In the hope of doing SOMETHING* re continued racist murders by police, may I present:

A QUICK PRIMER THREAD FOR WHITES WHO CARE BUT HAVENT CONNECTED ALL THE DOTS YET

*(Black folks you don’t owe me labor but if there’s something else specific you’d like me to do I’m all ears.)

Fellow whites who care (because if you don’t care by now, fuck off) - you may have noticed a few data points that seem connected somehow, but you can’t grok the connection beyond “some people suck.”

For example:
•Too many murdered Black folks
•Obvious double standards re use of force on protesters
•Cops you knew in high school were either your bullies or else casually racist
•If you’re Irish or Italian, some vague tie between ethnic identity and support for police

Here’s the connection. In the mid 19th c, labor unions in northern cities were somewhere between social clubs and street gangs. Their primary function was to protect access to employment for Irish and Italian immigrants.

Said immigrants were competing at the time (for jobs that no one else wanted) with free Black people. This competition frequently ended in violence, usually instigated or escalated by the Irish and Italians.

The primarily English/Dutch/German ruling classes saw the benefit of having muscle in the street to oppress Blacks and in so doing keep the working class divided. So they rewarded these immigrants with access to the benefits of white privilege, which theyd previously been denied.

(This is a bit of an oversimplification but I stand by it as a TL;DR. If you want to understand all the dynamics at play I can’t recommend HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE by Noel Ignatiev highly enough.)

(Also, lest it seems like I just hate Irish people, the very first wave of Irish immigrants to the US were largely anti slavery and had abolitionists as prominent community leaders. They felt a kinship with Black Americans as fellow victims of English oppression.)

(The turning of these community leaders against abolition was a deliberate move taken by slave owners and business leaders who depended on slavery. This is also how you square the strong anarchist/socialist tradition of Ireland w reactionary tendencies in Irish-American circles.)

ANYWAY. One group of labor unions that emerged from this dynamic - white privilege in exchange for class treason and anti-black violence - were police unions. So when people say PDs are rotten to the core, this is at least part of what they’re getting at.

This is why I’m highly skeptical about efforts to “reform” the police. I’m not completely beyond hope there (though I understand why many are). But it’s certainly not going to get better if we ignore that history. /End main thread...for now.

(PS #1 - the dynamic I described was primarily in northern cities. In southern cities, police and sheriffs depts evolved out of literal slave patrols. I hope you intuitively understand the problem there.)

(PS #2 - this is not a knock against labor unions generally. I’m a union member. Overall, unions are good and more people should have them. But many current unions emerged from the Great Depression and with a strong socialist tradition. That’s an important distinction.)

(My litmus test for unions is “are you trying to build power for all workers? Or are you trying to hoard power for a predetermined in-group of workers?”)

(ALSO power for workers does not mean impunity from consequences. If members of the Motion Picture Editors Guild were routinely murdering people in broad daylight, I WOULD BE DOING SOME SOUL-SEARCHING.)