Second best book I've read in 2017
This post is for you peeps who still read anything longer than 300 words.
The book's introduction which is below hits one right between the eyes with revelatory probity and makes one reflect upon uncomfortable truths that even the victims of "choke hold" don't want to think about. Download and read the entire peerless manuscript.
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INTRODUCTION - BROKE ON PURPOSE
Here are some of the things that police did to African American people, during the time of the country’s first African American president: in Ferguson, Missouri, arrested a man named Michael for filing a false report because he told them his name was “Mike.” Locked up a woman in Ferguson for “occupancy permit violation” when she called 911 to report she was being beat up by her boyfriend and the police learned the man was not legally entitled to live in the house. Killed a seven-year-old girl in Detroit while looking for drugs at her father’s house. Shot Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston after stopping him for a traffic infraction. Severed Freddie Gray’s spinal cord in Baltimore. Unloaded sixteen bullets into seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald while he lay cowering on a Chicago street. Pushed a teenage girl in a bikini to the ground in McKinney, Texas. Shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland within two seconds of seeing him in a public park. Pumped bullets into Philando Castile in Minnesota while his girlfriend livestreamed it on Facebook, with her four-year-old daughter in the backseat.1
If the police did these things to African Americans during Barack Obama’s presidency, what should we expect in the era of Donald Trump? During the 2015 protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, Trump tweeted, “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!”Trump has called police officers “the most mistreated people in this country” and suggested that activists who protest police violence should be investigated by the Justice Department.2
Cops did not treat African Americans better when Obama was in office, and they will not treat them worse during the era of Trump. The ascendency of Donald Trump might embolden a racist cop, but racist cops are not the main problem. Most police officers are decent working-class men and women with no more racial hang-ups than teachers, doctors, or anyone else. As we will see, the crisis in law and order in the United States stems from police work itself rather than from individual cops.
There has never, not for one minute in American history, been peace between black people and the police. And nothing since slavery—not Jim Crow segregation, not forced convict labor, not lynching, not restrictive covenants in housing, not being shut out of New Deal programs like Social Security and the GI Bill, not massive resistance to school desegregation, not the ceaseless efforts to prevent African Americans from voting—nothing has sparked the level of outrage among African Americans as when they have felt under violent attack by the police.3Most of the times that African Americans have set aside traditional civil rights strategies like bringing court cases and marching peacefully and instead have rioted in the streets, destroyed property, and attacked symbols of the state have been because of something the police have done. Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Charlotte in 2016—each of these cities went up in flames sparked by the police killing a black man.4
The problem is the criminal process itself. Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do. Virtually every objective investigation of a U.S. law enforcement agency finds that the police,as policy, treat African Americans with contempt. In New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco, and many other cities, theU.S. Justice Department and federal courts have
stated that theofficialpractices of police departments include violating the rights of African Americans.5The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, detain, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people. It is the moral responsibility of every American, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why.
The work of police is to preserve law and order, including the racial order. Hillary Clinton once asked a room full of white people to imagine how they would feel if police and judges treated them the way African Americans are treated.6This is not a difficult question in a country that was founded in response to an oppressive occupation by armed agents of a remote government. If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution. The purpose of this book is to inspire the same outrage about what the police do to African Americans, and the same revolution in response.
A chokehold is a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die. The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something about the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.”7The truth is any human being will suffer distress when pressure on the carotid arteries interrupts the supply of blood from the heart to the brain. Many police departments in the United States have banned chokeholds, but this does not stop some officers from using the tactic when they perceive a threat. The New York Police Department officially bans the practice, but it receives approximately two hundred complaints a year from people who say they have been placed in chokeholds.8The NYPD regulations did not prevent Officer Daniel Pantaleo from tackling Eric Garner and tightly squeezing his neck for approximately twenty seconds. Pantaleo had been trying to arrest Garner, a forty-three-year-old black man, for selling cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island. Garner denied he’d been breaking the law, and when Pantaleo came at him with handcuffs, Garner moved his hands away and said, “Don’t touch me please.” Pantaleo jumped on Garner’s back, grabbed his neck, and pushed his head facedown against the pavement. Garner said “I can’t breathe” eleven times, and then lost consciousness. He was transported to a local hospital, and died an hour after arriving at the hospital. The New York City Medical Examiner’s office ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide, caused by “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Officer Pantaleo was not charged with a crime and remained a sworn officer of the NYPD.9As far as the district attorney of Staten Island was concerned, what Officer Pantaleo did to Eric Garner is what you call police work.
The United States Supreme Court decided a case about chokeholds that tells you everything you need to know about how criminal “justice” works for African American men. In 1976, Adolph Lyons, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was pulled over by four Los Angeles Police Department officers for driving with a broken taillight. The cops exited their squad cars with their guns drawn, ordering Lyons to spread his legs and put his hands on top of his head. After Lyons was frisked, he put his hands down, causing one cop to grab Lyons’s hands and slam them against his head. Lyons had been holding his keys and he complained that he was in pain. The police officer tackled Lyons and placed him in a chokehold until he blacked out. When Lyons regained consciousness, he was lying facedown on the ground, had soiled his pants, and was spitting up blood and dirt. The cops gave him a traffic citation and sent him on his way.
