13:03:55 captioning is standing by.  and a necklace of orange seeds with a larger silver heart.
13:04:14 On behalf of the nearly 10,000 members of the American Anthropological Association, the largest association of anthropologists in the world, I want to thank you for joining us.
13:04:29 We also would like to recognize that this is LGBTQia pride month, and we honor the accomplishments you have made for and in your community.
13:04:36 As we get started, I'd like to give you a brief overview of how we will function today.
13:04:42 You have logged into the Zoom format.
13:04:46 You should see the category of Q&A.
13:04:49 For most of you, it will be next to the chat link.
13:05:01 Throughout the webinar, you can type your questions into the Q&A section for our panelists, and Jeff Martin, the director of communications for the American Anthropological Association, will read your question.
13:05:09 You may indicate that there is a particular panelist to whom you would like to address your question.
13:05:12 Otherwise, it will be open for any of our panelists to respond.
13:05:21 Please, don't post your questions in the chat as we want this to be open for conversation between you and the panelists.
13:05:27 Again, Q&A for questions.
13:05:32 We have muted each attendee.
13:05:43 If you have any problems, go to AAA or Nell with your problem, both you should be able to see on your chat.
13:06:02 In addition, as I did just a minute ago, each panelist will begin my describing themselves to assure equitable access and closed captioning by subtitle or captioning is available on the closed caption link at the bottom of your screen.
13:06:11 I would like to knowledge that we have more than 600 people in attendance today, many of whom are not anthropologists.
13:06:19 For that reason, I'd like to clarify who we are and why we have having to say about racial and police brutality.
13:06:28 We planned this webinar several weeks ago while George Floyd was still alive and working toward his tomorrow.
13:06:38 What we're to discuss hasn't changed, but it has increased in importance and relevance as this has become a part of many more people's lives.
13:07:07 Our discipline, the discipline of anthropology, focuses on the human condition, the archeological, biological, ethic logical, and bilinguist research, and documents how people experience their world through their voices and their lives that we share with you today.
13:07:13 Our four panelists have dedicated their research lives.
13:07:37 They will start the webinar by talking for about four minutes how racism and the policing of black bodies became a part of our mundane lives, how it has grown since its inception, why protest is critical to our communities, and to reimagine public safety program could look like.
13:07:51 Dr. Shanti Parikh is an associate director of African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
13:08:00 Dr. Kalfani Ture is an associate professor at criminal justice at Quinnipiac who has served as a police officer.
13:08:10 Dr. Donna Auston is a writer, activist.
13:08:25 Dr. Avram Bornstein, interim Dean of studies, and the leadership program at John J. College at CUNY, the University of New York.
13:08:39 Dr. Parikh.
13:08:56 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  I am an African-American woman with an Indiana father, so mixed, wearing a beige jacket, leopard skin top, and a painting in the background, and I'm a family.
13:08:59 a female.
13:09:09 Since I'm the opening speaker, I'm going to do a little bit of framing in the historical moment we are learning.
13:09:13 Thank you for organizing this event and inviting me.
13:09:26 You had great insight into this, because as Ramona mentioned, you organized this before the unfortunate death of George Floyd and before these particular protestors.
13:09:28 protests.
13:09:32 It's an honor to be on this panel.
13:09:39 Much of my talk will draw from work I've been doing in the.
13:09:47 St. Louis region, before and after the Ferguson uprising, so I'll begin.
13:09:53 It's an understatement to say the current moment is the urgency of black death.
13:10:06 The urgency of anthropology to show how the art of narrative are the forms and ways we can respond.
13:10:25 Urgency in black deaths in the enduring legacy of anti-black police brutality and the state-sanctioned impunity that rewards black violence.
13:10:57 But we see the urgency of black death in the COVID-19 pandemic, and its grossly disproportionate rates on black communities, to the devastating economic toll to loss of income and the terrorism for the quick, vulnerable, and quarantine, and this is not just in the household but the role that black people play in the service of care in the community.
13:11:37 The symbolism of "I can't breathe" should not be lost on us as anthropologists, who like metaphor, whether it's a knee to the neck or the COVID knee to the lungs, but racism that drives both of the above, but these two familiar paths of black death -- extrajudicial killing and medical death -- have been extremely generative.
13:12:01 It has seen a cross section of protestors from around the world from safely sheltering at home, a racial privilege denied to people such at Brie -- Breonna Taylor and others.
13:12:19 Reminded of the painful video of George Floyd's slow death and his uniformed killer, the outrage over the continued suffocating grip of white supremacy has been brewing for some time.
13:12:28 The Ferguson uprising of 2014, Eric Gordon, and again, the lines that we're seeing this year.
13:12:48 The rapid speed in energy with which police reform, racial justice, and defund movements have been advancing in the past few weeks makes the task of this seminar, and of our discipline, intimidating, urgent, but exciting.
13:12:57 This movement can be called, to borrow Trump's phrase, the real operation warp speed.
13:13:04 But instead of finding a vaccine for a disease, we are finding a vaccine for another disease.
13:13:09 The anti-black killing and its connection to white supremacy.
13:13:40 Like others, I argue that anthropology has much to bring to the table, and I co-edited an article about Ferguson, one is in diagnosing the problem and the second one is paying attention to community responses and how community defines needs.
13:13:43 So first, diagnosing of the problem.
13:13:54 Placed in its historical, colonial origin, we see that the police killings and brutality of black people is not the result of a broken system over police.
13:14:39 Rather, it is precisely how the police was intended to serve the colonial state, to protect white male property and discipline and contain expendable but valuable black bodies, by roaming the Southern plantations in northern states and runway slave to a remove of federal troops, troops ensured the freed blacks and the KKK, black communities too long have experienced police and brutal and often oppressive.
13:14:52 This relationship in St. Louis and elsewhere, the 19th and 20th century, using St. Louis as a case study, I'll rapidly discuss this.
13:15:10 This is important for us to understand how policing unfolds in each locale to maintain certain social orders and how anthropologists, our contribution is to determine how solutions unfold within that.
13:15:51 So using St. Louis as a case study, we saw zoning covenant deeds and localized policing were used to enforce segregation and fragmentation or what we call the anti-black -- today it is 100 different -- many of which control their own budgets, police, judicial systems, schooling, and all of this ensures very dark racial segregation known as the divided city.
13:16:36 Black citizens become trapped, to use a term from Colin Powell, and black enclaves surrounded by white areas, such as Ferguson, and black bodies are constantly required to move in and out of white spaces and thus the heavy policing of black bodies, and all of this in the post-Ferguson DOJ report which found that even though Ferguson itself was 67% black, they made up 85% of the police staff, 95% of the citations, 90% of police force.
13:16:47 In 95 cases of jaywalking citations, which is what brought Michael Brown into contact with his killer.
13:16:48 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  You're right.
13:16:53 All of this is really important, and we'll let you come back to that in just a minute.
13:17:00 But Dr. Ture, I wonder if you could talk to us from your perspective.
13:17:02 >> KALFANI TURE:  Sure.
13:17:09 First of all, I want to thank the AAA for hosting this, the conversation that we're having now.
13:17:49 I want to step back and say thank you to Shanti for giving us some context of this problem and helping to historicize it, I'll truncate my remarks, I am wearing a white sleeved dress shirt with a black vest and I have a beautiful visual background by way of the internet which shows me on the 30th floor with a nice window view.
