Chokehold Read online

  ALSO BY PAUL BUTLER

  Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice

  © 2017 by Paul Butler

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017 Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  ISBN 978-1-62097-034-8 (e-book)

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  This book was set in Electra LH

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  In memory of my father, Paul Butler

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Broke on Purpose

  1: Constructing the Thug

  2: Controlling the Thug

  3: Sex and Torture: The Police and Black Male Bodies

  4: Black Male Violence: The Chokehold Within

  5: Do the Brothers Need Keepers? How Some Black Male Programs Perpetrate the Chokehold

  6: Nothing Works: Why the Chokehold Can’t Be “Reformed”

  7: If You Catch a Case: Act Like You Know

  8: Woke: Unlocking the Chokehold

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  Broke on Purpose

  Here are some of the things that police did to African American people, during the time of the country’s first African American president: in Ferguson, Missouri, arrested a man named Michael for filing a false report because he told them his name was “Mike.” Locked up a woman in Ferguson for “occupancy permit violation” when she called 911 to report she was being beat up by her boyfriend and the police learned the man was not legally entitled to live in the house. Killed a seven-year-old girl in Detroit while looking for drugs at her father’s house. Shot Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston after stopping him for a traffic infraction. Severed Freddie Gray’s spinal cord in Baltimore. Unloaded sixteen bullets into seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald while he lay cowering on a Chicago street. Pushed a teenage girl in a bikini to the ground in McKinney, Texas. Shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland within two seconds of seeing him in a public park. Pumped bullets into Philando Castile in Minnesota while his girlfriend livestreamed it on Facebook, with her four-year-old daughter in the backseat.1

  If the police did these things to African Americans during Barack Obama’s presidency, what should we expect in the era of Donald Trump? During the 2015 protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, Trump tweeted, “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” Trump has called police officers “the most mistreated people in this country” and suggested that activists who protest police violence should be investigated by the Justice Department.2

  Cops did not treat African Americans better when Obama was in office, and they will not treat them worse during the era of Trump. The ascendency of Donald Trump might embolden a racist cop, but racist cops are not the main problem. Most police officers are decent working-class men and women with no more racial hang-ups than teachers, doctors, or anyone else. As we will see, the crisis in law and order in the United States stems from police work itself rather than from individual cops.

  There has never, not for one minute in American history, been peace between black people and the police. And nothing since slavery—not Jim Crow segregation, not forced convict labor, not lynching, not restrictive covenants in housing, not being shut out of New Deal programs like Social Security and the GI Bill, not massive resistance to school desegregation, not the ceaseless efforts to prevent African Americans from voting—nothing has sparked the level of outrage among African Americans as when they have felt under violent attack by the police.3 Most of the times that African Americans have set aside traditional civil rights strategies like bringing court cases and marching peacefully and instead have rioted in the streets, destroyed property, and attacked symbols of the state have been because of something the police have done. Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Charlotte in 2016—each of these cities went up in flames sparked by the police killing a black man.4

  The problem is the criminal process itself. Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do. Virtually every objective investigation of a U.S. law enforcement agency finds that the police, as policy, treat African Americans with contempt. In New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco, and many other cities, the U.S. Justice Department and federal courts have stated that the official practices of police departments include violating the rights of African Americans.5 The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, detain, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people. It is the moral responsibility of every American, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why.

  The work of police is to preserve law and order, including the racial order. Hillary Clinton once asked a room full of white people to imagine how they would feel if police and judges treated them the way African Americans are treated.6 This is not a difficult question in a country that was founded in response to an oppressive occupation by armed agents of a remote government. If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution. The purpose of this book is to inspire the same outrage about what the police do to African Americans, and the same revolution in response.

  A chokehold is a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die. The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something about the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.”7 The truth is any human being will suffer distress when pressure on the carotid arteries interrupts the supply of blood from the heart to the brain. Many police departments in the United States have banned chokeholds, but this does not stop some officers from using the tactic when they perceive a threat. The New York Police Department officially bans the practice, but it receives approximately two hundred complaints a year from people who say they have been placed in chokeholds.8 The NYPD regulations did not prevent Officer Daniel Pantaleo from tackling Eric Garner and tightly squeezing his neck for approximately twenty seconds. Pantaleo had been trying to arrest Garner, a forty-three-year-old black man, for selling cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island. Garner denied he’d been breaking the law, and when Pantaleo came at him with handcuffs, Garner moved his hands away and said, “Don’t touch me please.” Pantaleo jumped on Garner’s back, grabbed his neck, and pushed his head facedown against the pavement. Garner said “I can’t breathe” eleven times, and then lost consciousness. He was transported to a local hospital, and died an hour after arriving at the hospital. The New
York City Medical Examiner’s office ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide, caused by “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Officer Pantaleo was not charged with a crime and remained a sworn officer of the NYPD.9 As far as the district attorney of Staten Island was concerned, what Officer Pantaleo did to Eric Garner is what you call police work.

  The United States Supreme Court decided a case about chokeholds that tells you everything you need to know about how criminal “justice” works for African American men. In 1976, Adolph Lyons, a twenty-four-year-old black man, was pulled over by four Los Angeles Police Department officers for driving with a broken taillight. The cops exited their squad cars with their guns drawn, ordering Lyons to spread his legs and put his hands on top of his head. After Lyons was frisked, he put his hands down, causing one cop to grab Lyons’s hands and slam them against his head. Lyons had been holding his keys and he complained that he was in pain. The police officer tackled Lyons and placed him in a chokehold until he blacked out. When Lyons regained consciousness, he was lying facedown on the ground, had soiled his pants, and was spitting up blood and dirt. The cops gave him a traffic citation and sent him on his way.