Lyons sued to make the LAPD stop putting people in chokeholds. He presented evidence that in recent years sixteen people—including twelve black men—had died in LAPD custody after being placed in chokeholds. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, theU.S. Supreme Court denied his claim, holding that because Lyons could not prove that he would be subject to a chokehold in the future, he had no “personal stake in the outcome.” Dissenting from the Court’s opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the Supreme Court, wrote:
A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.
The Chokehold is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed. It is the process by which black lives are made vulnerable to death imposed by others and death that comes from African Americans themselves. The Chokehold works through overt state violence—such as the way communities of color are policed—and slower forms of vulnerability, such as the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the gentrification, all over the country, of inner-city neighborhoods formerly occupied by poorpeople of color, and the way that when a black man chooses to kill somebody, nine times out of ten it is another black person.
The Chokehold does not stem from hate of African Americans. Its anti-blackness is instrumental rather than emotional. As slaves built the White House, the Chokehold builds the wealth of white elites. Discriminatory law enforcement practices such as stop and frisk, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs are key components of the political economy of the United States. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s stigmatized overt racism, the national economy, which from the founding has been premised on a racialized form of capitalism, still required black bodies to exploit. The Chokehold evolved as a “color-blind” method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation. The rap group Public Enemy said, “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.”11Actually all it takes is the Chokehold. It is the invisible fist of the law.
The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland—where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans—is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system issupposedto work. The problem is not bad apple cops. The problem is police work itself. American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.
The Chokehold is how the police get away with shooting unarmed black people. Cops are rarely prosecuted because they are, literally, doing their jobs. This is why efforts to fix “problems” such as excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail. If it’s not broke, you can’t fix it. Police violence and selective enforcement are not so much flaws in American criminal justice as they are integral features of it. The Chokehold is why, legally speaking, black lives don’t matter as much as white lives.
The whole world knows that the United States faces a crisis in racial justice, but the focus on police and mass incarceration is too narrow. We might be able to fix those problems the way thatwe “fixed” slavery and segregation, but the Chokehold’s genius is its mutability. Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crew bled into the new Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform—we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew. This book uses the experience of African American men to explain why.
As a tool of oppression, the Chokehold does not apply only to African American men. The dynamic of blaming a victim of subordination for his or her condition, and then imposing a legal and social response that enhances the subordination, is familiar to many out-groups in the United States. This book explores the Chokehold through the lens of “policing black men,” but there might be any number of other lenses.
A far from exhaustive list might include:
Chokehold: national security profiling of Muslim Americans
Chokehold: surveillance of poor women receiving government benefits
Chokehold: the appropriation of Native American land
Chokehold: exploitation and deportation of undocumented Latino workers
Chokehold: police and private violence against transgender women of color
Chokehold: sex trafficking of Asian women
BLACK + MALE: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH
In focusing on African American men, I want to avoid a mistake that some others have made before me. To observe that the experiences of black men are determined by their race and gender does not mean that their plight is worse than that of some other groups, particularly African American women. Intersectionality is the concept, first articulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw,that describes how people experience subordination differently based on their multiple identities.13Nobody is just male, or Asian, or bisexual; people have different group identities, and all those identities are relevant with regard to their life experiences. For example, a Latina woman and a Latino man might be subject to different kinds of stereotypes based on their race, ethnicity, and gender identity.
Intersectionality is about the difference that gender makes for race, and that race makes for gender. It helps us understand the ways that racism and sexism particularly confront women of color. In the words of a seminal text in black women’s studies: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.”14Intersectionality explains why males are frequently perceived as standard bearers for the race in a way that females are not. Things that happen to African American men are identified as “black” problems in a way that things that happen to African American women would not be. Even if some of the same things that happen to African American men happen to African American women, men are likely to receive the most attention.
At the same time, intersectionality creates a space for black male–focused analysis. Lynching, for example, was gendered as well as raced; it was not enough to hang black men from trees, but their penises had to be cut off as well. Black women also have been terrorized, rape being one obvious example, but we should remember that black male victims too have been punished for gender as well as race. Chapter 3 makes this point about stop and frisk. It is not hard to imagine that discrimination against black men sometimes might take different forms than discrimination against black women, and that the combination of race and gender discrimination might impact African American men’s educational achievement, participation in the labor market, and risk of incarceration in particular ways. The problem is that black male issues are likely to be prioritized, to the extent that any racial justice interventions are prioritized. The important #SayHerName campaign has lifted up the experiences of women of color withthe police. For example, after excessive force, sexual assault is the most common complaint against the police, and African American women are the most likely victims.15This problem has not received the attention it deserves, which is not uncommon for issues that disproportionately impact black women. At the same time, intersectionality teaches us that gender matters for black men as well, and that ignoring gender undermines the chances of making things better. The challenge for any project that focuses on African American men—whether a black male achievement program such as former president Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative or a book such asChokehold—is to highlight the particular ways in which black men are stereotyped without marginalizing the experiences of African American women in the process. I am dedicated to that process throughout these pages.
