Thirty years ago, spearheaded by now-president and then Senator Joe Biden, Congress passed the 1994 Crime Bill—a law that would become infamous for its catastrophic role in the mass incarceration of many Black people.
Today, the law is so widely criticized amongst progressives and Black people as an obvious indicator of anti-Blackness that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and any politician considered to have supported the law are also criticized heavily. Not enough to keep them out of the White House (in Joe Biden’s case), but heavily nonetheless.
Despite that criticism– and despite making a big show of painting a Black Lives Matter mural on the ground and renaming a plaza amid the George Floyd protests– Washington D.C.’s city council passed a crime bill that would give the police unfettered power in the city. This includes but is not limited to:
- the power to designate any neighborhood they want a high-risk area and once done, they can stop, search, or arrest anyone walking with so much as one other person
- the power to arrest anyone wearing any kind of face covering at the sole discretion of the police;
- the power to demand anyone riding the metro identify themselves to the police for no legally justifiable reason whether the police have identified themselves or not;
- the right to legally kill suspects during car chases;
- the ability to review body camera footage before writing their statements; and
- making it a crime to discard a gun—it would become a separate crime the moment the gun touches the ground.
It doesn’t take too much imagining to realize how deadly the consequences of this last provision would be in a country where police have repeatedly killed Black people under the stated justification that they so much as thought a Black person was armed, whether legally or not. Imagine being disincentivized to put down your gun by this law that makes it a crime, when keeping the gun on you could also easily be a death sentence at the hands of police.
This legislation initially floored me. Not just because– despite the social condemnation that followed the 1994 Crime Bill– they’re choosing to introduce one of the most overtly draconian, dangerous, overbroad and likely unconstitutional sure-to-be racistly implemented expansions of police powers, but specifically because it was introduced by the Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser—a Black woman.
But then I started to seriously think about the 1994 Crime Bill, and I realized that the racist legacy of the law’s impact often overshadows a grim reality that we must seriously reckon with: the law was supported by many Black leaders.
With that in mind, instead of looking at Mayor Bowser in isolation, I see her within her cohort of other Black politicians across the United States with troubling politics. They have capitalized on their Blackness—or more specifically, the Black community’s susceptibility to supporting Black candidates who present themselves as avatars for Black excellence, Black success/wealth, and Black respectability. Yet our community frequently fails to critically interrogate how a commitment to those myths harms other Black people who do not, or cannot model those things.
While people are celebrating Atlanta as some kind of Black mecca, its politicians routinely ignore and over-criminalize Atlantans who live in poverty, often weaponizing RICO charges against them, so that they can create the appearance of a Black mecca for a few wealthy Black people.
Moreover, they offer their Blackness as a shield for white people who don’t want to be called racist. White voters can thus elect Black people who promise to more heavily police Black people, thus empowering a racist system without being called racist themselves. If you recall the movie Get Out, when a white father met his daughter’s Black boyfriend, played by Daniel Kaluuya, he made a point to say that he “would have voted for Obama for a third term.”
This shield could explain why so many white and Black people find themselves supporting and defending District Attorney Fani Willis— a woman being celebrated for filing RICO charges against Donald Trump while people conveniently forget that she’s often overusing RICO charges against Black people.
Willis is the same woman who wanted to bring RICO charges against Atlanta public school teachers, refused to prosecute the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks, and– while Georgia’s Attorney General used RICO charges to indict activists protesting the development a massive police training facility dubbed Cop City– she has yet to charge the police who shot one of the activists to death.
This is the curse of representation just for representation’s sake. It’s the fundamental problem with believing diversifying racist institutions will change the institutions when in reality, the diverse members are required to more harshly punish their own in order to prove their worth and purpose to the institutions they serve.
When you consider the requisites for the cohort Mayor Bowser belongs to, it becomes easier to identify other members. NYC Mayor Eric Adams, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, and Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens come to mind.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams is a Black man, but he is also a former NYPD officer who appears to identify more with the latter than the former. Despite a campaign that ran ads targeting the Black community about experiencing police brutality as a teen and becoming a cop to fight against it, Adams is responsible for not just bringing back stop and frisk, but for making it worse than even during the Bloomberg era when it was found unconstitutional in 2011 because of NYPD’s racist use against Black and Hispanic people.
NYPD has stopped tens of thousands of people since Adams took over, and 97 percent of the people stopped have been Black or Hispanic. Worse, Adams has not only overseen NYPD’s use of stop and frisk, he specifically revived and rebranded an NYPD unit that had been disbanded for their disproportionate number of police shootings in 2020 to carry out the stops. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Adams.
Meanwhile, just next door in Philadelphia, Mayor Parker is busy hiring hundreds of new cops, banning and criminalizing ski masks, and promising to also implement stop and frisk.
And all of that still pales in comparison to Atlanta’s Mayor Dickens who presides over one of the Blackest cities in the country and responded to those Black constituents’ protests of the police brutality they face and that killed 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in 2020 by spending $90 million dollars on Cop City— which would tear down acres of forest needed to protect Atlantans from flooding and overheating so that cops could learn warfare tactics to police those Black constituents.
While people are celebrating Atlanta as some kind of Black mecca, its politicians routinely ignore and over-criminalize Atlantans who live in poverty, often weaponizing RICO charges against them, so that they can create the appearance of a Black mecca for a few wealthy Black people who can model this myth of Black excellence and, by propping up a police state, demonstrate that they’re keeping the other Black people in line.
It’s time for Black people to question Black leadership and reject the idea that it’s good enough just having any Black person at the table so long as they look the part or parrot back myths of Black excellence and respectability that harm most of us in practice.
It’s time to question which Black people we place at the table, because the slew of anti-Black laws being championed by Black politicians across the country indicates that we have a lot of people representing us, but we have very little serving us.