From a couple of years ago, but this testimony might be helpful for non-blacks to gain some insight into a chronic and unbearable condition.
Let me speak of two related thoughts thus provoked: the essence of policing must be confronted in terms of 1) the American legacy of white supremacy and 2) the oligarchic cruelty of our regime.
1. Now is the time to recognize the everydayness of American white supremacy and repudiate its everyday enforcement. We have exoticized the phenomenon of white supremacy as something belonging only to the extremity of Nazism. But the New World was afflicted by this psychopathology from the beginning.
White supremacy is the American original sin. To be sure, the near-universal history of slavery (itself rooted in the universal fact that the powerful do what they will and the powerless suffer what they must) provides the background, but slavery became racialized in a novel way in the New World. There are many reasons for that development, but an obvious benefit for the master class was that pigmentation acted like a whole-body brand, making it much easier for a minority to hold a majority in servitude. Blackness/brownness meant range of action and movement could be surveilled easily.
And that very mechanism is still operative in what this witness relates in his story.
2. Our polis, the United States of America, just like any other polis, polices according to dominant social interests. Our oligarch overlords expect us all to honor with the name "freedom" the rapacity of billionaires. Sufficiently above the status of the "precariat," the various upper strata of the middle class have generally made peace with the oligarchic disposition (often living off the trickledown from the super-wealthy).
The majority of America, however, lives precariously: poor whites, poor blacks, poor Latinos, etc. That's a lot of despair to manage. There's mass entertainment and drugs and...policing.
The previous point about the marker-value of blackness explains why this function of policing falls more heavily on blacks. But the socioeconomic obscenity is not limited to them. A class alliance would be dynamite. Poor whites need to see that the ideology of white supremacy keeps them in their place too, in return for some of the immunities that come with white skin. It’s a bad bargain all around.
Depending on interest, as a memorial to George Floyd and as a service to civic deliberation on the problem of policing, I am quite interested in offering a guided reflection on policing, race, and justice. I was thinking of working through Bentham on the panopticon, William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, Angela Davis’s Policing the Black Man, Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and at least the last couple of chapters of Security, Territory, and Population.