13:18:04 I'm an associate professor of criminal justice at Quinnipiac, as stated, and I'm a former police officer, and I started my career off with Georgia State police.
13:18:26 I translated to Roswell police department, and ended with the Chakatee police department (phonetic), as I would develop my own interventions to improve policing.
13:18:41 But I also went into law enforcement because I wanted to make an immediate impact on the black and brown communities that law enforcement is often situated in, and I'll talk about that in just a second.
13:18:46 So I want to keep my opening remarks really short.
13:19:18 The first thing I want to say, for those of you who are anthropologists, I strongly encourage you to read the association of black anthropologists on policing and they've been at this work for a long time, since its inception, the association of black anthropologists have been not only looking at police violence, but more broadly, addressing the issue of white supremacy.
13:19:19 So I want to knowledge that.
13:19:27 And there's a global statement about this, that I encourage you to sort of visit that statement.
13:19:32 The second thing is, I want to talk about policing, just really quickly.
13:19:37 I'm concerned about policing and race in employment.
13:19:45 My particular research area involves looking at the intersections of public safety, law enforcement, and police.
13:20:13 And in particular, I ask, the police decision-making when they encounter African-Americans and Latinx males, but limitalty, an interstitial space between the black-and-white communities or a space that is undergoing Gentrification.
13:20:17 And what involves police decision-making?
13:20:38 I assume critical areas in that decision-making is the professional training, the sort of biographies of officers, as well as the informal and socialization that happens in law enforcement, which too often tends to invalidate all the things we should be doing in a proper way.
13:21:09 If there's anything I want to mention here, as a police officer who actually have gone to three police academies and particularly tough because once I went into law enforcement, I immediately recognized that I was too black for the group, but because of the history of state-sanctioned violence to police officers, I also became too blue for the black community.
13:21:25 So I, in fact, sat in this subliminal space that allowed me to gain really great insight into policing and its tensions and its possibilities for black community.
13:21:52 But when I went into law enforcement and I would begin to undergo my own training in law enforcement, some things I just want to point out here to give some kind of context, I spent maybe eight hours training around police relations, more than 300 on defensive tactics and use of force.
13:21:55 So there's already this impolite.
13:21:57 imbalance.
13:22:02 It didn't take 9/11 for us to learn about policing.
13:22:06 Law enforcement are trained as warriors.
13:22:10 That's the way the training is instituted.
13:22:11 So there's an issue.
13:22:29 There's a sort of tendency of a lot of folks to serve to violence, versus to draw more peaceful ways of regarding issues, breaches of civility, as we would call it in law enforcement.
13:22:54 So I'm going to stop there and then sort of entertain questions as they come in the discussion, but in closing, I also want to be able to state in the discussion why I think it's going to be an uphill battle to reform police officers and why it might be appropriate to just totally dismantle them and start from the ground up.
13:22:57 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you, Dr. Ture.
13:23:02 That's an important conversation we will come back to.
13:23:07 Dr. Auston, can we ask you to describe yourself and move to the next discussion.
13:23:12 >> DONNA AUSTON:  Welcome, everyone, thanks for joining us for this conversation.
13:23:15 I am Donna Auston.
13:23:18 I am an African-American female.
13:23:25 I'm currently wearing a white blouse and a matching white head wrap.
13:23:50 And I am -- my background is in a virtual library that does not actually reflect the living conditions, the physical space that I'm currently in, but it's really exciting, lots of books and a desk and a chair with fluffy pillows.
13:24:50 What I want to do is pick up where Dr. Shanti and Dr. Kalfani left off, and that is sort of thinking about, briefly, how I approach the problems of -- my research is actually concerned with looking at the ways that black Muslim communities in the US have been particularly impacted by virtue of sort of -- anti-blackness and Islamophobia with the Black Lives Matter movement, and one of the things I want to do to give a brief discussion around two interrelated questions, and what is what is the na
13:24:54 And the second question is, what are possible solutions, right?
13:25:00 So my research, per se, is not -- it's not an ethnography of police officers, per se.
13:26:07 It's actually more sort of focused on looking at the ways that the communities that I study responded through their activism and their efforts to directly combat various forms of violence that they experienced or they had of law enforcement, both at the local level, state level, and foremost at the top of everyone's mind at the moment, you know, the murder of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, these all involve shootings, suffocations, and -- I did a fair amount of research in Baltimore ddie Gr ride
13:26:26 Where he was put in the back of the paddy wagon and driven around because he's not restrained, because he's not wearing a seat belt, he died from literally having his spine broken.
13:26:55 So there's all of those various ways that actual violence, what most of us understand as physical violence, but also, surveillance and with communities, this is one of the ways, and also, black communities experience this as well, that black communities are not always looked on, right?
13:27:22 Cameras in their community, CDE, countering violent extremism, which ostensibly is friendly interventions, but picks on certain people from certain backgrounds as being subject to extra violence and invasive policing practices.
13:27:48 So there's a whole spectrum of problems and behaviors and practices on the part of the law enforcement that demonstrate Dr. Parikh's point, when she said, this is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
13:28:09 So we have to consider the gap between the conversations that are at least currently happening in particular, in the public, in the mainstream public, between reform and practices that, you know, as a collective, are leading more towards dismantling and abolition, right?
13:28:15 And there are different categories of responses that I think it's important to sort of think about how they are different.
13:28:26 I want to very briefly try to share something on my screen that's from the last week or so that illustrates this.
13:28:31 If you'll give me one quick second.
13:28:33 To pull this picture up.
13:28:34 Okay.
13:28:52 So this is a picture of a street in Washington DC that was recently -- last week.
13:29:10 On the right-hand side, you'll see the letters in bright yellow paint that is used to typically divide the line between the line and the street is used to spell out Black Lives Matter.
13:29:24 This was actually done by the City of DC, the mayor of DC, Mayor Bowser commissioned this to be right by the White House.
13:29:43 On the one hand, indicative of, you know, our response of -- that -- on the surface indicates some sort of commitment on the part of the municipal authorities in Washington DC to do something different with regard to law enforcement excess.
13:30:06 And then the second half of the photograph, you can see, you can see or, you know, also, in yellow paint, but that part of this graphic that's painted in the asphalt was added a couple of days later by activists in Washington DC.
13:30:33 Because the gap between what -- what the government or municipal government was offering in terms of redress to these problems and what many of the activists on the ground are looking for, and that's how visibly, you know, dividing the line between reform and abolition, right?
13:30:43 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  I think the defund the police, the question of what we mean by defund is what I think a lot of people have -- and I want to come back to this.
13:31:03 I want to give Dr. Bornstein a chance working with the New York police department into police training and what that might mean, but I want to come back because one of the things we need to talk about, what are we asking folks for.
13:31:17 How can we make this a more known topic, more than what people are speculating for.
13:31:21 Dr. Bornstein.
13:31:32 >> AVRAM BORNSTEIN:  I'm a 51-year-old white guy, bald, blue shirt, sitting in my home in New York City.
13:31:45 I will return to faculty and directed a criminal justice program at John J. College that we've had for 20 years.
13:31:49 Let me make four points and you can certainly back.
13:32:10 Points 1 and 2 are about possible transformations that come out of my work on the ground in the -- with NYPD at our college and then macro colleges, and the anthropologist likes to do both of that, on the ground and big-system stuff.
