How is President Donald Trump getting away with what he is doing in the nation’s capital? Every time they show the city on the news, I am reminded why Parliament made a song about Washington D.C. and called it “Chocolate City:” Black folks are everywhere.
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But it looks like the residents of the city are living in a police state. Federal agents being out on the streets is one thing, but seeing military personnel patrolling the streets carrying service weapons is something completely different.
You’d expect Trump’s MAGA base to support him because that is what they do. But where is the outcry about this from moderate Republicans? And while there is some grumbling among Democrats, why has their response been so tepid? Put bluntly, where is the outcry from white people?
Want to hear an uncomfortable truth…? White people are allowing it to happen because many of them are comfortable with the over policing of Black people. Don’t believe me? Sit back and read…class is in session.
In the summer of 2020, the murder of George Floyd captured the attention of corporations and white people to such a degree that they started posting Black squares on social media. That was them saying, “I’m paying attention. I am concerned about the way the police treat Black people.”
But there is an implicit truth that comes to light because of that moment. Black people had been over-policed in this country for over a century, but it took a Black man being killed on camera for them to care about it. The reality is that our brothers and sisters who put questionable things in their potato salad had been comfortable with Black communities being over policed for generations.
There are the blatant racists who say that Black people are inherently criminal and, therefore, need to be surveilled. That’s the argument that slave owners made when abolition was on the horizon, so people who would say something like that are the easy targets for this kind of analysis.
But then there are people like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden — politicians who are supposedly on the side of Black folks — who advocated for The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. That was a bill that led to increased policing in Black communities, made the school-to-prison pipeline exponentially worse and resulted in millions of Black men being thrown into prison on drug charges.
This is but one example of “good” white people being quite comfortable with the over-policing of Black bodies. And if you want to bring it down to a local level, all you need to do is look at the history of allegedly liberal cities like Boston, New York City and Los Angeles to see that even when the municipality is supposed to be Democratic, there is still a comfortability with treating Black communities like they are inherently unsafe and therefore in need of a police presence.
So why is there not more of an outcry about the president sending troops into D.C.? I’m not saying it is because this adheres to a centuries old pattern of over policing Black bodies. But I’m not not saying that is what is going on either.
Straight From 
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