Coates’ text is full of many powerful and meaningful passages. Hence, it is hard to pin point just one passage or place in the text that is worth delving into deeper when compared to the rest of the text. Nonetheless, Coates’ discussion of the police is worth highlighting. As Coates notes early on in the second half of his text:
At this moment the phrase ‘police reform’ has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies–the sprawling circular state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects–are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are racist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. (Coates 79)
Coates’ analysis of the police forces is particularly interesting considering the heightened levels of awareness about police violence. The way Coates simply noted how police reform has become the recent and popular trend is interesting. However, Coates’ most interesting point about the police is the ways in which the police are not simply individual actors with prejudices, but are rather institutional actors carrying out the will of the people. This argument about police closely mirrors Olson’s analysis in The Abolition of White Democracy regarding color-blindness. Olson suggests that color-blindenss is problematic because it naturalizes the category of whiteness, thus making it a pre political category. Under the color-blind democracy, the racist activities that were once associated with an institutional structure are now associated with individuals. Hence, racism is dismissed as the action of an uneducated individual, rather than viewed as the result of an institutional system that aims to uphold the privileged and powerful standing of white people in America.
Coates’ text, overall, does not seem to provide solutions, but rather acts as a way to educate his son about the world he was brought into. However, I am curious if, in this passage, Coates is critiquing the color-blind state. Can we read this passage as an argument to move away from the color-blind state? What would it mean to recognize that the majority opinion controls the police? Is the police simply just an extension of the majority’s will? How does the police become the arm of the majority? Are the police inherently prone to discrimination because of their association to the institutional structures that uphold and confer benefits onto the white majority?
Critical Race Theory -- LMU 2016 