THE CHOKEHOLD AND BLACK MEN
Let’s keep it real. Many people—cops, politicians, and ordinary people—see African American men as a threat. The Chokehold is the legal and social response. It contains a constellation of tools that are used to keep them down—including a range of social practices, laws, punishments, and technologies that mark every black
man as a thug or potential thug. The state—especially the police—is authorized to control them by any means necessary.
One of the consequences of the Chokehold is mass incarceration, famously described by Michelle Alexander as “the New Jim Crow.”16The Chokehold also brings us police tactics such as stop and frisk, which are designed to humiliate African American males—to bring them into submission.17But the Chokehold applies to all African American men, not only the brothers who are locked up or have criminal records. It is insidious enough that it clamps down on black men even when there are no cops around. The Chokehold demands a certain kind of performance from a black man every time he leaves his home. He must affirmatively demonstrate—to the police and the public at large—that he is nota threat. Most African American men follow the script. Black men who are noncompliant suffer the consequences.
If you are the parent of a black boy, one of the most important decisions you make is when you tell them about the Chokehold. You don’t want to scare them, but the Chokehold is literally a matter of life and death.
The people who carry out the Chokehold include cops, judges, and politicians. But it’s not just about the government. It’s also about you. People of all races and ethnicities make the most consequential and the most mundane decisions based on the Chokehold. It impacts everything from the neighborhood you choose to live in and who you marry to where you look when you get on an elevator. I like hoodies but I won’t wear one, and it’s not mainly because of the police. It’s because when I put on a hoodie everybody turns into a neighborhood watch person. When the sight of a black man makes you walk quicker or check to see if your car door is locked, you are enforcing the Chokehold.
You are not alone. As an African American man, I’m not only the target of the Chokehold. I’ve also been one of its perpetrators. I’ve done so officially—as a prosecutor who sent a lot of black men to prison. I represented the government in criminal court and defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force. Many of those prosecutions I now regret. I can’t turn back time, but I can expose a morally bankrupt system. That’s one reason I wrote this book.
But before I get too high and mighty, you should know that I’ve also enforced the Chokehold outside my work as a prosecutor. I am a black man who at times is afraid of other black men. And then I get mad when people act afraid of me.
Other times I have been more disgusted or angry with some of my brothers than scared. I read the news articles about “black-on-black” homicide in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. I listen to some hip-hop music that seems to celebrate thug life. And as a kid I got bullied by other black males. Sometimes I think if brothers would just do right, we would not have to worry aboutpeople being afraid of us. I have wondered if we have brought the Chokehold on ourselves.
In order for African American men to have better outcomes, they have to learn how to navigate the system. The Chokehold is “the system” for black men. It is their government, far more than the president or the mayor. Still, most people have no idea how the Chokehold works. This book will break it all down.
Maybe you are just an ordinary person who is sometimes afraid of black men. You’re not a racist, but you need to know the facts. This book is going to give you the information you need, including real talk about the kinds of crimes that African American men commit and the ways that we as a society can respond.
This book is also for people who want to understand how the criminal process really works—from an expert who has been deep in the system on all sides. In my years as a prosecutor, I learned some inside information that I am now willing to share. Some of it will blow your mind, but I don’t feel bad for telling tales out of school. I was on the front lines in carrying out the Chokehold. Now I want to be on the front lines in helping to crush it.
My creds to write this book don’t come just from my experience as a law enforcement officer, my legal training at Harvard, or the more than twenty years I have spent researching criminal justice. I learned as much as an African American man who got arrested for a crime I did not commit—during the time that I served as a federal prosecutor. I didn’t beat my case because I was innocent, even though I was. I beat my case because I knew how to work the system. In chapter 7 I share those tips. If you have caught a case, it may be information even your own lawyer has not provided you. When the law is stacked against you—and because of the Chokehold, it is—you have to do whatever you can to fight back.
The Chokehold is perfectly legal. Like all law, it promotes the interests of the rich and powerful. In any system marked by inequality, there are winners and losers. Because the Chokehold imposes racial order, who wins and who loses is based on race.
White people are the winners. What they win is not only material, like the cash money that arresting African Americans brings to cities all over the country in fines and court costs. The criminalizing of blackness also brings psychic rewards. American criminal justice enhances the property value of whiteness.
As the Chokehold subordinates black men, it improves the status of white people. It works as an enforcement mechanism for keeping the black man in his place literally as well as figuratively. Oh the places African American men don’t go because of the Chokehold. It frees up urban space for coffeehouses and beer gardens.
But it’s not just the five-dollar latte crowd that wins. The Chokehold is something like an employment stimulus plan for working-class white people, who don’t have to compete for jobs with all the black men who are locked up, or who are underground because they have outstanding arrest warrants, or who have criminal records that make obtaining legal employment exceedingly difficult. Poor white people are simply not locked up at rates similar to African Americans. These benefits make crushing the Chokehold more difficult because if it ends, white people lose—at least in the short term. Progressives often lambast poor white people for voting for conservative Republicans like Donald Trump, suggesting that those votes are not in their best interests. But low-income white folks might have better sense than pundits give them credit for. A vote for a conservative is an investment in the property value of one’s whiteness. The criminal process makes white privilege more than just a status symbol, and more than just a partial shield from the criminal process (as compared to African Americans). By reducing competition for jobs, and by generating employment in law enforcement and corrections, especially in the mainly white rural areas where prisons are often located, the Chokehold delivers cash money to many working-class white people.
