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My heart goes out to every officer and their families killed in the line of duty. That is a pain I wish on no one. But like Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, I am also sick and tired of being sick and tired — of the denial of institutional racism, even in the midst of overwhelming evidence.
Hamer’s words immediately came to mind when the U.S. Dept. of Justice released its highly publicized report on discriminatory practices in the Ferguson Police Dept. I’m so over people being surprised by these actions and would rather focus on solutions that begin with validating the reality of the dangerousness and difficulty of police work in exchange for an acknowledgement of the violence of racial profiling against black people. It is only through the validation of one another’s experiences that we can mutually achieve non-lethal, quality-of-life enhancing solutions.
Let’s start with the denial (or willful ignorance) about the existence of institutional racism. Even the FBI Director James Comey acknowledged some “hard truths” about law enforcement and race involving the widespread nature of unconscious bias. In spite of supporting data, there is still resistance to the idea of institutional racism in police departments.
For example, the president of the Austin (Texas) Police Association denies the existence of institutional discrimination, reducing it to a few isolated cases of biased individuals who are eventually weeded out of law enforcement.