13:32:15 I want to talk about policing, and you hit an important point about training.
13:32:32 Police are in 1500 different departments, state, extreme variations, they've seen the way that Kalfani spoke around that, the warrior, and the imbalance that he spoke about.
13:32:51 Here in New York City, recruits spend six months training before they hit the streets, and field training, which could be good or horrible and different kinds of in-service over the years around use of force and auto theft and all kinds of things.
13:32:57 Applicants don't need a college degree.
13:33:19 Now, at John J., we have a different kind of model in policing, that would make it other professions in which you need at least a two-year degree to be like a constable in England, and to make it more professional.
13:33:25 20 years ago we started what I thought would be a pilot program leading towards this.
13:33:30 The bad news is, it remains a pilot program after 20 years.
13:33:37 The good news is, it remains, and we have a lot of experience in creating higher education and a different model.
13:33:41 So the first is just to rethink police education.
13:33:49 The second point is defunding the police, a good engine to think about how workers are organized.
13:33:59 About 66% on average, two-thirds of police work is being on patrol and answering calls for service.
13:34:04 Fire and E.M.S. have pretty defined jobs.
13:34:12 Police get called for music, public intoxication, rowdy teenagers, elsewhere.
13:34:17 Much of this could go else where with the underlying support of police.
13:34:28 We might want to fund detectives to do investigations or warrant squads or things like that, but patrol could be completely reconsidered.
13:34:37 But that depends on real services with housing and business and business development and all those other kinds of areas of society.
13:34:43 There are some amazing models or these things out here, but they're really the exception, not the rule.
13:34:49 So the second part is to rethink patrol, the main draw on the resources.
13:35:01 Third, if we step back, take a more macro look, policing and criminal justice systems are part of social and economic systems with the meanings all connected together.
13:35:14 And so, for example, you know, stop and frisk, here in New York, which many people have heard about, driven by a new economic model based on finance, real estate, and entertainment.
13:35:25 So point 3 is really that a real police reform requires a significant shift in the domestic and global organization of racial capital.
13:35:33 You can't change one part to these larger structures to which that is really just an appendage.
13:35:45 Fourth and finally, in 70 years of policing in New York City, there have been major marches, 1850s, 1890s, all through -- some successful and some not.
13:36:04 Today's reform movement, the one I'm sketching out here sounds a lot like one put forward in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reform in 1964, something like the Marshall Plan that had saved Europe.
13:36:08 It would minimize the problems of poverty, like street crime.
13:36:24 But four years later it was opposed by the election of Richard Nixon who rose to power on a law and order platform, need to be heavily policed to make the world safe for disdevelopment.
13:36:26 for business development.
13:36:30 So before it was born, it was declared a failure.
13:36:36 Now, 50 years later, law and order seems to be on the ropes, but not defeated.
13:36:44 We can recreate the organization of police work, but they are linked to larger systems that also must be a part of any kind of reform.
13:36:44 Thank you.
13:36:49 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you, so much, Dr. Bornstein.
13:37:02 You were talking about the way that space and place really enact a kind of violence against the black body as it is.
13:37:07 Could you finish that thought and take us where you were going to?
13:37:15 We need to open up to the Q&A, and thankfully, we have a bunch of questions for all of you, but I want to make sure we come back to that.
13:37:16 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  Yeah, thank you.
13:37:37 So one of the things that is going on in the national conversation is something that -- Avri just alluded to, how to ground the police in a community-based approach versus one that still does need to get situated elsewhere.
13:37:58 And one of the things we've been thinking about here is, what does that mean to have these local sort of more localized levels of community policing, when, indeed, the community level is what has been oppressive to black people, because it's so fragmented?
13:38:13 So that's one of the ways as an anthropologist can really help to partner with communities and understand how do some of these national recommendations sort of unfold locally, depending on what's going on.
13:38:33 So can I just share, instead of talking about it, can I share two slides that I think are part of the conversation that's going on, that I'm sure we will touch upon, and one of them -- if I can get the -- okay.
13:38:38 One of them is this, which is the 8 can't wait.
13:38:49 This emerged, the 8 Can't Wait emerged out of Ferguson, and I'm sure we'll be talking about this.
13:39:08 These are being implemented locally, and the next one that Donna talked about the abolition approach and divesting and reinvesting in the community.
13:39:16 So this is very much how do we redistribute wealth in an area that is so fragmented.
13:39:24 >> KALFANI TURE:  If I could interject quickly, one aspect about this.
13:39:31 In my work, and also my research, my prior research is around actually displacement for public housing.
13:39:53 What I concluded is there is certainly a spatiality for police brutality, and we don't look at physical places as an insignificant backdrop in our work.
13:40:05 We under the built environmental, social environment, national environment represent important physical dimensions of identity, what we're looking at.
13:40:28 So what I found is that -- at least what I concluded by way of my own research is that there's this sort of -- in order for white society and the white power structure to be maintained, it must have this contra distinctive place or people or et cetera.
13:40:46 So spatially, then, African-American people or Latinx people, otherwise in this society, they are sort of forced to occupy or live within spaces that represent the contra distinction, the opposite.
13:41:11 So you take public housing, what's referred to as African-American urban ghetto, or (indistinguishable), these are intentional spaces, right, because we don't define ourselves as the -- the white society don't define themselves by who they are.
13:41:13 It becomes a science standard, if you will.
13:41:16 We're defined by who we're not.
13:41:32 So we tie these marginalized people to these spaces and we put polluting industries around them, et cetera, we're basically setting up or establishing that contra distinctive others.
13:41:40 And then we use policing to maintain the boundaries or police in that interstitial space.
13:41:50 So I think it's important for us when we think about sort of this sort of policing issue, we need to think about this sort of connection to race in place.
13:41:56 I'll stop here.
13:41:59 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  That's great.
13:42:01 Thank you.
13:42:05 Donna Auston, was there anything else you wanted to add?
13:42:20 We have a fair amount of questions coming in from the participants, and I just want to say, I apologize if anyone perceives that I was cutting someone off.
13:42:40 We agreed on an amount of time and the reason was to address these questions because there are so many people on it, Shanti, Kalfani, I owe you a sincere apology.
13:42:46 We have so much to share and say, and I want to make sure that everyone feels they're being included.
13:42:52 To the many participants, I apologize if that was the perception.
13:42:59 Is there anything else you want to say before we open it up to folks' questions?
13:43:30 >> DONNA AUSTON:  I think one of the things that hasn't been mentioned, in part where I was going, in addition to sort of considering the whole ecosystem, like policing, right, with, you know, connected to property and real estate and those sorts of connections, I think it's also -- it's vital to sort of think about the ways that policing -- the practice of policing has become increasingly militarized over the course of, you know, several decades.
13:43:32 And this is part of where I was going.
13:43:33 The nature of the problem, right?
13:44:14 Because it includes sort of these individual incidents of brutality, but it includes the fact that police departments have been receiving federal grants of military-grade equipment for quite some time now, and we give a lot of attention to this in the post-9/11 era, but it was happening long before then, particularly in relationship to, you know, initiatives like the war on drugs and the war on terror, right, where black communities and black Muslim communities have in particular been impacted
13:44:46 Not only at the federal level, but local reservations and repercussions, and we saw protests after the death of Mike Brown, the tanks and teargas and the urban police department occupying, not hyperbole, but actually occupying the streets of, you know, of a largely black township, right?