The Chokehold relegates black men to an inferior status of citizenship. We might care about that as a moral issue, or as anissue of racial justice. But honestly many people will not give a damn for those reasons. African Americans have been second-class citizens since we were allowed—after the bloodiest war in U.S. history and an amendment to the Constitution—to become citizens at all.
In the standoff between African Americans and the police, U.S. presidents have sided with the cops. For the last fifty years, every man who has been elected president has taken steps during his campaign to send a message to voters that he will be tough on black men. Richard Nixon watched one of his campaign ads warning voters about urban crime and exclaimed, “This hits it right on the nose. It’s all about law and order and the damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there.” Ronald Reagan complained about criminal fraud by “strapping young bucks” who used food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Campaigning for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter spoke out against forced integration, saying, “The government should not take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood just to establish their intrusion.” George H.W. Bush ran a television ad featuring William Horton (Bush’s campaign called him “Willie” although Horton never went by that name), a black man who raped a white woman while on a furlough from prison in Massachusetts. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said, “By the time we’re finished they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
President Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man who was so intellectually disabled that when the correctional officer came to take him to the death chamber Rector set aside the pecan pie he had ordered for his last meal because he was “saving it for later.” George W. Bush, soliciting the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, complained about Justice Department investigations of police departments, saying as president he would support cops “rather than constantly second guessing local law enforcement decisions.” During his first presidential campaign, Barack Obamamocked “gangbangers,” saying they are so lazy they ask “Why I gotta do it? Why can’t Pookie do it?” During the 2008 campaign, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute people for rape—even of a child. Obama criticized the decision, indicating that he would have voted with the conservative justices AntoninScalia and Clarence Thomas to uphold the death penalty in such cases. As a former law professor, Obama had to know that historically African American men were virtually the only people executed for rape. Donald Trump, answering a question in a debate with Hillary Clinton about what he would do to bridge the racial divide, said, “We need law and order. If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country. . . . We have a situation where we have our inner cities—African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.”
Once in office, the presidential record has been mixed. Bill Clinton endorsed a crime bill that created federal “three-strikes” laws and allocated $16 billion to build new prisons and put thousands of police officers on the street. But George W. Bush frequently spoke of the importance of showing compassion to people returning to their communities after serving time in prison. Barack Obama went further than any president before him. He was the first sitting U.S. president to visit a prison. He commuted the sentences of more than 1,300 inmates, far more than any president before him. Obama established the “President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing” and his Justice Department investigated over twenty local police departments.
But in the main, the U.S. criminal process carried on during the Obama era was as violent and harsh as ever. The policing commission’s recommendations were largely ignored by the nation’s 18,000 police departments. Obama’s commutations were only a fraction of the people who were potentially eligible; his first pardon attorney resigned in protest because the White House did not give her the resources to properly consider all who were eligible.
But something significant did happen during Obama’s time in office. A movement rose up. A movement that has the potential to transform the United States as profoundly as the abolition of slavery and the dismantling of Jim Crow. The movement for black lives ascended as a response to an endless roll of videos of police shooting African American people. The killings themselves certainly were not new, but the widespread dissemination of the images of state-sponsored violence against American people was. The Chokehold is far from the only marker of racial inequality but for African American men it is the worst. In a few years, white people will be a minority in the United States. This certainly does not mean that white racial dominance will end, but the demographic shift will make the racial hierarchy plain, and ultimately more vulnerable.
Everyone who has a stake in the future of the United States must be concerned about the Chokehold. You could say that the Chokehold threatens our democracy, or, alternatively, you could say that the Chokehold is constitutive of our democracy. Either way it is destabilizing. While politicians worry about ISIS and al-Qaeda, legal violence by our own government poses a greater threat to the future of this country—and certainly to individual black men—than illegal violence by terrorists.
The political scientist Lisa Miller has described the United States as a “failed state” for African Americans.18Indeed some activists involved in the movement for black lives speak of their work as creating a “Black Spring,” similar to the Arab Spring movements that attempted to bring democracy to some Middle Eastern countries.19
We face a crucial choice. Do we allow the Chokehold to continue to strangle our democracy and risk the rebellion that always comes to police states? Or do we transform the United States of America into the true multiracial democracy that, at our best, we aspire to be? This book is about the urgency of transformation. All of the people will be free, or none of them will. “All the way down, this time.”20
This post is for you peeps who still read anything longer than 300 words.
The book's introduction which is below hits one right between the eyes with revelatory probity and makes one reflect upon uncomfortable truths that even the victims of "choke hold" don't want to think about. Download and read the entire peerless manuscript.
