The Blue in Racism
December 3, 2019
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What is the blue race? Where do these perceived hate crimes occur? When did this systematic discrimination against this minority begin?
These are the questions that came to me when I heard the phrase, “Blue Lives Matter.” I am sure you would ask the same questions yourself.
Beginning in December 2014, Blue Lives Matter is a social movement that advocates for placing violence against law enforcement officers under hate crime statutes. It was adopted as a symbol for the police service to the United States and to commemorate those who had lost their lives in the force.
According to the Washington Post, the movement also provides a “strong sense of identity and camaraderie,” especially for white officers. This movement’s platform was heavily influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement that began almost a year and a half prior.
In July 2013, police officer George Zimmerman shot a young, black teenager named Trayvon Martin in Florida. Black Lives Matter was the response, a group of people hoping to bring awareness to racism, discrimination, and police brutality against black Americans. Since this movement’s establishment, it has developed international support and helps bring justice to others who have faced the harsh reality of systemic racism in America.
Blue Lives Matter, like All Lives Matter, has been the controversial counterargument. The movement has the power to undermine Black Lives Matter by attempting to equate it. An article by the Washington Post mentions that “police — specifically white police — are telling the world that they are police even when their uniforms are off, part of a targeted community in need of special protection.”
Remarkable respect should be given to the police force for what they do, and crimes against law enforcement should not be ignored. However, it is misleading to call this group a minority as well as to call these crimes against it “hate crimes.” Law enforcement is not systematically targeted, oppressed, and discriminated against, to the same extent as black communities in America have been.
Discrimination stops when an officer removes his or her uniform. However, this uniform, unlike a skin color, can be changed, which fundamentally shows how Blue Lives Matter cannot have the same status as Black Lives Matter.
Along with this, the data shows that crimes against black Americans occur at a higher rate than those against officers. Around 96 deaths of black men and boys occur per 100,000 people, compared to the 39 white men and boys.
Deliberate killings of officers are rare, in fact, in 2014, about 9 officers per 100,000 officers were killed with intention. Officers are deliberately killed at a much lower rate than black Americans.
Blue Lives Matter is just a way for select white Americans to advocate for their status as a so-called minority. The movement is invalid because the police force can never truly be considered a minority. Skin tone, unlike an occupation, is not a removable part of identity.
In the Lower Merion community, we do not see the implications of this argument. Our affluent and privileged neighborhood does not have a high minority population, and it is not heavily regulated by the police force. However, when we go east to Philadelphia, where the communities have higher minority populations, the brutality and the discrimination become reality. There, we see the disparity among police officers and black Americans and can understand why Black Lives Matter precedes Blue Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter is a powerful voice for all black Americans to deal with racism, discrimination, and police brutality. The campaign brings awareness to the challenges minority communities face and helps them gain what we all want: equality. Blue Lives Matter, on the other hand, undermines this campaign by trying to advocate for their own status as a minority, even though they do not face the same racism, discrimination, and brutality. The police do not deserve this attention.
So I ask again: What is the blue race? Because it certainly is not a minority in the United States of America.
Ishika Vyas ‘22 is so excited to write for her second year in The Banner, and she can’t wait to write about social and political affairs all around...
I just wanted to say, good article, but there are some missing facts.
Police Officers, and blue lives matter, do not claim they are a minority or race.
The hate crime bill would make it a hate crime to target police officers or firefighters… which it would be…
Blue Lives Matter once again is not claiming they are a oppressed minority, however that they are often wrongly represented and discriminated against in the news and social media when it comes to shootings and police brutality cases, where they are often treated guilty before innocent instead of innocence before proven guilt. People easily sell out the police and other people who keep them safe on a daily basis, saying things like “why would he shoot someone with a knife?” “why would she shoot someone with a gun they were reaching for if they didn’t have it in their hands?” “why would they shoot someone for reaching in their pockets” “why would they do x” without understanding the reality of police work and the timeframe of a officer down and a shooting, all the while blaming police for response times and fear, and telling them they aren’t being biased against them, while doing that exact thing. Police are heavily criticized and scrutinized, and a justified shooting often ends with calls of systematic racism and discrimination, which it can sometimes be, but more than often, this is also called the same thing in a shooting which is justified. Sure, the person 10 feet away with a knife might not be certain death, but in the 3 seconds or less it takes for them to get to the officer, at that point it’s a standoff. If you haven’t looked into police procedures and policies, and seen why they’re in place, there shouldn’t just be blind criticism of the police and them trying to organize and defend themselves against public opinion.
I already told you, Ishika, but this was a great article and I really love your perspective on this.
If I may, I’d like to respond to Jack Wilson’s comment from December 4th. I do not want to speak for Ishika, and obviously whatever I say does not necessarily represent her takes on the issues. But from my point of view, I want to address Jack’s points while also recognizing that I do not know everything about this issue, and as a white person in an affluent area, this is based on opinions I have heard from people of color and various other forms of research. However, this is all second hand, and if any person of color wants to correct me on a stance I misrepresented, please do so!