13:45:01 So these questions, I think, are also important, particularly as we begin to talk about what the possible solutions might be, because, yes, we have to sort of think about what it means to -- what it means to provide safety.
13:45:09 And, of course, a part of that is, it's not -- it's not -- in most instances, it's not increased policing.
13:45:12 We have covered that very well.
13:45:21 It's attention to making sure that people have access to food and making sure that people have access to good housing and all of these other things, right?
13:45:34 But it's also thinking about the ways that we have been equipping and authorizing police personnel at the local, state, federal level, right, to really behave.
13:45:42 And we've seen how this has really -- been unleashed in cities across America in the last couple of weeks.
13:45:45 We've seen -- you know, we've seen teargas.
13:45:48 We've seen all of these things happening.
13:46:13 And one of the ways that this is -- one of the ways this is possible, of course, is because, you know, we've allocated the resources at whatever levels of government our funding, our particular police entities, to basically function as paramilitary, you know, forces, that act without, you know, any type of measures of accountability.
13:46:24 Where that has been capable of restraining and keeping -- keeping this weaponry from being deployed on largely unarmed communities.
13:46:27 And that's, I think, a really important part of the question.
13:46:44 Certainly when we start to think about why abolition as a direction for solution becomes something that we actually have to take pretty seriously, because it's not just a problem of an individual officer's training, although that matters, and although that may have some impact.
13:47:10 We're also dealing with something that's a lot more systematic, and quite frankly, much bigger than what an individual officer might do, as tragic of the consequences of those individual actions are and have been, there's also something else here we need to think about.
13:47:45 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  In addition to Donna and the militarization, two other protective mechanisms, the Fraternal Order of the Police or the police union, and then the pair of Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s, which basically gave -- in effect, said that you could use -- police officers can use excessive force, deadly or not, against citizens who are perceived as threatening.
13:47:53 And where the black body is perceived as threatening, that becomes an easy -- as we've seen in these cases, as become the easy defense.
13:48:07 And one of the cases in St. Louis, officer Jason Stekley, the judge used that in his defense.
13:48:17 From what we know, the construction about the -- in the urban drug dealer is likely to be armed with a weapon.
13:48:25 So he himself in his verdict relied on those frozen stereotypes.
13:48:34 So the police, the unions protect police officers, but also, the law and the Supreme Court decision which allows it.
13:48:48 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  There were two reports just submitted over to Congress, and we can make sure they're available to the audience that hit exactly on what you're saying, Shanti, exactly.
13:49:14 One of the big questions that we have, from an anthropological perspective, how can we make a change, to impact policy, how they can begin to empower communities, and how we can have a more dominant voice in this understanding of the fusion of the two.
13:49:36 >> AVRAM BORNSTEIN:  Anthropology is a holistic discipline covers a lot of possibilities to answer that question, and even this panel here, people working on different things, community-based, different things -- I'm working with NYPD.
13:49:39 So there's all different levels of this.
13:49:54 I think that, you know, my own interest has been in the anthropology of work, and then it became anthropology of violence, because I realized how much violence shapes work.
13:50:05 Things like the militarization that Donna and Shanti are talking about, there's aspects of this that are more subtle, and in the organization work, right?
13:50:15 And that we can see, if we're looking closely at the anthropologists.
13:50:21 When we've had a shift in military, in reporting structures with military and police and such.
13:50:35 There were times in New York history where housing police officers and school police officers reported to housing managers and school principals, and they were in the background and the school principal said, come with me.
13:50:36 I give the orders, right?
13:50:38 And that was one model.
13:50:39 And that ended.
13:50:46 And thankfully, in housing and police and schools, started reporting to NYPD.
13:50:55 A totally different model, subject and job and the way that things are shaped, making it a much more militarized workforce.
13:51:08 So the granular level, the way that police think -- that Kalfani is studying about the decision-making process that police are in.
13:51:14 There's multivariable things that I think we all have a part of it, a part of that.
13:51:16 And then, of course, together, we can pull it together.
13:51:28 It seems like at the macro level, we have a lot of agreement here that we're talking about a systemic oppression that's economic and social and political and violent.
13:51:32 And we're all looking at different pieces of it.
13:51:47 >> KALFANI TURE:  So I would just quickly add that, first, you know, I think disciplinary boundaries are blurred ever more every day that passes by, and I think that's a got thing.
13:51:49 good thing.
13:51:57 Particularly African-American anthropologists and my colleagues, we want to help us answer the question.
13:52:48 What I would say is I think is particularly unique about anthropology towards these larger questions about public safety, race in place, privilege culture, what I mean by that, one of the firstethnografers was WB Dubois, and in Philadelphia Negro, he gives us -- to understand people, you have to immerse yourself, the contingencies that they do day to day.
13:52:54 I think as anthropologists we're well suited to that.
13:53:02 We understand the importance of the evolutionary perspective, but also the holistic perspective.
13:53:24 So when we go into these communities, the workstations, whether they be workstations or police academies, local, safe -- we're not just looking at the sort of socialization or professionalization of officers in that location.
13:53:43 We want to understand the jurisprudence around it, and I would add Dred Scott, the Dred Scott decision where the chief justice says -- not too distance from where you are located.
13:54:24 Plessey versus Ferguson, go before Tennessee versus Gardner, I would say when the Supreme Court decided to come up with this law of quasi immunity in 1967 and its most recent decision in 2009, they sort of insulated law enforcement, insulated this culture of violence, insulated white supremacy and this coercive institution that is in this cross-racial world, they relied more heavily.
13:54:29 So from a holistic perspective, to look at (indistinguishable).
13:54:32 I need to look at what the law says.
13:54:33 But I need to look at history.
13:54:39 What do anthropologists -- we see that culture changes over time.
13:54:43 And it changes within sort of interlocking structures.
13:54:51 And so we want to look at culture both historically and what are the institutions that come in and out.
13:55:06 So I think that doesn't get to the answer, but I would say that, you know, ethnography by anthropology is certainly an important part of that solution, how we study the problem.
13:55:27 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  I could would add, I think a role that anthropology has played in a lot of what we do is exposing how public discourse shores up public sentiment and fears and racialization.
13:55:39 Authorities point, the police do that, but then how the American public buys into this idea that if you get rid, if you defund the police, then there's vulnerability of subjects.
13:55:54 A particular -- can I share my screen just to show this one -- I was amazed, and this is what displayed in the local newspaper yesterday.
13:55:59 And if you can see, this came out just yesterday.
13:56:22 So the playing on discourses of fear, this idea of violence, playing on white people's fears, and it was -- it could be a -- already, they're trying to mobilize people, probably because elections are around the corner, and if you vote democratic, this is what's going to happen.
13:56:28 So the attempts to reform police are also caught up in the moment we're in, which is elections.
13:57:00 And now is the critical time, both to -- for anthropologist to put forth in a gender that is tuned to local specificity, that takes into account the communities that are marginalized being overpoliced but also do want a police presence to protect them in other ways, but this counter narrative that's going to try to disrupt or confuse the public imagination of this.
13:57:08 For example, the idea of abolition or reparation that become so politically coded and heated.
13:57:20 The part of our role also is to help disentangle what that means in other ways.