Download Book
Code:
https://mega.nz/#!qs0j3KBK!Zi_S-fsK0KOToNNDcwaQeNnapKTnK2t5wQbOUhHfabwINTRODUCTION - BROKE ON PURPOSE
Here are some of the things that police did to African American people, during the time of the country’s first African American president: in Ferguson, Missouri, arrested a man named Michael for filing a false report because he told them his name was “Mike.” Locked up a woman in Ferguson for “occupancy permit violation” when she called 911 to report she was being beat up by her boyfriend and the police learned the man was not legally entitled to live in the house. Killed a seven-year-old girl in Detroit while looking for drugs at her father’s house. Shot Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston after stopping him for a traffic infraction. Severed Freddie Gray’s spinal cord in Baltimore. Unloaded sixteen bullets into seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald while he lay cowering on a Chicago street. Pushed a teenage girl in a bikini to the ground in McKinney, Texas. Shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland within two seconds of seeing him in a public park. Pumped bullets into Philando Castile in Minnesota while his girlfriend livestreamed it on Facebook, with her four-year-old daughter in the backseat.1
If the police did these things to African Americans during Barack Obama’s presidency, what should we expect in the era of Donald Trump? During the 2015 protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, Trump tweeted, “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!”Trump has called police officers “the most mistreated people in this country” and suggested that activists who protest police violence should be investigated by the Justice Department.2
Cops did not treat African Americans better when Obama was in office, and they will not treat them worse during the era of Trump. The ascendency of Donald Trump might embolden a racist cop, but racist cops are not the main problem. Most police officers are decent working-class men and women with no more racial hang-ups than teachers, doctors, or anyone else. As we will see, the crisis in law and order in the United States stems from police work itself rather than from individual cops.
There has never, not for one minute in American history, been peace between black people and the police. And nothing since slavery—not Jim Crow segregation, not forced convict labor, not lynching, not restrictive covenants in housing, not being shut out of New Deal programs like Social Security and the GI Bill, not massive resistance to school desegregation, not the ceaseless efforts to prevent African Americans from voting—nothing has sparked the level of outrage among African Americans as when they have felt under violent attack by the police.3Most of the times that African Americans have set aside traditional civil rights strategies like bringing court cases and marching peacefully and instead have rioted in the streets, destroyed property, and attacked symbols of the state have been because of something the police have done. Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Charlotte in 2016—each of these cities went up in flames sparked by the police killing a black man.4
The problem is the criminal process itself. Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do. Virtually every objective investigation of a U.S. law enforcement agency finds that the police,as policy, treat African Americans with contempt. In New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco, and many other cities, theU.S. Justice Department and federal courts have
stated that theofficialpractices of police departments include violating the rights of African Americans.5The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, detain, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people. It is the moral responsibility of every American, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why.
The work of police is to preserve law and order, including the racial order. Hillary Clinton once asked a room full of white people to imagine how they would feel if police and judges treated them the way African Americans are treated.6This is not a difficult question in a country that was founded in response to an oppressive occupation by armed agents of a remote government. If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution. The purpose of this book is to inspire the same outrage about what the police do to African Americans, and the same revolution in response.
A chokehold is a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die. The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something about the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.”7The truth is any human being will suffer distress when pressure on the carotid arteries interrupts the supply of blood from the heart to the brain. Many police departments in the United States have banned chokeholds, but this does not stop some officers from using the tactic when they perceive a threat. The New York Police Department officially bans the practice, but it receives approximately two hundred complaints a year from people who say they have been placed in chokeholds.8The NYPD regulations did not prevent Officer Daniel Pantaleo from tackling Eric Garner and tightly squeezing his neck for approximately twenty seconds. Pantaleo had been trying to arrest Garner, a forty-three-year-old black man, for selling cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island. Garner denied he’d been breaking the law, and when Pantaleo came at him with handcuffs, Garner moved his hands away and said, “Don’t touch me please.” Pantaleo jumped on Garner’s back, grabbed his neck, and pushed his head facedown against the pavement. Garner said “I can’t breathe” eleven times, and then lost consciousness. He was transported to a local hospital, and died an hour after arriving at the hospital. The New York City Medical Examiner’s office ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide, caused by “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Officer Pantaleo was not charged with a crime and remained a sworn officer of the NYPD.9As far as the district attorney of Staten Island was concerned, what Officer Pantaleo did to Eric Garner is what you call police work.
The United States Supreme Court decided a case about chokeholds that tells you everything you need to know about how criminal “justice” works for African American men. In 1976, Adolph Lyons, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was pulled over by four Los Angeles Police Department officers for driving with a broken taillight. The cops exited their squad cars with their guns drawn, ordering Lyons to spread his legs and put his hands on top of his head. After Lyons was frisked, he put his hands down, causing one cop to grab Lyons’s hands and slam them against his head. Lyons had been holding his keys and he complained that he was in pain. The police officer tackled Lyons and placed him in a chokehold until he blacked out. When Lyons regained consciousness, he was lying facedown on the ground, had soiled his pants, and was spitting up blood and dirt. The cops gave him a traffic citation and sent him on his way.
