. I didn’t want this movement to stall because of what I thought might be a hastily chosen phrase.
But rather than holding onto my discomfort and skepticism, I decided to explore what was behind this call to action. It’s sometimes a convenient shield for me to think “well, other white people may not react well to this” instead of facing up to how my own biases shaped my initial reaction.
Bias shapes how I was raised, how I think, how I raised my own kids, and how I operate at work. You have been shaped in this way too, no matter who you are – from a conservative cop in Milwaukee to a liberal social worker in Portland. Overt acts of racism – while damaging – are easier to spot and condemn. The bias I’m referring to here is unconscious bias and the deeply ingrained negative narratives about Black people that it creates. These tracks were laid down before our founding and built upon over centuries. Amplified by stories, culture, and narratives, (mostly) white Americans are conditioned to believe that Black men and boys are dangerous; that Black women are angry; that natural Black hair or braids are unprofessional; and on and on.
These messages come to us in the way journalists and editors communicate the news; how marketers prepare ads; in movies and television; in political rhetoric – in every corner of society we receive racially-coded messages that reinforce whiteness as good and/or Blackness as bad, dangerous, or less important or human compared to whiteness. When I first started working with a coach on these issues several years ago, facing up to my biases was – at least initially – difficult. I was defensive. Then I felt like I had, for most of my life, been brainwashed. But eventually I realized facing up to our biases and working to overcome them is ultimately empowering. There is a lot more to learn about unconscious bias – I particularly liked Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Biased” if you want to learn more – but jumping these old tracks of thinking and building new ones is essential work all white people must do.
A grounding in individual bias is also essential to understanding systemic racism, something that the powerful protests have illuminated for white people in a way that makes me hopeful about the progress we can make as a society. Our individual biases shaped the people (white men, mostly) in power making decisions about our laws, our institutions, our companies, our churches, our schools and so on. The bias was baked in from the start so when you hear the language from reform advocates about how schools or policing are ‘broken’, that’s not actually true. Schools and police departments are doing what they were designed to do – advantage one group over others. The execution of that design may be more subtle in certain contexts, and individual actors within those systems may push against the tide (good apples, as opposed to the bad), but the system remains, and it’s resistant to change.
When activists chant “defund the police,” what’s behind that slogan is a conversation we all need to understand and engage with. Black people have known from the beginning that these systems were stacked against them, while many white people are only now coming to understand this reality. The reality is that police budgets in cities around the country have grown even as crime has dropped considerably. What overpoliced communities are telling us – what the ‘Defund’ movement is telling us – is that our priorities as a society are out of whack and must be rebalanced.
The systems that we as Americans rely on to support us – schools, health care, the justice system, and child welfare, to name a few, do exactly the opposite for communities of color broadly, and for Black and Indigenous people most acutely. What we are hearing from these communities is a call for true safety and security. That means access to health care, higher paying jobs, well-funded schools that teach the full spectrum of our history, reliable transit, affordable housing, and trained professionals – not cops with guns – to come to the aid of people with mental health challenges or those suffering from addiction. In other words, systems that lead with empathy and not suspicion and punishment. These are the ingredients of resilient communities.
So yes, “defund the police” may sound radical to my ears. But when we sit down and unpack the multiple layers of bias that exist in our society and its institutions, we recognize that it will take bold, comprehensive changes to make them work in a multi-racial society. We must continue listening to communities who have been excluded or harmed by these systems in the first place. And using what they tell us, reconstruct these systems with humanity at the center. That could look dramatically different from how we do things now.
As a white man, I have never once had a difficult interaction with the police, much less felt in fear for my life. Schools served me and my kids well. Society works for me, but it doesn’t work for too many of my fellow Americans who are Black. This has been true for centuries. But the pandemic and its disproportionate impact on Black people, combined with the murder of George Floyd and the worldwide, ongoing protests that followed, have finally made this reality visible for large numbers of white people across the country. Our role as white people now is to consider what actions we should be taking – and not to step in and say “well, that seems like too much”, when everything we have done before is not nearly enough.