13:57:25 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  And it takes the warrior out of it and puts the caregiver back into it.
13:57:35 That's what a lot of the defunding is about, to move into those areas where we could care for each other and care for our community.
13:57:41 I want you to summarize the questions we have.
13:57:45 We have 44, 45 out there.
13:57:56 I know, Jesse will have to condense them and give an opportunity for the panelists to dive into this.
13:58:09 We have 30 minutes left before we lose our closed captioner, so I want to make sure the folks who have logged on have an opportunity.
13:58:17 I have Jeff started to pull these questions for you to open up a whole conversation.
13:58:58 >> DONNA AUSTON:  Just to add to what anthropologists can do, they already currently function in spaces outside the Eiffel Tower in the academy or are drawing upon their anthropological knowledge and how they're speaking to, actually activists themselves, how they're -- working in government offices, you know, anthropologists are doing a lot of this work on issues in ways we would think of as applied versus theoretical.
13:59:02 So it's important to consider that as well.
13:59:07 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  And please, consider work in the university.
13:59:20 Some need to work in institutions that are employers in the sit at the table with a lot of power.
14:00:18 I think it would be great, the project that -- can we first start by just creating a database of how these different reforms that are being sort of circulated nationally, whether it's the 8 can't wait or the movement for black lives, congressional black caucus, these are platforms being picked up by a lot of localities, and by anthropologist in different locales, can we analyze the next year how these are, one, picked up locally, how they're applied locally, which ones resonate locally, given t
14:00:28 Sort of main -- maintenance of power.
14:00:43 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  One of the great things about this webinar, any questions we don't get to, we will have a chance, hopefully, to address those so they can be accessible to the people so they feel they can be engaged with the conversation.
14:00:46 But to your larger point, Shanti, yes.
14:00:51 We've had a race project that one that has been very instrumental in getting communities to talk.
14:01:17 We've had the task force and a racialized brutality and judicial violence, and we want to move that into the same communities, anthropologists in their communities that can put these kind of things together.
14:01:22 That's one of the things about the webinar, but everybody else is okay?
14:01:28 Just having summarized some of these questions so we can get to these?
14:01:31 >> JEFF MARTIN:  Thanks, Ramona.
14:01:38 I'm a white male with black framed glasses and graying brown hair, graying brown beard.
14:01:40 Too much gray for my purposes.
14:01:47 And I'm the director of communications for the American Anthropological Association.
14:01:56 I'm glad you ended that with what you just said, both, both Donna and Shanti and everyone else.
14:02:25 Some of the questions that I can encapsulate, how do we as university faculty and students, what steps can we take towards minimizing racial bias and subconscious racism in our students, and bring it into K through 12 so it starts when they're younger?
14:02:31 >> DONNA AUSTON:  So I can maybe start to address that.
14:03:00 After Charlottesville, I was there in that particular moment, and it was very short, like 500 words or less, but essentially the main point that was urgent to me, it often will happen in moments of crisis.
14:03:42 We have all of this sort of inward-looking, extension, what are we supposed to do about Charlottesville, also doing that introspective work, perhaps the graduate students that are in your program, maybe that one black graduate student that your program has and taking a hard look at your recruiting, retention, supports for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
14:04:03 It looks like doing work with the academic canons we instruct, we completely ignore, erase, you know, which works and which thinkers are considered essential and important to shaping the discipline and the disciplinary practices.
14:04:17 You know, so we have canons to use the commonplace for this sort of thing, white men that we rely upon to tell us everything we ever needed to know about the human experience.
14:04:22 It looks like looking at the hiring practices in your department.
14:04:34 It looks like not waiting for the moment of crisis to have conversations about race, to teach about race, not to marginalize scholarships based on race.
14:05:08 I know as someone who -- I worked on race within the academy, you know, when I started my program in 2011, it was like, you know, sort of -- I guess peak-post-racial moment where a lot of people thought race was passe and a parochial field of study and we didn't need to do that anymore, not prioritizes scholarships on race at that particular time.
14:05:11 When there's a crisis, we have to look at this again.
14:05:13 It was always important.
14:05:15 It was always relevant.
14:05:27 It was always key to understanding some of these other things to understand some of the other understand that we understand to be epistemological and priorities.
14:05:34 Because it shaped everything about the culture and world that we live in, particularly in the US, right?
14:05:40 Even though it's different in other parts of the world, but white supremacy is a global phenomenon, right?
14:05:58 It's not just something that exists in the U.S. the particulars, whatever, tomato, toe-maut-o, but we support not ever a Band-Aid after the fact.
14:06:21 I don't know about you, but I have been inundated with solidarity statements from my academic department and university and that office and this office and from Starbucks and from -- you know, from everybody who now decides that, oh, my God, we have to pay attention to this, and we need to sort of do something.
14:06:37 What is it that you are going to be doing in a sustained and, you know, sort of pointed, identifiable set of action steps to redress how racism operates in whatever your domain is, right?
14:06:55 And trust me, whatever field you work in, whatever profession you're in, whatever your institution is, whatever your company is, right, you have racism structurally, institutionalized within your domain.
14:07:03 Figure out how to fix it and don't look away when the crisis reseeds.
14:07:06 cedes.
14:07:23 And thinking of it as perpetual, not when this because of the way that racism works, has an option to look away from it when it's not, you know, in the streets of their downtown.
14:07:36 So I think for us, to really take these problems seriously as -- they're not -- they shouldn't be addressed as a trending matter, not in a superficial way.
14:07:53 There has to be real sustained paradigm shifts that guide the way we think about what to do with these intractable, long-standing, stubborn, obstinate problems.
14:07:54 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you.
14:07:58 Shanti, do you have something to add to that?
14:08:11 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  Always, as well, keeping at the foreground the way in which the visibilities and our rallying around the violence against black bodies become very gendered.
14:08:29 So how violence is -- against queer subjects, nongender-conforming subjects, which is very brutal, at rates that are extraordinarily, you know, unacceptable, become invisible.
14:08:31 But also, black women.
14:08:42 If you think historically about the movement against anti-black violence, it was -- it's an image of the black male.
14:08:53 The lynching, emmitt Till, Rodney King, Trayvon.
14:08:58 And the say her name, all violence is gendered.
14:09:10 But we have to understand, then, as occurring and needing to be addressed simultaneously, not addressing one and shifting the other one.
14:09:11 And understanding that.
14:09:22 And the serenade was -- a part of that movement was about the police going and treating a woman with a mental illness in a very violent way.
14:09:28 How her black womanness got read as the angry black woman.
14:09:35 So instead of addressing her mental illness, criminalizing that which preexisted.
14:09:42 So in addition to looking at race, look at sexuality, gender, and keeping that in the foreground.
14:09:45 That's what was so powerful about the Ferguson movement.
14:10:04 It was a movement that was led by young queer bodies of color, whether cis gender, nonconforming, and they kept that front and center.
14:10:08 >> KALFANI TURE:  I would say, really quickly, we start to think about solutions.
14:10:10 So it seems like the problem is multiple.
14:10:18 In an acute sense we have to worry about law enforcement and racialized violence.
14:10:23 But in the smaller sense, we haven't addressed the issue of white supremacy.
14:10:33 And I would like to strongly encourage the listening audience to take a look at the AAA statement, the most recently on police violence.
14:10:38 It gets to -- outlines some important steps, disciplines.
