Trigger warning: slavery, lynching, torture/killing of Black people
Resources
The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow Reading Guide (currently free, order a copy)
Documentary film 13th by Ava Duvernay and available on Netflix
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Learn about Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching activist and journalist (linking to Wikipedia here b/c I don’t have a better reference; if you know of a good biography or history of her work, send it to me and I’ll replace this with something better).
Black Lives Matter Founder Alicia Garza explains the Defund the Police Agenda (I don’t like this media outlet, but I do like video of Alicia Garza speaking directly about the agenda vs. major media outlets trying to explain it)
I am using the term BIPOC here which stands for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Here's a great explanation of that term, and why I tend to use it the most, though sometimes (usually for a particular reason) I just say Black or people of color. If you have questions about any terms I use and why, let me know.
Caveat
I am one person. I am not THE expert and I am not even AN expert. I am writing these blogs as an introduction to provide a way into your own learning. I can't cover all the relevant topics - this is just meant as an orientation that can help you decide how you will further your own understanding. Send me questions or comments and I'll do my best to respond.
Overpolicing and criminalization of black/brown communities
I think most people reading my blog would probably agree without any hesitation that slavery was a uniquely dehumanizing and unconscionable practice, and its place in our history is a sin we will have to work for generations to redeem. But it’s important to note a few specific dimensions of slavery and trace how they continue in the current practices of overpolicing and criminalizing Black and Brown communities.
I want to call attention to three aspects of how White Americans practiced enslavement of Black Africans. First, the practice of slavery involved regulating every part of Black African slaves’ lives. Slave owners didn’t want their slaves to learn to read. Their practice of religion was regulated. They often were punished for speaking languages from their home countries or bringing cultural and religious practices into their plantation lives. What happened with their children, who they could marry, etc. Every aspect of their lives was regulated. Second, American slavery was characterized by brutal physical domination, including torture and killing. Finally, slavery at its essence exemplified stealing Black African slaves’ labor. Black African slaves fueled the expansion of the US economy but had no right to be paid for their work. Their productivity enriched white plantation owners, but it also enriched all white people in the sense that the growth of the economy gave us all a chance to earn more. I’ll return to this point in a subsequent post about reparations and action plans.
The very origins of the American system of policing come from enforcing slavery. Some of the first police forces were slave patrols. Their job was to hunt down runaway slaves and return them to plantations where they were enslaved. Think on that. The origin of our police system is defending a system of patent injustice and inhumanity. That’s how this started. (listen to this podcast for a great explanation of this history).
When slavery ended, these three dynamics of slavery continued. How did that happen? First, white communities created systems of debt peonage and criminalization of freed Black African slaves. Freed slaves were arrested and imprisoned for the most minor infractions. They were arrested and imprisoned for being in debt – think on that. Black African slaves had no right to the resources they created, and then when freed, were arrested and imprisoned for incurring debts they couldn’t repay. What makes this worse is that police and prisons in the south had arrangements with White southern plantation owners whereby they leased out prisoners to work for free on the plantations. Some freed slaves were actually put back to work on the very plantations they had been freed from. Michelle Alexander traces this history and her book is one of the definitive explanations of how this system was created. The systems of debt peonage and convict leasing reproduced the regulation of freed slaves’ lives and stealing their labor.
Meanwhile, the rise of lynching created another form of policing of Black bodies and Black communities. Ida B. Wells, a pioneering civil rights leader and journalist, made it her project to document the epidemic of lynching in the south, starting in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. White lynch mobs detained, tortured and killed Black people without due process and oftentimes for the most minor offenses. Black boys and men were lynched for making eye contact with White people, or not ceding the sidewalk to White people they passed by. Any allegation of rape or sexual conduct with White women could get a Black man lynched. These allegations were not proven – there were no legal processes or investigations. Black men were lynched for asking to have their wages paid at work. Whole families were lynched, including children. This is a brutal and ugly aspect of American history. Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the stories of Black southerners who left their homes – late at night, secretly moving north – to escape the threat of lynching. She describes the great migration of Black people to the north and west as a refugee movement, of citizens fleeing persecution in their own communities. She likens this to the movement of central and south American immigrants today, who are fleeing similar and seemingly inescapable threat of violence in search of freedom.
