They thought they were setting me onto the right path which each furious blow and every tackle, trying to steer me in what they considered to be the right direction. Many people who’ve grown up in the Southern United States that part of the police culture is used to instill—by coercion or force—traditional values on you. That’s what happens when you hire people to be cops who so desperately wish to uphold those values. They ended up doing the exact opposite, causing in me a massive distrust of the State and police, a disposition I share with Black people all over for the exact same reasons.
Who’d have thought, child abuse at the hands of the State might turn people off to whatever bullshit status-quo norms they were trying to instill by force? As I’ve been saying all along as video after video after video surface of cops assaulting harmless, innocent people, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Fascism and police brutality are truly relevant to me because I got my fucking ass beat by cops as a kid for nothing and often no crime at all. The true brutality started in my teenage years when I became guilty of the crime of non-conformity. It seems to have slowed down in my adulthood, but there is absolutely a police culture that coerces us into superfluous conformity and it has happened sparsely over the years, especially during my work of political activism. Much of our police force think themselves entitled to enforce their own morality, rather than law.
Those of us who step outside of the norm, who look a little different, who don't budge when we're asked to shut up and kowtow and conform to illegal force, and even times when I just spoke what I thought or gave factual information about something they were asking about, I got my ass beat.
I’ve been beaten up and roughed up for the mere crime of expression.
While there is a racial component, I think we're finally starting to uncover the cold, dark, twisted reality that we've hired all the wrong people to police our world, uneducated, testosterone-fueled men who are willing to disbelieve rape victims in order to uphold the "bro code", savagely beat and kill Black people in the streets, and even going as far as to beat the shit out of me when I was a kid on more occasions than I could count. So often it was done under the guise of "trying to get you on the right path" because they didn't like the way I dressed or wore my hair or other material things they may have a disagreement, but certainly, this isn't what the police are for. It's not the police's job to execute moral codes but legal ones.
Some people suggest we’re making much ado about just a few bad apples. Fair enough.
Forgive me for believing that 1. when the State powers who are entrusted to serve and protect do the exact opposite, when they abuse power and brutalize, after several bad actors, it’s hard to distinguish who’s who because 2. the good police are clearly protecting the bad police, otherwise they’d have effectively policed themselves and removed the bad apples long ago and we wouldn’t be dealing with it now. Alas, this hasn’t happened.
For simple math, let’s suppose there are 10,000 good cops and only 20 bad cops, the fact that those 10,000 were protecting those 20 behind the shield of silence means there are 10,020 bad cops total. If they can’t police themselves, they must be accountable to us and transparent. It’s either/or.
I used to own quite a few t-shirts of Black Metal bands and they especially hated the Dark Funeral ones the least. It’s no surprise that religious overreach and institutional abuses of power go hand-in-hand. When people feel morally compelled to act because of their beliefs which are so deeply-held, convictions which raise the stakes of every perceived transgression, they’re much more willing to step out of line and enforce what they see as their self-anointed religious or moral duty. Anyone remember the pastor who punched the kid in the chest because he thought him a sinner and erring by straying from the path of “God”?
This attitude is echoed, reverberating throughout so many minds of people who wear a uniform and a badge. Like the church, the police forces across America shield such people who step out of line and reach over their boundaries in the name of self-licensing.
I'm not saddened but determined. I rejoice in the fact that the rest of the world is finally waking up to how the cops have treated some of us, especially in the Southern US. The winds of change have arrived. I feel like so much of the American political discussion hinges on our views of police and the state. It's clear that to most conservatives, the DMV is the biggest headache the state has ever given them, usually because they blend in with ordinary folk. Being able to blend in is almost the very definition of privilege. But for those of us who will not or (in the case of racial minorities) cannot do that, we get a whole other world of hell unleashed upon us that maintains the power structure.
Nonetheless, extraordinarily little in this world is dehumanizing as getting your ass beat by the cops and not being able to fight back because you know they'll either kill or arrest you. It's the worst feeling in the world, an injustice so foul that it reeks of a rancid stench just to think about it. It's just like women who've been sexually assaulted by powerful men, the worst part isn't the touching, it's not being able to fight back and assert your independence and individual autonomy, you're rendered pure object.
Then comes a whole other layer of hell when the people who haven't shared your experiences disbelieve them or take the stance that you "must've done something wrong," and it's their go-to argument because of their blind trust in authority (as if cops are somehow morally and judgmentally superior to the rest of us--they are not).
I've buried so many of these memories and just moved on with my life, but the murder of George Floyd is bringing it all back. Many of my friends who remember me from those days also got the exact same treatment for the vicious, terrible crime of non-conformity and exercising free speech. I remember the days when a band t-shirt was grounds for an assault from the police. That's back when wearing such clothing actually meant something and was a fight for our rights.
At this point, it's so acceptable that it's not rebellious at all, it's a statement of passive consumerism and thus I've tried to shift my rebellion to the pursuit of philosophy and rebellious ideas. But I remember. I remember so many instances of Southern cops taking the liberty to beat a child because they didn't like him. How could I forget? How could I just pretend this never happened to me when it did?
I will not stay silent during this time of national and global reckoning. My experiences matter and will be neither forgotten nor ignored.