14:10:50 So like Donna says that, you know, we tend to think about out there and think about the interventions that we will sort of craft or develop for out there.
14:11:00 We don't think ways of anthropology has in the past continued to uphold white supremacy.
14:11:11 This is an institution that we were serving most anthropologies would say they have little orientations, and they would -- the process (indistinguishable).
14:11:39 But, again, when we sort of take a bird's-eye view of this, we find out the progressive and so-called liberal are identifying just as problematic with regard to viability of black lives, the violence that black people experience day to day, but it's physical in the grotesque ways, whether the silence in society, all of these sorts of violence.
14:11:44 It's not always the grotesque forms of violence.
14:11:46 It's a continuum.
14:11:53 They would say that they support this cause and they're -- their heart to be here.
14:12:03 But in many ways, this is a misunderstanding of the ways in which white supremacy supports even those with good intentions.
14:12:17 It's not a dichotomous relationship between good or bad, but we all are faced with white supremacy, and if we don't think about it consciously, we don't even name it.
14:12:20 It becomes about naming it.
14:12:27 When we talk about racism, we automatically assume that we're talking about black people.
14:12:34 If we revert to gays and talk to whiteness, people get fragile.
14:12:35 We don't do that.
14:12:42 But to answer the question, you know, anthropology has to first look at in-house.
14:12:45 And honestly do so.
14:12:57 And then we can provide the proper interventions for policing and some of the other sort of manifestations of white supremacy, whether it be racism, sexism, et cetera.
14:13:05 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  Anthropology has been great at defining terms and the language that we use that is specific.
14:13:20 So white supremacy, anti-blackness, and those sorts of rhetorical shifts impact how people think about it.
14:13:24 Just calling it race, it became this neutral thing.
14:13:42 So that's a role we could play is really help creating a language, a precise language that can become a natural part of how we talk about it, but that's precise, that identifies a particular problem.
14:13:44 >> JEFF MARTIN:  Okay.
14:13:44 Thank you.
14:13:51 It's interesting how you are addressing many of the questions, just through your discourse, just through your conversations.
14:13:53 You're covering everything.
14:14:06 Here's another question, and this may be possibly geared -- it will be geared to all of you, but Avram Bornstein particularly.
14:14:33 Can they talk about larger policing and what anthropologists were -- kneeling on the next was part of the Palestinians, so what about policing?
14:14:36 >> AVRAM BORNSTEIN:  That's a natural entry for anthropology as well.
14:14:51 Your example -- my work, you know, for many years has been occupied territories with Palestinians, the impact of the occupation of Israeli violence on everyday life.
14:15:11 And you're absolutely right that there's a shared technology from, you know, pressure-point type of stuff to the kinds of architecture that's being used to the software, the kind of stuff that Donna was talking about, the militarization, that's shared training that goes across the world.
14:15:16 But this is, you know, this is not really a unique thing, right?
14:15:19 This is a part of the history of policing as well, right?
14:15:33 That what was an original experiment to control the Irish, you know, in the English occupation of Ireland, you know, was adopted to control the Irish in New York City and Boston.
14:16:14 So that kind of global level of sharing and the exporting of -- and New York has been one of the biggest exporters of police, you know, rhetoric and police organization and Giuliani, who has been in the news so much with President Trump, the guy made a fortune selling his consultancy work to people all over the world about how to use geomapping, stop and trip -- geomapping systems of crime control that ended up giving -- controlling black areas of town, dark areas of town.
14:16:18 In Rio, right, or in Johannesburg.
14:16:32 So this kind of global reach, not to mention that the very systems that we're talking about, the exploitative systems that we're talking about are global in nature.
14:16:54 The same -- blackness, racism, white supremacy, we're talking about in the United States, allows for the exploitation of resources around the world, whether it's labor in Bangladesh or resources in the Middle East or something like that.
14:16:57 It's all a part of the global system.
14:17:18 And that's something that anthropologists have spent a good deal of time studying, how policism have been exported and imported and the racism that's been reverberated around the world.
14:17:25 It's powerful what the white supremacy ideology has infiltrated different parts of the world.
14:17:49 You know, there's some great material on the genocide in Rwanda, and there's this whole white supremacy involved with Desmond Tutu, that it's kind of shocking in a way that that has infiltrated, that has infiltrated the globe as well.
14:18:02 >> KALFANI TURE:  There's a wonderful book out, how counter insurgencies.
14:18:08 I can't remember the author's name, but he's at Johns Hopkins University.
14:18:19 He's talking about, we didn't just learn from society or police in Germany or other parts of the world, but we've also been training police around the world.
14:18:24 Post-9/11, we were training a lot of law enforcement at the global level.
14:18:32 In both tactics of using force and also just surveillance.
14:18:42 It's a wonderful book, and I think it gives a sort of comparative treatment to police training globally.
14:18:56 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  The relationship between the emergence of very militaristic, entrenched, brutal police forces with the global economy.
14:19:25 So that's the impetus behind a lot of it, South Africa, and I move to my research, Africa, the black bodies to confined spaces, whether it's the homelands or at the mines into protected -- you know, basically racial apartheid but for the extracted piece as well as Rwanda and securing who has access to resources.
14:19:49 Probably one of the worst places in the world right now is The Democratic Republic of the Congo and extraction of very critical resources used for our cell phones and the like and the importation of weapons, for the exportation of resources.
14:19:55 So also, the tide with the global economy and extraction.
14:20:00 Same thing we see in St. Louis.
14:20:01 >> JEFF MARTIN:  Okay.
14:20:07 Next question is, actually, from an economic student at San Diego state.
14:20:18 I'm curious because it seems like issues of incarceration, police brutality, are tied to low-income community.
14:20:25 Racist correlated, but it seems that class is more significant variable in understanding these.
14:20:31 Can you talk about the connection between race and class in the context of these issues?
14:20:38 Is it important to address issues of racism without class antagonisms?
14:21:14 >> DONNA AUSTON:  One of the answers that I give to this question, because it comes up a lot, when discussing these types of issues, not just policing, but say, something like environmental racism, for example, and I always like to start with reminding people that black people in the United States and the Caribbean, in South America, literally started our journey in this part of the world as property.
14:21:19 So like black people, are literally capital, right?
14:21:27 So it is absolutely impossible, in my opinion, to separate race from class.
14:21:39 Had a race-based economic system that actually built wealth on, you know, on the sale and extraction of labor from black people in the Western hemisphere.
14:21:44 But also, under the colonial order, various parts of the globe.
14:22:01 What Shanti was saying about global extraction, officially, we're like post-colonialism, allegedly, but that was -- the people who brought ships here were worked as, you know, extract resources from the places that they lived in.
14:22:04 And this continues to this day.
14:22:18 So at that point, it's -- when I get this question, I have to admit, I'm not picking on the questioner at all, but it is a bit frustrating, because a lot of times we do -- it's not one or the other.
14:22:19 It's always both.
14:22:23 And so I think it's very important for us, and it continues to be the case.
14:22:36 So, for example, if you look at the race gap in the US, right, race and gender have everything to do with, you know, with wealth and class mobility, right?
14:22:51 If you are a black woman earning pennies on the dollar to what a white man makes just because of your identity, how is it possible to separate race from class and gender and some of these other categories, right?