I think the point of mentioning how being a policeman isn’t a race is addressing the confluence of the two when you replace “black” with “blue.” Framing police as of equal or greater discrimination and abuse than black people (which you are inherently doing when you decide they need to be stood up for with an appropriation of a race movement) is misleading. When the police go home, they get to take off their uniforms. If they believe they will be treated poorly because they are a policeman, they take off their hat and badge and just be a “normal citizen.” If we say for the sake of argument that police are discriminated against, then they automatically have an advantage over black people, because they don’t wear their identity on their face. They chose this occupation, they chose to subscribe to it, it is a job, not an identity. And if they want to escape that, it is well within their rights to quit.
But black people can’t just quit being black. And most people in America can’t just separate people from their identity, either, like we are so willing and able to do with policemen. People love to say “I don’t see color,” but that really isn’t true. We all have implicit biases. From birth, especially where we have grown up, we have been fed images by the media of violent black people, “bad neighborhoods” that really just mean North Philly black neighborhoods, and a false representation of who black people are. If you think police are poorly represented, try doing a quick google search and see just how poorly black people are objectively treated in the media.
Black people are overrepresented as perpetrators of violent crime when news coverage is compared with arrest rates [but are underrepresented in the more sympathetic roles of victim, law enforcer]. (Entman & Gross, 2008, p. 98, citing Travis L. Dixon & Daniel Linz, 2000)
I would disagree with Jack on the point that police are “often wrongly represented and discriminated against in the news.” As a collective whole, the media and politicians tend to treat police like they do soldiers: “they are valiant heroes who protect our [freedom, democracy, lives, communities, etc] and it is disrespectful to imply otherwise.”
There is a culture in America to abhor violence unless it comes from the police (or military). I would say we automatically assume innocence for policemen, because when people hear about a policeman using force or opening fire, we automatically assume it was what they had to do in that situation to protect us. They are just doing their job.
The black victims of shootings, on the other hand, are always assumed guilty. The news always tries to convict black people as guilty and the shooting justified by talking about drug use and the like. I will quote a piece from Theappeal.org
“Articles routinely focused on the victim’s behavior immediately before his death, presenting it as suspicious, or discussed past arrests, even when they did not lead to convictions. After Tamir [Rice] was killed, the media went so far as to report on his mother’s old drug charge. And after Darren Wilson fatally shot [Michael] Brown in 2014, police emphasized allegations that Brown had tried to steal cigars from a convenience store shortly before he was killed. [CalvinJohn Smile and David Fakunle / Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment]”
The media tries to use these things to make shootings seem justified, so it’s understandable why calls of systemic racism and discrimination might seem outrageous when black victims are painted as dangerous automatically. It’s still not the police’s job to shoot and kill people, though. Protection isn’t about shooting a person you deem as a threat because of a sudden movement or a hairbrush you think is a gun. It should be about de-escalating and using violence as a last resort, and taking out a weapon as a LAST last resort. But more often than not, police see a black person and perceive an immediate threat.
Besides the fact that black men are more likely to be sentenced to death than white men for the same crime, several suggestive experimental studies have shown that subjects in a video police simulation are more likely to “shoot” black men (holding objects that may or may not be guns) than white men under the same circumstances (e.g., see Greenwald, Oakes, & Hoffman, 2003).
This isn’t a twisted view from people who are biased against police. There is statistical evidence to back up the claim that police violence is disproportionally directed at black people, and the assumption of guilt with things like Stop and Frisk and “driving while black” is much more widespread than any assumptions we make about police who kill. This stuff has been in place for a long long time. This is not recent. Who do you think was fire-hosing black peaceful protestors during the civil rights movement? I think it is a stretch to call criticism of that institution “blind.”
Police procedures are not airtight. And if you haven’t looked into that, you should. Police can use “reasonable suspicion” to search and detain anyone, and the definition of that has not been specifically or succinctly defined. Anything can be seen as reasonable suspicion, it is a flexible calling card that police use often. And often, the judge will side with them and say that reasonable suspicion is all you need to justify killing people, too.
I understand why police might be offended by some criticism. They don’t want to be seen as racist or part of a corrupt system. People hate being told that they’re part of a problem. And if you’ve never had a bad experience with a policeman, and you’ve always been fed the idea that they’re here to protect you, (What do you do when you’re unsafe? You call the police), I can understand why you might feel you have to defend them. But not everyone is protected by the police. Not everyone feels safe enough to call them. They may arrive too late, misread the situation, and shoot an innocent person. It’s happened before. This is a perspective that has always been shrouded by the defense of the law enforcement. They are in the position of privilege and power, and by countering empirical claims about police brutality with a defense of the police is missing the point. “Black lives matter” is not saying “Blue lives don’t matter.” It’s saying: “Every year, between 900 and 1,000 policemen shoot and kill people. But only 35 have ever been convicted of a crime, and less than 10 of those police were punished. Black people are disproportionately killed, and many of those people are innocent. But there is clearly a lack of accountability. When an innocent black person dies, the justice system sends us a message: that person’s life didn’t matter. If it did, they would prosecute the person responsible. But way too often, those charges are dropped, and those policemen go on to shoot and kill more people. This is frustrating, painful, heart-breaking, and destructive. So we’re here to say: That innocent person’s life did matter. Black lives are not just something to end and then walk away from it like nothing happened.”