The other epidemic we must fight is white supremacy by Jodeen Olguín-Tayler
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wenty years ago, as a senior at Boulder High School, I led a small collective of students in a walkout to protest the murder of Amadou Diallo by police in New York City. While at Casey Middle School, when the Klu Klux Klan marched along Pearl Street, I tip-toed downstairs to lock my sister’s bedroom door while she was sleeping after my friends told me she was too dark-skinned to be safe. This month, leaders across our Boulder community — and the world — have been protesting the ways black people are killed by police brutality. We join these protests knowing that black people have been dying from racial inequality in health care, the disproportionate vulnerability to the coronavirus and suffering unequal economic impacts from the COVID-19 crisis. These are not accidents. These are all symptoms of another deadly illness. These violent symptoms point to an illness that has gripped this country since its birth and has been embedded into its very DNA. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor this past spring, and of George Floyd and Tony McDade the last week of May are painfully visible manifestations of this epidemic. This illness is all around us — impacting us differently, yet none of us are free from it. We need to see all these symptoms as parts of the same sickness: white supremacy. What many of us protesting are asking is that we don’t ignore the
sickness that choked George’s breath from his body, nor deny the illness that allowed three other officers to stand by, watching. We need action against the contagion released with the tweets of public officials escalating the violence. And, if you are angry at these actions, please also grieve about the silence of neighbors and family — because that, too, test positive. As a Chicana woman, I’m painfully familiar with both the brutal racism enacted on my people, and the policing of white identity that results in a more privileged position for those — like myself — who are people of color with light-colored skin. My tias and primos in New Mexico and my brothers in Sao Paulo, Brasil tell me that a COVID vaccine may help those with money and proximity to whiteness, yet together we bear the suffocating experience that this, too, will be unequally distributed in our majority black- and brown communities. I tested positive for COVID-19 in March, and felt the panic that grips you when your lungs are starved from oxygen. I now fear for my Chicano-Korean son, as attacks on Asian-American communities escalate because of the racists who labeled coronavirus a “Chinese virus.” As white men with guns — cheered on by their president — demand business as usual in the face of over 66% of coronavirus deaths being suffered by people of color, it
We cannot support a return to a “great America” that
never was. We — all of us — desperately need a new normal.
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see GUEST COLUMN Page 7
JUNE 11, 2020
DANISH PLAN from Page 5
reforming themselves. Either alternative is acceptable. Importantly, outlawry is not a return to vigilante justice. Vigilantes were self-appointed posse, judges, juries and executioners. But with outlawry, an offender would be declared an outlaw through a legal process, and, equally important, members of the community who choose to act against the outlaw would be acting with full sanction of the law, not acting outside it like vigilantes. Still, speaking of vigilantes... Option 3: Form committees of public safety and vigilance. A dictionary definition (Oxford English in this case) of a “vigilance committee” is “a self-appointed committee for the maintenance of justice and order in an imperfectly organized community.” Like a community without a police department. Like Minneapolis, maybe. Vigilance committees were formed in a number of frontier communities, including San Francisco in 1856. Think of them as an early example of community policing. What could possibly go wrong? Well, in 1966 a book came out about the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. It was titled, San Francisco’s Reign of Terror. Option 4: Hire private security. There are plenty of private security companies around, but if you are a group of merchants threatened by mobs of excitable boys who want to loot and burn your businesses in a police-free city, you might want to hire a firm with a lot of hands-on experience in counter-insurgency, I mean private-sector community policing. The company formerly known as Blackwater Security comes to mind. Its superbly trained agents know how to stop trouble before I
it begins. And what could possibly go wrong? OK, there were those pesky incidents in Baghdad when someone looked cock-eyed at a Blackwaterguarded convoy and a misunderstanding involving live ammunition ensued. OK, they over-reacted. But when your city is in flames and there aren’t any cops around, you might consider that a feature, not a bug. Option 5: Make an arrangement with the mafia. The mafia has been in the protection racket, I mean business, for decades. It’s pretty good at what it does. However it doesn’t provide onsite security during a riot to prevent looting. Hunting down the looters after the riot and blowing their knee-caps off is more its style. And if your local godfather needs a favor from you, you better do it. Or else. Option 6: Support your local warlord. Power hates a vacuum, and if you get rid of your local police, someone, usually someone with a militia, is going to take over and provide a full range of security services — to those who play ball with them and pay their, uh, tithings. Some police-free cities have had several competing warlords at the same time. It happens all the time in the developing world. Option 7: Embrace self-defense. And the suck. When you’ve gotten rid of the police — and you suddenly realize that we are not all in this together — your last line of defense is self-defense. Buy a gun. And learn to sleep with one eye open. This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly. BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