Unfortunately, these dynamics continue up to today. The system of mass incarceration we have in America has filled prisons with BIPOC, many of them arrested because of stop-and-frisk policies that regulate and criminalize the most minor legal infractions. Remember that Eric Garner was killed by police in New York while being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. If that is even a crime, it is a crime of poverty. It doesn’t need to be met with violence or imprisonment. But many of our cities have had policies to detain people in poor neighborhoods for the most minor infractions. The data on this is every clear – those policies have had a disproportionate impact on BIPOC communities.
And many people who sit in jail in America today are there for non-violent crimes that are connected to being poor. Non-violent drug offenses. Writing bad checks. Prostitution. George Floyd – killed while being arrested for supposedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. Middle class people and people with wealth don’t get killed and don’t go to jail for these same offenses. They get good legal counsel, they can afford to pay for bail and restitution, they get probation and community service and drug treatment. And because we have racial wealth disparities – that means it’s more likely white people have the resources to navigate the criminal justice system while people of color get eaten up by it. I urge you to read the tragic and heartbreaking story of Kalief Browder – a teenager arrested in New York for allegedly stealing a backpack. Because his family was unable to pay for bail, he sat at Riker’s Island for three years, much of that time in solitary confinement. Ultimately he was freed, but he died of suicide from the mental health impact of that imprisonment before he turned 20. This is the impact of our system of policing – a criminalized youth, sitting in prison without being convicted of a crime, life ruined and ended.
Free or low-cost prison labor is also a feature of our current system, just like slavery, just like debt peonage.
The moments where we see police captured on film torturing or killing Black detainees – going back to Rodney King and happening over and over again up to today – those moments are the most egregious and horrific culmination of a system that is rotten through and through. For BIPOC communities that I speak to and work in partnership with, you can’t separate that from the daily harassment, the lives lost to the prison system, the constant fear BIPOC people have about any encounter with the police. This is also why the harassment of Chris Cooper in Central Park a few weeks ago was so horrific – because when White people call the police on Black people, too often that is a death sentence or the beginning of torture and trauma.
So what does this mean for yoga?
Well, it might be one of the reasons BIPOC people don’t come to classes at our studios, which are often in the very white communities that overpolice them.
But it also speaks to the question of how we make yoga relevant to the struggles of the communities we care about. Yoga is a powerful tool for healing. But if we are oblivious to the struggles of our students, how can we apply it? If our studios don’t sit in opposition to this practice and thoughtfully and skillfully create safe places for BIPOC students, we aren’t inviting our students into a place that is walking with them.
And we White yoga teachers make too many assumptions about the priorities of need in these communities. I once wrote about how happy I was to be teaching yoga to women in jail, who really need yoga to help them heal (these were my words). A Black activist friend who holds me accountable called me up and shared with me how presumptuous that statement was. She said – yes maybe they need yoga, but you know what else they need? They need safe housing. They need a living wage. They need to live in safe neighborhoods. They need health care. They need to not live in fear of deportation or being incarcerated for the most minor thing. They need to not worry that their kids are going to be killed by the police when they walk out the door.
Yoga is great, and its practice and teaching has changed my life. But let’s get real. We have to be willing to walk alongside BIPOC communities and fight for the changes that give them the same access to resources, opportunity, power and life itself. Yoga is only one part of that picture.
I’m going to write more about trauma in a subsequent post in this series. But I want to mention it here. When unarmed Black men and women are killed today – either by police or by self-appointed vigilantes (like the men who killed Ahmed Aubery or Trayvon Martin), that is a direct line back to the practice of lynching. When Black people experience this – when they see it on the news, when it happens in their community, to their friends or family, the pain it evokes traces back to generations of pain where communities of color, and Black communities in particular, have been targeted by lynching. This is generational trauma. Yoga could be an extremely powerful practice of recovery from this trauma, but only if it is accessible, in the right place, in the right way, and only if taught with trauma-informed pedagogy. If we don’t do that, we have to face the possibility that we make this trauma worse. And perhaps only if taught by members of the same community (I don’t know about that, but it seems possible that that is a necessity for a truly healing practice).
So what can you do? Read. Learn. Take action. Find out about what is happening in your community around the movement to defund the police. This movement isn’t actually about eliminating police budgets altogether, but about shifting resources to invest in communities in ways that prevent violent crime, not police it after the fact. Get active in this fight. Be a voice with your legislators.
I’m here as a resource to you. I’m not the expert, but I am in relationship to experts and I will happily point you to resources that can help you.
Walking this walk with you, with love, gratitude and solidarity forever.
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