Lyons sued to make the LAPD stop putting people in chokeholds. He presented evidence that in recent years sixteen people—including twelve black men—had died in LAPD custody after being placed in chokeholds. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, theU.S. Supreme Court denied his claim, holding that because Lyons could not prove that he would be subject to a chokehold in the future, he had no “personal stake in the outcome.” Dissenting from the Court’s opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the Supreme Court, wrote:
It is undisputed that chokeholds pose a high and unpredictable risk of serious injury or death.
Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer’s arm and the force applied, the victim’s voluntary or involuntary reaction, and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim’s larynx, trachea, or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as “do[ing] the chicken,” in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung.
Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer’s arm and the force applied, the victim’s voluntary or involuntary reaction, and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim’s larynx, trachea, or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as “do[ing] the chicken,” in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung.
A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.
The Chokehold is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed. It is the process by which black lives are made vulnerable to death imposed by others and death that comes from African Americans themselves. The Chokehold works through overt state violence—such as the way communities of color are policed—and slower forms of vulnerability, such as the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the gentrification, all over the country, of inner-city neighborhoods formerly occupied by poorpeople of color, and the way that when a black man chooses to kill somebody, nine times out of ten it is another black person.
The Chokehold does not stem from hate of African Americans. Its anti-blackness is instrumental rather than emotional. As slaves built the White House, the Chokehold builds the wealth of white elites. Discriminatory law enforcement practices such as stop and frisk, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs are key components of the political economy of the United States. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s stigmatized overt racism, the national economy, which from the founding has been premised on a racialized form of capitalism, still required black bodies to exploit. The Chokehold evolved as a “color-blind” method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation. The rap group Public Enemy said, “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.”11Actually all it takes is the Chokehold. It is the invisible fist of the law.
The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland—where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans—is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system issupposedto work. The problem is not bad apple cops. The problem is police work itself. American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.
The Chokehold is how the police get away with shooting unarmed black people. Cops are rarely prosecuted because they are, literally, doing their jobs. This is why efforts to fix “problems” such as excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail. If it’s not broke, you can’t fix it. Police violence and selective enforcement are not so much flaws in American criminal justice as they are integral features of it. The Chokehold is why, legally speaking, black lives don’t matter as much as white lives.
The whole world knows that the United States faces a crisis in racial justice, but the focus on police and mass incarceration is too narrow. We might be able to fix those problems the way thatwe “fixed” slavery and segregation, but the Chokehold’s genius is its mutability. Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crew bled into the new Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform—we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew. This book uses the experience of African American men to explain why.
As a tool of oppression, the Chokehold does not apply only to African American men. The dynamic of blaming a victim of subordination for his or her condition, and then imposing a legal and social response that enhances the subordination, is familiar to many out-groups in the United States. This book explores the Chokehold through the lens of “policing black men,” but there might be any number of other lenses.
A far from exhaustive list might include:
Chokehold: national security profiling of Muslim Americans
Chokehold: surveillance of poor women receiving government benefits
Chokehold: the appropriation of Native American land
Chokehold: exploitation and deportation of undocumented Latino workers
Chokehold: police and private violence against transgender women of color
Chokehold: sex trafficking of Asian women
BLACK + MALE: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH
In focusing on African American men, I want to avoid a mistake that some others have made before me. To observe that the experiences of black men are determined by their race and gender does not mean that their plight is worse than that of some other groups, particularly African American women. Intersectionality is the concept, first articulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw,that describes how people experience subordination differently based on their multiple identities.13Nobody is just male, or Asian, or bisexual; people have different group identities, and all those identities are relevant with regard to their life experiences. For example, a Latina woman and a Latino man might be subject to different kinds of stereotypes based on their race, ethnicity, and gender identity.
Intersectionality is about the difference that gender makes for race, and that race makes for gender. It helps us understand the ways that racism and sexism particularly confront women of color. In the words of a seminal text in black women’s studies: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.”14Intersectionality explains why males are frequently perceived as standard bearers for the race in a way that females are not. Things that happen to African American men are identified as “black” problems in a way that things that happen to African American women would not be. Even if some of the same things that happen to African American men happen to African American women, men are likely to receive the most attention.
At the same time, intersectionality creates a space for black male–focused analysis. Lynching, for example, was gendered as well as raced; it was not enough to hang black men from trees, but their penises had to be cut off as well. Black women also have been terrorized, rape being one obvious example, but we should remember that black male victims too have been punished for gender as well as race. Chapter 3 makes this point about stop and frisk. It is not hard to imagine that discrimination against black men sometimes might take different forms than discrimination against black women, and that the combination of race and gender discrimination might impact African American men’s educational achievement, participation in the labor market, and risk of incarceration in particular ways. The problem is that black male issues are likely to be prioritized, to the extent that any racial justice interventions are prioritized. The important #SayHerName campaign has lifted up the experiences of women of color withthe police. For example, after excessive force, sexual assault is the most common complaint against the police, and African American women are the most likely victims.15This problem has not received the attention it deserves, which is not uncommon for issues that disproportionately impact black women. At the same time, intersectionality teaches us that gender matters for black men as well, and that ignoring gender undermines the chances of making things better. The challenge for any project that focuses on African American men—whether a black male achievement program such as former president Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative or a book such asChokehold—is to highlight the particular ways in which black men are stereotyped without marginalizing the experiences of African American women in the process. I am dedicated to that process throughout these pages.
