This message was brought to by a diversity of tactics both deliberate and not. Excerpt: We told President Obama that we were not the “People’s Spokespeople”. We told him that we had neither the power, positions, nor desires to stop the eruptions in the streets and that they would continue until a radical change happened in this country. We told him that we had no faith in anything, church or state. We told him that the country was on the brink and that nothing short of major capitulations at all levels of the government to the demands of the people could prevent it. Straight talk like that. We asked for the president to utilize his pulpit to spark the governmental culture shift that this movement calls for. We told him to end the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, to end federal funding to police departments with histories of discrimination, harassment and murder. We beseeched President Obama to invest in community-based alternatives to policing and incarceration and challenged him on the lack of data on the state’s systematic and underreported killings of unarmed black and Latino people. He listened. Intently. He responded passionately. He agreed with many of our points and offered his take on the current State of the Union. He presented the reforms that have dominated the discourse in the hours after our meeting. He cautioned us against demanding too big and stressed gradualism. He counseled us that the wheels of progress turn sluggishly and reminded us of the progress that got us to this point: a room full of black folk in the Oval Office. He asked for our help, harkening back to his organizing days when, in the streets of Chicago, the cries of the people shifted the landscape. We debated on the power of the vote and the lack of faith in the Democratic party. We did not budge. Only time will tell whether the stories of Renisha, Tamir, Mike, Eric, John, Aiyanaand others will shape the course of history in policy, practice or culture. No one knows whether our “impactful” meeting with this nation’s first black president will yield any change that people in Ferguson or Flint or Chicago can feel. It is yet to be seen, though one can hypothesize, what will come of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. We walked out of that meeting unbought and unbowed. We held no punches. There was no code-switching or bootlicking; no concessions, politicking or posturing. The movement got this meeting. Unrest earned this invite, and we can’t stop. If we don’t get what we came for, we will shut it down. President Obama knows that and we know it. No meeting can stop that.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 22:31:07 +0000
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