14:23:35 When we look at practices in the US where racism has often been tied to specific economic practices, such as red lining, you know, preventing black veterans returning from war from being eligible for loans and grants and other financial means of assistance under the GI Bill, whether you're talking about school segregation where black people were legally and often violently excluded from educational opportunities, which is, in many ways, has been one of the primary means of economic class mobili
14:24:03 If I can't actually attend schools or if they are inferior, go back to Plessey versus Ferguson and some of these earlier cases that established segregation as the legal, like, law of the land in many cases, and, of course, it's continued in sort of, you know, these -- you know -- sorry.
14:24:07 What is the word I'm looking for?
14:24:10 Sort of transformed, right, sort of ways.
14:24:13 We don't have Jim Crow anymore.
14:24:19 Brown Versus Board of Education was supposed to have ended school segregation.
14:24:26 But we know from the data, in most places in the US, schools are still highly segregated.
14:24:37 I know New Jersey where I live, which is in the North, right, it's not a part of the Jim Crow belt historically, we still have some of the most segregated schools in the country.
14:24:52 And so like all of these things that actually contribute to people's ability -- and this is -- and I could go on, they're predatory lending schemes that disproportionately impact communities of color.
14:24:56 I mean, it's like, you know, because we have all day.
14:25:08 We could do a whole webinar on the ways that economics is profoundly and primarily shaped in a lot of ways by race, gender, and other sorts of social identity.
14:25:12 So these things, in my opinion, are very much inseparable.
14:25:25 >> AVRAM BORNSTEIN:  In our discussion, someone threw out the word on everybody's lips right now that you were describing, intersectionality, so there's a certain intersection between these types of identities.
14:25:39 I just want to make one sort of addition to that, and that -- clearly, the racial system, you know, has this intense organizing factor in terms of class systems.
14:25:40 But they're intekting.
14:25:42 intersecting.
14:25:43 They're not identical.
14:26:20 And that racist fierce, cultural fears of the other, in any dimension, to the Israelis and Palestinians, there's an excellent opportunity of those things but a dynamic of racial fear and white supremacy that operates beyond exploitation, even, that has a dynamic completely on its own, that is -- has no economic rationality to it, and it cannot be reduced -- that it is irrational in a certain economic way.
14:26:39 So although some people can be opportunistic and completely exploit these racism and racial fear and racial other, it has a dynamic that can also just destroy the ability to make any profit whatsoever, in multiple time frames that we could look at that.
14:26:48 So I think we should allow some of the momentum, in a sense, or social power.
14:27:10 >> JEFF MARTIN:  In the remaining time, it doesn't look like much, but I want to get to the culture of policing again, if I can, and the thought that, you know, some people said there are rogue cops with no backup, there's a culture of policing, the training and where it all begins and goes beyond that.
14:27:19 When it comes to reforming police education to require a two-year degree, how would it be vetted?
14:27:34 I have seen some of the classes in community college, it tends to be racist, sociological data that people of color are inherently criminal.
14:27:46 So how would this be a solution if before they even get into the community, they're seen people of color as nonhuman, in need of surveillance and order?
14:27:50 >> AVRAM BORNSTEIN:  I guess I'll jump on that because I spoke about education.
14:28:03 There's no question that the higher education in the United States has been an instrument to support white supremacy since its beginning, always has been.
14:28:16 It's also been a vehicle to counter white supremacy and we're very proud of the mobility we bring to people of color at CUNY who have moved through the economic system -- the educational system.
14:28:24 And so I think that, for sure, it depends a lot on what education can happen.
14:28:28 I think we need to have an accredited type of education.
14:28:33 We can say the same thing about counselors and school teachers.
14:28:43 So they have had, in their accreditation process, they have -- they have metrics that look at how does the profession address these issues.
14:28:46 And not everybody does it well, right?
14:28:50 But it's a self-conscious kind of thing.
14:28:57 Now, justice is much different than counseling or K through 12 education, but that's a potential direction.
14:29:10 That becomes a part of -- you want to have an accredited two-year degree for four-year degree, you have to at least try to address benchmarks.
14:29:13 Is it a fool proof system?
14:29:26 Absolutely not, but it can be a progressive forced in this, that we with advocating here for anthropology, and we know it could be racist.
14:29:33 It has taught people about cranial sizes and those kinds of things for plenty of years.
14:29:42 One thing about police culture, though, you touched on the warrior stuff, so I'm not going to come back to the militarization.
14:29:46 But there is a double side to this, right, a contradiction.
14:29:54 Police, you know, they don't perceive themselves in this perspective, right, of being warriors against people.
14:29:56 Good people, citizens, and such like this.
14:30:00 They see themselves defending everybody, right?
14:30:08 Every good person gets their defense, and -- that's the -- that's what they want to see themselves as, right?
14:30:09 The defender of the neighborhood.
14:30:25 And coming into the poor, oppressed, black neighbors neighborhoods, and I might be a white guy from long Island, but I see myself as that.
14:30:29 , no matter how ludicrous it may be.
14:30:41 It's completely corrupted by racism, but I think the values and the democratic policing, no matter who you are, you can call a cop and get somebody to come deal with your problems, right?
14:30:44 And cops want to believe that about themselves.
14:31:08 So that's something a part of it that can be tapped, let's put it that way, and encouraged, and we need, like good anthropologists to expose them to the ethnocentric racism to protect good people.
14:31:23 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  And we need to step up and teach the classes in our criminology programs, in the policing programs, where we're seeing this thing.
14:31:31 How can we as academics really begin to address those on our campuses, how do we get our campus police involved?
14:32:07 And I think there comes a point where it says, we are trying to have these kinds of conversations, and we need to go to the faculty Senate and say, let's create requirements, and we are fortunate in San Diego State that we have that mandate now as a part of our curriculum, you the Senate passed that all these programs have to have a course -- a series of courses, actually, have to take at least one course to get into the policing of black bodies.
14:32:23 So this is something we can do as individuals and as departments and as faculty and work with anthropologists to really make that happen.
14:32:24 Go ahead.
14:32:43 >> DONNA AUSTON:  If I could just add, really quickly, part of what also, I think, is a component of the culture of policing is, of course, education, training, that sort of thing, but it's also sort of what police are allowed to do and get away with.
14:33:06 And there's a culture that extends beyond immediate police departments and it stems into legislature and it extends into support system and extends into, you know, some of these other -- some of these other systems that are sort of responsible for making sure that, you know, somebody, you know, holds police accountable.
14:33:17 And because that's been severely lacking or weak in most cases, most of the officers are not even charged formally for killing people.
14:33:26 It's very can I have to sort of, you know -- to sort of expect that the police are going to police themselves.
14:33:40 And there has to be, you know, yes, I think there are things that we can do in our classroom and whatever, that actually are very important in helping people to see issues differently.
14:33:49 It's one of the reasons I like to teach, because I like to have my students learn the process of, you know, being exposed to other perspectives and that sort of thing.
14:33:58 But at the same time, you know, and I'm -- I'm speaking now primarily as a black woman.
14:34:29 You know, who happens to be an anthropologist, but everything in my experience, you know, and however many years I've been alive, I won't tell you how old I am, but more than a few, the police, they don't have any incentive to rein in behavior unless they're motivated.
14:34:45 Dr. Martin Luther King said a man may not make a man -- a law may not make a man love me, but it could keep a man from lynching me.