THE CHOKEHOLD AND BLACK MEN
Let’s keep it real. Many people—cops, politicians, and ordinary people—see African American men as a threat. The Chokehold is the legal and social response. It contains a constellation of tools that are used to keep them down—including a range of social practices, laws, punishments, and technologies that mark every black
man as a thug or potential thug. The state—especially the police—is authorized to control them by any means necessary.
One of the consequences of the Chokehold is mass incarceration, famously described by Michelle Alexander as “the New Jim Crow.”16The Chokehold also brings us police tactics such as stop and frisk, which are designed to humiliate African American males—to bring them into submission.17But the Chokehold applies to all African American men, not only the brothers who are locked up or have criminal records. It is insidious enough that it clamps down on black men even when there are no cops around. The Chokehold demands a certain kind of performance from a black man every time he leaves his home. He must affirmatively demonstrate—to the police and the public at large—that he is nota threat. Most African American men follow the script. Black men who are noncompliant suffer the consequences.
If you are the parent of a black boy, one of the most important decisions you make is when you tell them about the Chokehold. You don’t want to scare them, but the Chokehold is literally a matter of life and death.
The people who carry out the Chokehold include cops, judges, and politicians. But it’s not just about the government. It’s also about you. People of all races and ethnicities make the most consequential and the most mundane decisions based on the Chokehold. It impacts everything from the neighborhood you choose to live in and who you marry to where you look when you get on an elevator. I like hoodies but I won’t wear one, and it’s not mainly because of the police. It’s because when I put on a hoodie everybody turns into a neighborhood watch person. When the sight of a black man makes you walk quicker or check to see if your car door is locked, you are enforcing the Chokehold.
You are not alone. As an African American man, I’m not only the target of the Chokehold. I’ve also been one of its perpetrators. I’ve done so officially—as a prosecutor who sent a lot of black men to prison. I represented the government in criminal court and defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force. Many of those prosecutions I now regret. I can’t turn back time, but I can expose a morally bankrupt system. That’s one reason I wrote this book.
But before I get too high and mighty, you should know that I’ve also enforced the Chokehold outside my work as a prosecutor. I am a black man who at times is afraid of other black men. And then I get mad when people act afraid of me.
Other times I have been more disgusted or angry with some of my brothers than scared. I read the news articles about “black-on-black” homicide in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. I listen to some hip-hop music that seems to celebrate thug life. And as a kid I got bullied by other black males. Sometimes I think if brothers would just do right, we would not have to worry aboutpeople being afraid of us. I have wondered if we have brought the Chokehold on ourselves.
In order for African American men to have better outcomes, they have to learn how to navigate the system. The Chokehold is “the system” for black men. It is their government, far more than the president or the mayor. Still, most people have no idea how the Chokehold works. This book will break it all down.
Maybe you are just an ordinary person who is sometimes afraid of black men. You’re not a racist, but you need to know the facts. This book is going to give you the information you need, including real talk about the kinds of crimes that African American men commit and the ways that we as a society can respond.
This book is also for people who want to understand how the criminal process really works—from an expert who has been deep in the system on all sides. In my years as a prosecutor, I learned some inside information that I am now willing to share. Some of it will blow your mind, but I don’t feel bad for telling tales out of school. I was on the front lines in carrying out the Chokehold. Now I want to be on the front lines in helping to crush it.
My creds to write this book don’t come just from my experience as a law enforcement officer, my legal training at Harvard, or the more than twenty years I have spent researching criminal justice. I learned as much as an African American man who got arrested for a crime I did not commit—during the time that I served as a federal prosecutor. I didn’t beat my case because I was innocent, even though I was. I beat my case because I knew how to work the system. In chapter 7 I share those tips. If you have caught a case, it may be information even your own lawyer has not provided you. When the law is stacked against you—and because of the Chokehold, it is—you have to do whatever you can to fight back.
The Chokehold is perfectly legal. Like all law, it promotes the interests of the rich and powerful. In any system marked by inequality, there are winners and losers. Because the Chokehold imposes racial order, who wins and who loses is based on race.
White people are the winners. What they win is not only material, like the cash money that arresting African Americans brings to cities all over the country in fines and court costs. The criminalizing of blackness also brings psychic rewards. American criminal justice enhances the property value of whiteness.
As the Chokehold subordinates black men, it improves the status of white people. It works as an enforcement mechanism for keeping the black man in his place literally as well as figuratively. Oh the places African American men don’t go because of the Chokehold. It frees up urban space for coffeehouses and beer gardens.