  Lyons sued to make the LAPD stop putting people in chokeholds. He presented evidence that in recent years sixteen people—including twelve black men—had died in LAPD custody after being placed in chokeholds. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his claim, holding that because Lyons could not prove that he would be subject to a chokehold in the future, he had no “personal stake in the outcome.” Dissenting from the Court’s opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the Supreme Court, wrote:

  It is undisputed that chokeholds pose a high and unpredictable risk of serious injury or death. Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer’s arm and the force applied, the victim’s voluntary or involuntary reaction, and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim’s larynx, trachea, or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as “do[ing] the chicken,” in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung.10

  A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.

  The Chokehold is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed. It is the process by which black lives are made vulnerable to death imposed by others and death that comes from African Americans themselves. The Chokehold works through overt state violence—such as the way communities of color are policed—and slower forms of vulnerability, such as the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the gentrification, all over the country, of inner-city neighborhoods formerly occupied by poor people of color, and the way that when a black man chooses to kill somebody, nine times out of ten it is another black person.

  The Chokehold does not stem from hate of African Americans. Its anti-blackness is instrumental rather than emotional. As slaves built the White House, the Chokehold builds the wealth of white elites. Discriminatory law enforcement practices such as stop and frisk, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs are key components of the political economy of the United States. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s stigmatized overt racism, the national economy, which from the founding has been premised on a racialized form of capitalism, still required black bodies to exploit. The Chokehold evolved as a “color-blind” method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation. The rap group Public Enemy said, “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.”11 Actually all it takes is the Chokehold. It is the invisible fist of the law.

  The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland—where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans—is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is supposed to work. The problem is not bad apple cops. The problem is police work itself. American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.

  The Chokehold is how the police get away with shooting unarmed black people. Cops are rarely prosecuted because they are, literally, doing their jobs. This is why efforts to fix “problems” such as excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail. If it’s not broke, you can’t fix it. Police violence and selective enforcement are not so much flaws in American criminal justice as they are integral features of it. The Chokehold is why, legally speaking, black lives don’t matter as much as white lives.

  The whole world knows that the United States faces a crisis in racial justice, but the focus on police and mass incarceration is too narrow. We might be able to fix those problems the way that we “fixed” slavery and segregation, but the Chokehold’s genius is its mutability. Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crew bled into the new Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform—we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew. This book uses the experience of African American men to explain why.

  As a tool of oppression, the Chokehold does not apply only to African American men. The dynamic of blaming a victim of subordination for his or her condition, and then imposing a legal and social response that enhances the subordination, is familiar to many out-groups in the United States. This book explores the Chokehold through the lens of “policing black men,” but there might be any number of other lenses.

  A far from exhaustive list might include:

  Chokehold: national security profiling of Muslim Americans

  Chokehold: surveillance of poor women receiving government benefits

  Chokehold: the appropriation of Native American land

  Chokehold: exploitation and deportation of undocumented Latino workers

  Chokehold: police and private violence against transgender women of color

  Chokehold: sex trafficking of Asian women12

  BLACK + MALE: AN INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH

  In focusing on African American men, I want to avoid a mistake that some others have made before me. To observe that the experiences of black men are determined by their race and gender does not mean that their plight is worse than that of some other groups, particularly African American women. Intersectionality is the concept, first articulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, that describes how people experience subordination differently based on their multiple identities.13 Nobody is just male, or Asian, or bisexual; people have different group identities, and all those identities are relevant with regard to their life experiences. For example, a Latina woman and a Latino man might be subject to different kinds of stereotypes based on their race, ethnicity, and gender identity.

  Intersectionality is about the difference that gender makes for race, and that race makes for gender. It helps us understand the ways that racism and sexism particularly confront women of color. In the words of a seminal text in black women’s studies: “All the women are white, all the blacks are men.”14 Intersectionality explains why males are frequently perceived as standard bearers for the race in a way that females are not. Things that happen to African American men are identified as “black” problems in a way that things that happen to African American women would not be. Even if some of the same things that happen to African American men happen to African American women, men are likely to rec
eive the most attention.

  At the same time, intersectionality creates a space for black male–focused analysis. Lynching, for example, was gendered as well as raced; it was not enough to hang black men from trees, but their penises had to be cut off as well. Black women also have been terrorized, rape being one obvious example, but we should remember that black male victims too have been punished for gender as well as race. Chapter 3 makes this point about stop and frisk. It is not hard to imagine that discrimination against black men sometimes might take different forms than discrimination against black women, and that the combination of race and gender discrimination might impact African American men’s educational achievement, participation in the labor market, and risk of incarceration in particular ways. The problem is that black male issues are likely to be prioritized, to the extent that any racial justice interventions are prioritized. The important #SayHerName campaign has lifted up the experiences of women of color with the police. For example, after excessive force, sexual assault is the most common complaint against the police, and African American women are the most likely victims.15 This problem has not received the attention it deserves, which is not uncommon for issues that disproportionately impact black women. At the same time, intersectionality teaches us that gender matters for black men as well, and that ignoring gender undermines the chances of making things better. The challenge for any project that focuses on African American men—whether a black male achievement program such as former president Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative or a book such as Chokehold—is to highlight the particular ways in which black men are stereotyped without marginalizing the experiences of African American women in the process. I am dedicated to that process throughout these pages.