14:34:55 There has to be some level of accountability, taking away the ability, you know, in this case, you know, one of the ways to do that is through defunding, right?
14:34:59 Not funding police so that they are able to be armed to the teeth.
14:35:51 So that every single -- sort of a contradictory messaging, right, that we're saying, you should get this type of training, and, again, it may help individual officers, but I think it has limits, because, you know, black people, you know, this or that, and put the destructive, murderous weaponry in their hands, what is the messaging we're telling police officers to have restraint but give them the tools they need in order to do the job?
14:35:59 It's hard to sort of expect, I think, that they will not -- why do I have all this fancy equipment?
14:36:01 It's for use, right?
14:36:18 So that's one aspect, like thinking about this as, you know, there are, there are a lot of different approaches and I think have to be simultaneously enacted that help us get this problem under some sort of control.
14:36:21 >> KALFANI TURE:  So there's a lot of points raised.
14:36:28 First, you can't train someone who doesn't want to be trained.
14:36:32 In other words, they can go through the motions in the police academy.
14:36:43 I can tell from you the academy I attended, you have a multiple choice test at the end of some instruction block, but you will receive the answers.
14:36:46 So you can't train someone who doesn't want to be trained.
14:36:52 And second of all, there are a lot of different structural things that invalidate the training.
14:37:07 I spent 16 hours learning domestic violence only to have another academy recruit tell me, what did that guy do to that guy?
14:37:09 See that invalidates the training.
14:37:15 And see how the D.A. works with the police officers, they come to the police department to investigate that issue.
14:37:21 So there's this incestuous relationship with the people who should in fact hold them accountable.
14:37:37 And then there's this sort of real sort of philosophies, whatever, whether it be quasi-judicial or other things that protect them.
14:37:43 Bad policing is well insulated.
14:37:51 I've always been for taking police academies and putting them on college campuses.
14:37:52 Here's why.
14:37:57 You can have bad pedagogy and a bad professor in the classroom.
14:38:09 But if we allow them to get certifications alongside in law enforcement, they have a great chance of being exposed to underpinning structure and equality.
14:38:20 More than 16 hours of interpersonal violence or domestic violence, take a semester course on interpersonal violence.
14:38:24 Then have to learn something about the history of policing.
14:38:26 Perhaps, the history of policing and race.
14:38:41 So I've always been a fan of moving police academies to campuses, can't do the firearms training, defensive tactics, learning how to operate an emergency vehicle.
14:38:45 You can do that off campus.
14:38:49 But you're exposed, theoretically, to diversity.
14:39:01 The other thing, when I say you can't train someone that doesn't want to be trained, we have to think about the umbrella, which is wlooits.
14:39:02 white supremacy.
14:39:16 The reason we had the federal 1033 program for the militarization of police officers, because culturally, we as American citizens, also have been accepting the idea of the Second Amendment.
14:39:27 We are a pro-gun country, and at the root of that militarization of police or us as everyday citizens and the Second Amendment is that we fear the other.
14:39:31 We fear the encroachment of the earth.
14:39:40 We fear this equality of the other being in public space in civil society.
14:40:02 So whether as police officers we immediately seize upon these public figures, who may be women or queer, when we see the possibility to apprehend them, we see that as police officers but also as an obligation of everyday citizens.
14:40:13 So one thing we did not discuss is lateral policing, which is seeing everyday citizens as extensions of law enforcement who go out and enforce force.
14:40:26 So you can get Ahmaud Arbery, put him down and kill him, or -- it's not what we imagine.
14:40:27 It's very close.
14:40:33 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  Or the woman who called the police on the birdwatcher.
14:40:42 Arming civilians is the only evidence she had to give knowing how it would be as a black man.
14:40:53 One thing that I found very useful during this is many of these places have black police societies.
14:41:02 That within the police are -- have identified unique structural issues that need to be addressed.
14:41:15 And the ethical society of police in St. Louis where they have already identified specific structural issues that they would like, you know, that they think need to be abolished.
14:41:50 Some of them are removing police departments from the investigative process, making the whistle blower -- very few are within the police because there is such an incentive to not be a whistle blower and punitive measures if you are a whistle blower from within, but making a police officer's record public, as in the Minnesota case.
14:42:18 So there have been groups who have identified and, again, going back to the 8 Can't Wait and going back to the movement for black lives, but many have been useful in thinking about which one of these policies, which one of these recommendations are the right ones to target, depending on the particular situation.
14:42:19 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you so much.
14:42:23 We are really against time.
14:42:41 Dr. Auston, Dr. Parikh, Dr. Ture, Dr. Bornstein, having this conversation with you today is something none of us can walk away from without having changed our lives in some powerful way.
14:43:01 I know we want to talk a little bit about how we can begin to answer the questions that did not get answered and how we can continue to include our amazing panelists as a part of this ongoing conversation as we move forward to not just leave it here, but this is where we pick it up and we run with it.
14:43:02 >> JEFF MARTIN:  Exactly.
14:43:13 One of the things I want to say quickly, this has been recorded and we will make this visible on the AAA YouTube channel, so you'll be able to see it.
14:43:25 I don't know if my boss, Ed, is going to get angry with me right now, but I'm going to talk to him about having a part 2 webinar, because we've only just begun to address this issue.
14:43:31 And out of -- I can tell you, 61 questions, we only asked maybe five or six.
14:43:41 So it's possible, we could have a part 2 and continue this discussion again.
14:43:42 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you.
14:43:58 Thank you so much, Dr. Austin, Dr. Parikh, Dr. Ture, Dr. Bornstein, I think we've lost our closed captioner, so I want to make sure it is accessible.
14:44:02 Let's start planning our part 2.
14:44:34 >> DONNA AUSTON:  Just very briefly, I want to give a final shout-out to ABA, to the Association of Black Anthropologists, because they have been an amazing community of scholars, activists, thinkers, concerned community members in making sure that the discipline of anthropology paid attention to this issue and has been working -- it's also the 50-year anniversary of ABA.
14:44:54 We were supposed to celebrate in St. Louis before Corona sort of put the kabash on that, but they've given me space in my own personal research.
14:45:03 When we think about what models of what anthropology and what anthropologists can do, check out everything that the ABA has done.
14:45:04 They're living it, right?
14:45:07 So I just wanted to sort of acknowledge that.
14:45:12 All of that work from that community here.
14:45:14 >> SHANTI PARIKH:  I echo that.
14:45:19 Kalfani, thank you for mentioning that at the beginning.
14:45:26 Thank you to Kalfani for mentioning this and Ramona for moderating.
14:45:32 >> KALFANI TURE:  I think all of this was fruitful, quite instructive.
14:45:39 I feel a sense of change that I haven't felt in my short life, and I hope that there is some momentum with all of this.
14:45:55 I would just simply add, just echo the point about the ABA, but I want to just note that this is not a conversation for a black anthropologist or black criminologist.
14:46:16 This is a conversation for all of us, POC or black folks have been expected to do the teaching, whether we acknowledge is explicitly or not, but in terms of the interventions, whether it be in the broader society, this is for all of us.
14:46:18 All of our lives hang in the balance.
14:46:33 So it must be white, black, queer, straight, whatever the diversity is, we need to pull it to the able to and all be there.
14:46:39 >> RAMONA PEREZ:  Thank you so very, very much, and we will definitely get back to everyone as soon as we can.