But it’s not just the five-dollar latte crowd that wins. The Chokehold is something like an employment stimulus plan for working-class white people, who don’t have to compete for jobs with all the black men who are locked up, or who are underground because they have outstanding arrest warrants, or who have criminal records that make obtaining legal employment exceedingly difficult. Poor white people are simply not locked up at rates similar to African Americans. These benefits make crushing the Chokehold more difficult because if it ends, white people lose—at least in the short term. Progressives often lambast poor white people for voting for conservative Republicans like Donald Trump, suggesting that those votes are not in their best interests. But low-income white folks might have better sense than pundits give them credit for. A vote for a conservative is an investment in the property value of one’s whiteness. The criminal process makes white privilege more than just a status symbol, and more than just a partial shield from the criminal process (as compared to African Americans). By reducing competition for jobs, and by generating employment in law enforcement and corrections, especially in the mainly white rural areas where prisons are often located, the Chokehold delivers cash money to many working-class white people.
The Chokehold relegates black men to an inferior status of citizenship. We might care about that as a moral issue, or as anissue of racial justice. But honestly many people will not give a damn for those reasons. African Americans have been second-class citizens since we were allowed—after the bloodiest war in U.S. history and an amendment to the Constitution—to become citizens at all.
In the standoff between African Americans and the police, U.S. presidents have sided with the cops. For the last fifty years, every man who has been elected president has taken steps during his campaign to send a message to voters that he will be tough on black men. Richard Nixon watched one of his campaign ads warning voters about urban crime and exclaimed, “This hits it right on the nose. It’s all about law and order and the damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there.” Ronald Reagan complained about criminal fraud by “strapping young bucks” who used food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Campaigning for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter spoke out against forced integration, saying, “The government should not take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood just to establish their intrusion.” George H.W. Bush ran a television ad featuring William Horton (Bush’s campaign called him “Willie” although Horton never went by that name), a black man who raped a white woman while on a furlough from prison in Massachusetts. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said, “By the time we’re finished they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
President Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man who was so intellectually disabled that when the correctional officer came to take him to the death chamber Rector set aside the pecan pie he had ordered for his last meal because he was “saving it for later.” George W. Bush, soliciting the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, complained about Justice Department investigations of police departments, saying as president he would support cops “rather than constantly second guessing local law enforcement decisions.” During his first presidential campaign, Barack Obamamocked “gangbangers,” saying they are so lazy they ask “Why I gotta do it? Why can’t Pookie do it?” During the 2008 campaign, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute people for rape—even of a child. Obama criticized the decision, indicating that he would have voted with the conservative justices AntoninScalia and Clarence Thomas to uphold the death penalty in such cases. As a former law professor, Obama had to know that historically African American men were virtually the only people executed for rape. Donald Trump, answering a question in a debate with Hillary Clinton about what he would do to bridge the racial divide, said, “We need law and order. If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country. . . . We have a situation where we have our inner cities—African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.”
Once in office, the presidential record has been mixed. Bill Clinton endorsed a crime bill that created federal “three-strikes” laws and allocated $16 billion to build new prisons and put thousands of police officers on the street. But George W. Bush frequently spoke of the importance of showing compassion to people returning to their communities after serving time in prison. Barack Obama went further than any president before him. He was the first sitting U.S. president to visit a prison. He commuted the sentences of more than 1,300 inmates, far more than any president before him. Obama established the “President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing” and his Justice Department investigated over twenty local police departments.
But in the main, the U.S. criminal process carried on during the Obama era was as violent and harsh as ever. The policing commission’s recommendations were largely ignored by the nation’s 18,000 police departments. Obama’s commutations were only a fraction of the people who were potentially eligible; his first pardon attorney resigned in protest because the White House did not give her the resources to properly consider all who were eligible.
But something significant did happen during Obama’s time in office. A movement rose up. A movement that has the potential to transform the United States as profoundly as the abolition of slavery and the dismantling of Jim Crow. The movement for black lives ascended as a response to an endless roll of videos of police shooting African American people. The killings themselves certainly were not new, but the widespread dissemination of the images of state-sponsored violence against American people was. The Chokehold is far from the only marker of racial inequality but for African American men it is the worst. In a few years, white people will be a minority in the United States. This certainly does not mean that white racial dominance will end, but the demographic shift will make the racial hierarchy plain, and ultimately more vulnerable.
Everyone who has a stake in the future of the United States must be concerned about the Chokehold. You could say that the Chokehold threatens our democracy, or, alternatively, you could say that the Chokehold is constitutive of our democracy. Either way it is destabilizing. While politicians worry about ISIS and al-Qaeda, legal violence by our own government poses a greater threat to the future of this country—and certainly to individual black men—than illegal violence by terrorists.
The political scientist Lisa Miller has described the United States as a “failed state” for African Americans.18Indeed some activists involved in the movement for black lives speak of their work as creating a “Black Spring,” similar to the Arab Spring movements that attempted to bring democracy to some Middle Eastern countries.19
We face a crucial choice. Do we allow the Chokehold to continue to strangle our democracy and risk the rebellion that always comes to police states? Or do we transform the United States of America into the true multiracial democracy that, at our best, we aspire to be? This book is about the urgency of transformation. All of the people will be free, or none of them will. “All the way down, this time.”20