OP-ED: DC just passed a draconian crime bill, showing that black faces in positions of power are not enough

Thirty years ago, Congress, under the leadership of now President after which Senator Joe Biden, passed the 1994 crime bill – a bill that became infamous for his disastrous role in the mass incarceration of many Black people.

Today that is the law widely criticized amongst progressives and Black people as an obvious indicator of anti-Blackness Hillary ClintonJoe Biden and each politician considered to support this bill as well heavily criticized. Not enough to maintain them out of the White House (in Joe Biden’s case), but strong nonetheless.

Despite this criticism – and despite making a great show of A Black Lives Matter mural in the sphere and changing the name of the square in the face of the George Floyd protests – Washington city council passed the criminal law This would give the police unfettered power in the town. This includes, but is not limited to:

• have the power to designate any neighborhood as a high-risk area, and once they accomplish that, they’ll stop, search or arrest anyone walking with up to at least one other person
• the suitable to arrest any person wearing any face covering on the police’s sole discretion;
• the suitable to require any person traveling on the subway to discover themselves to the police without lawful reason, regardless of whether the police identified themselves or not;
• the suitable to legally kill suspects during automotive chases;
• the power to review body camera footage before writing a statement; AND
• making weapons a crime – it will develop into a separate crime the moment the weapon touches the bottom.

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how deadly the results of this latest law could be in a country where police have repeatedly killed black individuals with the justification that they thought the black person was armed, legally or not. . Imagine that a law that makes it a crime discourages you from putting your gun down, when keeping a gun in your person could easily be a death sentence from the police.

This laws initially blew me away. Not only is that this why – despite the general public condemnation that followed the 1994 Crime Bill – they determine to introduce one of essentially the most openly draconian, dangerous, excessive and possibly unconstitutional expansions of police powers that will certainly be implemented on a racist basis, but precisely because she was introduced by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser – a black woman.

But then I began pondering seriously concerning the 1994 crime bill and realized that the racist legacy of the law’s effects often overshadows the grim reality that we must seriously reckon with: the bill was supported by many black leaders.

With that in mind, as an alternative of viewing Mayor Bowser in isolation, I see her amongst other Black politicians across the United States pursuing troubling policies. They have exploited their blackness – or, more specifically, the black community’s receptivity to supporting black candidates who present themselves as avatars of black excellence, black success/wealth, and black respectability. However, our community often fails to critically examine how clinging to those myths harms other Black individuals who do not or cannot model themselves after these myths.

Moreover, they provide their blackness as a shield for white individuals who do not wish to be called racists. White voters can thus elect Blacks who promise to police Blacks more rigorously, thus strengthening the racist system without being called racists. If you remember the movie where a white father met his daughter’s black boyfriend, played by Daniel Kaluuya, to speak that he would “vote for Obama for a third term.”

This shield may explain why so many white and black people support and defend District Attorney Fani Willis – the lady famous for bringing RICO charges against Donald Trump, while people conveniently forget that she often abuses RICO charges against Black people.

Willis is identical woman who desired to bring RICO charges against Atlanta public school teachers, refused to prosecute the officer who killed Rayshard Brooksand – although Georgia’s attorney general has filed RICO charges to indict activists protesting the development of a massive police training facility called Cop City – she has not yet brought charges police who shot one of the activists.

This is the curse of representation for its own sake. The fundamental problem is the idea that diversifying racist institutions will change those institutions, when in fact diverse members are required to punish their very own more harshly in order to prove their price and purpose to the institutions they serve.

When you think about the necessities of the cohort to which Mayor Bowser belongs, it becomes easier to discover other members. New York Mayor Eric Adams, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens come to mind.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is a black man, but he can also be a former NYPD officer who seems to discover more with the latter than the previous. Despite a campaign that aired ads targeting the Black community depicting his childhood experiences with police brutality and his desire to develop into a police officer to fight it, Adams is not only liable for restoring stop and friskbut for doing it worse than even in the Bloomberg era, when it was ruled unconstitutional in 2011 because of racist use by New York police against blacks and Latinos.

Since Adams took power, the New York Police Department has detained tens of 1000’s of people 97 percent of people detained are black or Latino. Worse still, Adams not only oversaw the NYPD’s use of stop and search warrants, but he in particular revived and renamed the NYPD unit which was disbanded on account of the disproportionate number of police shootings in 2020 to perform arrests. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Adams.

Meanwhile, just down the road in Philadelphia, Mayor Parker is busy hiring tons of of recent cops, ban and criminalization of ski masksAND also promising to implement the Stop and Frisk function.

And all of this still pales in comparison to Atlanta Mayor Dickens presiding over one of the blackest cities in the country and responding to the demands of those black voters protests against the police brutality they face, which killed 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in 2020 spending $90 million for Cop City– which might cut down acres of forest needed to guard Atlantis from flooding and overheating so cops could learn war tactics to police black voters.

While people rejoice Atlanta as its own Black meccaits politicians routinely ignore i over-criminalize Atlanteans who live in povertyoften arming the RICO charges against themso that they’ll create the looks of a Black mecca for a few wealthy Black individuals who can model themselves on the parable of Black perfection and, by supporting the police state, show that they keep other Black people in line.

It is time for Black people to query Black leadership and reject the concept that it’s enough to have any Black person on the table so long as they give the impression of being the part, or to repeat the myths of Black excellence and respect that harm most of us in practice.

It’s time to ask ourselves which Black people we put on the table, since the plethora of anti-Black laws supported by Black politicians across the country indicate that now we have many individuals representing us, but only a few serving us.