Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

owned property were matched with attacks against White people. In the disordersof the 1960s, attacks against persons had been relatively rare. In threeof the sixties' largest riots-those of Watts, Newark, and Detroit-the crowdintentionally killed only two or three White people. Bruce Porter and MarvinDunn comment:What was shocking about Miami was the intensity of the rage directedagainst white people: men, women and children dragged from their carsand beaten to death, stoned to death, stabbed with screwdrivers, runover with automobiles; hundreds more attacked in the street and seriouslyinjured .... In Miami, attacking and killing white people was themain object of the riot. .1HAmong those injured in the riots was an elderly White man namedMartin Weinstock. Weinstock was hit in the head with a piece of concreteand suffered a fractured skull. He was hospitalized for six days. Still, he toldan interviewer:They should only know that I agree with their anger .... If the peoplewho threw the concrete were brought before me in handcuffs, I wouldinsist that the handcuffs be removed, and I'd try to talk to them. I wouldsay that I understand and that I'm on their side. I have no anger at all.But they'll never solve their problems by sending people like me to thehospital. \'JWeinstock is right: violence directed against random representatives ofsome dominant group is hardly strategic, much less morally justifiable. Butif such attacks are (as Porter and Dunn insist) "shocking, " it can only bebecause Black anger has so rarely taken this form.White violence against Black people has never been limited to the destructionof their property. Even in Miami, Black people gul lhe wursl of theviolence. Of the seventeen dead, nine were Black people killed by the police,the National Guard, or White vigilantes.4o Are these deaths somehow lessshocking than those of White people?Yet-how loudly White people denounce prejudice when it is directedagainst them, and how quietly they accept it as it continually bears downon people of color. They indignantly point out the contradiction when thosewho object to prejudice employ it, and all the while adroitly ignore their owncomplicity in the institutions of White supremacy.James Baldwin, again in his "Letter from Harlem, " imagines the predicamentof a White policeman patrolling the ghetto: "He too believes ingood intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken forthe deed. He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated .... But,"Baldwin asks, "which of us has?"41THE BASICSWe are encouraged to think of acts of police violence more or less in isolation,to consider them as unique, unrelated occurrences. We ask ourselvesalways, ''What went wrong?" and for answers we look to the seconds, minutes,or hours before the incident. Perhaps this leads us to fault the indi-8