Thread by @GeeDee215

@KeahHenry hmmm.

so a couple years ago, i interviewed this woman about police reform. she was a unicorn: she was Black, a grandmother, a police captain, and a PhD in organizational theory.

@KeahHenry she was walking me through the idea of changing a police department "from the inside."

So you start off as a patrol officer. Now already, you don't have power inside the institution. You have to make the arrests or hand out the tickets per your bosses' directions.

@KeahHenry if you recognize that there is racial bias in the arrests and ticketing you have to do and you make noise about it, how are you going to get promoted? you're Black and you're the squeaky wheel? Nah. Your career will top out at patrolling.

So you stay quiet.

@KeahHenry you'll make noise once you get promoted, you think.

So then you get promoted — and mind you, you're only further institutionalized by the culture of the police, and you believe that the police are mostly good but that X needs to change to make them better.

@KeahHenry and you keep making that concessions until you're in a position of real decision-making power.

At this point, all the Black people who would have a problem with any of the discriminatory policing and the discrimination in the department have been weeded out.

@KeahHenry so she said: are you, the only Black person in the room, who had to work and keep your head down to become deputy police chief or whatever, going to suddenly say...we need to radically remake all of this now that you have "power"?

@KeahHenry that doesn't happen. the people who could make it to that place don't want to change these institutions — they are necessarily not table-flippers. They are invested in those institutions and the legitimacy of them. they're not going to advocate for budget cuts.

@KeahHenry they're not going to risk stirring up anger among their colleagues by firing and pushing for prosecution of even the most egregious offenders.

institutionalized people don't want to blow up their institutions, period.

@KeahHenry her point was: the "we need more Black people in policing" — which is a thing a lot of people said after the demographics of the Ferguson PD became public in 2014 — will have almost no material bearing on whether the police behave in even marginally less racist ways.

@KeahHenry And to go back to our episode: James Forman Jr pointed out that DC had a Black mayor, a Black chief prosecutor in Eric Holder and a Black city council, Black judges and Black prosecutors...and they were all throwing the book at Black people and locking them up!

@KeahHenry there are some caveats here about DC and self-rule but...what did all that Black elite power in the inside change for the poor Black people who were being thrown in prison?*

*And since DC is a federal city, that meant they could be incarcerated in a fed prison in, like, Iowa.

@KeahHenry i guess the thing is: in the context of people stumping for (or at least abetting ) wildly destructive outcomes, aren't you actually telling the wrong story about the consequences of these people's careers if you focus mainly on, like, some mentorship program they started?

@KeahHenry as i said in the ep, i think where you fall on things like this are about whether you're like "as a Black professional, I understand why Kamala Harris made these choices"

or whether you're "I could have been one of those people who got locked up for a decade on weed charges"

@KeahHenry and that is absolutely about class and status in Black America.