G.D. Profile picture
16 Nov, 10 tweets, 3 min read
“Reform” convos so often go like this:

“Someone did X thing and it worked!”

Then they stop asking questions bc the “reforms,” at least superficially, achieved some measurable “good”thing. Maybe test scores went up or police complaints went down. But the devil is in the details.
In the case of Camden, NJ...police complaints have plummeted bc Black neighborhoods are subjected to more electronic surveillance — which is what i meant by reforms just pushing for the same policing imperatives but differently formalized.
People want the problem to go away, so we often don’t think harder or deeply about the premises of the “reforms” or the tradeoffs.
One thing the defund argument has over reform is that the defund folks are more accurately diagnosing the problem: that policing imperatives are racist, and police contact is generally unhelpful and counterproductive, if not disastrous.
“Community policing” ends with a lot of police contact, differently formalized and justified.

More diverse cops gets you police contact, differently formalized.

Body cameras. Residency requirements. “Better training.” Etc.
And it’s a reason “reform” is so popular: there’s a broad sense that something is wrong with policing, but also a deeper sense that there are some people the public wants to see policed, and so splitting the difference = keep overpolicing those people but do so more *politely.*
in the replies to this, someone mentioned that "reform" can work, and linked to a story headlined "Where Police Reform Has Worked."

The article says that police shootings were down in LA and hit a 30-year low. But my point at the top was that the devil is in the details:
So successful reform means the LAPD is killing slightly fewer people and instead merely beating up way more people.

what hasn't changed at all is that the mere fact of police contact remains dangerous.
the "a deeper sense that there are some people the public wants to see policed" is a huge dynamic in the discourse around this issue.

Many big cities are as safe as they've ever been. The public generally thinks it's still 1990, though.

pewrsr.ch/2OVPwl2

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More from @GeeDee215

7 Nov
CNN's pundits – not Dana Basch and Abby Phillip but that unholy quartet of Van Jones and Rick Santorum and Axelrod and whassaname — are already doing that "It will be good if GA's two Senate seats go to the GOP bc then Biden will have to govern from the sensible middle" thing.
the "sensible middle' is one of the most inane, nonsensical constructions in mainstream US political discourse.

besides the fact that it presumes that Biden is going to govern from the left — tuh — it also assumes that the two parties are symmetrical ideological opposites.
Now Kasich is doing it: "Now is the time for Democrats to listen to the other side...we need to listen to what those Republicans want."
Read 5 tweets
6 Nov
It doesn’t make sense. A Black registered voter has a 90% chance of voting for Democrats. A Latino voter has a 70ish% chance of doing so. But a white voter has a <50% chance of doing so — and a white Republican way less than *that* — why not focus on Black and Brown turnout?
(Rhetorical question: it’s bc white ppl believe that things can only be legitimate if they center white people.)
The Democrats have not won a majority of the white vote since 1964, and have been obsessed w/ winning those voters back ever since.

Meanwhile, two youngest voting age cohorts, Millennials and Gen-Zers, are 45 and 49% nonwhite, respectively.
Read 9 tweets
6 Nov
Lol one of these people was an organizer who marched with King and the other adamantly opposed a holiday for King in AZ but okay
McCain voted against the 1990 Civil Rights act, a bill that made it easier for ppl to sue employers for discrimination.

The optics of GOP opposition were so bad — David Duke went to DC to cheer its failure in person — that GOP senators tried to override Bush’s veto of the bill.
Read 6 tweets
6 Nov
So much of the “conventional wisdom” espoused by pundits on CNN is just nakedly dumb and wrong

They were chocking up AZ trending blue to a revolt of suburban moms and Cindy McCain’s endorsement of Biden. So these moms rocked with Trump and Joe Arpaio but flipped bc of Cindy? 🤔
If white ladies were revolting against Trump in the traditionally red suburbs of AZ...wouldn’t they also be doing so else in the country?
As a few people pointed out to me yesterday, to the extent that the blue flip in Maricopa County was because of suburban moms, it was because those suburban moms are now *brown* and their energized kids have been doing work:

theintercept.com/2020/11/02/ari…
Read 5 tweets
4 Nov
again, Trump is only a viable candidate because of his overwhelming white support, up and down the income ladder and across generations.

white voters are the constant. if Trump lightly underperformed with white voters in, say, Florida, the map looks different.

But go off.
In Florida, one candidate won SIX in 10 white voters in a state where EIGHT in 10 people identify as white (including a LARGE number of Hispanic people).

It has the effect of overstating Trump's appeal to people who are...not white. Image
this was Ta-Nehisi in 2016. How different does any of this look *now*? Image
Read 7 tweets
4 Nov
whiteness has always been elastic in the US, but it's always expanded to absorb different kinds of people of European descent.

it's an open q as to whether it will/can expand to subsume groups of Asian Ams or Latinos — and whether their racial formation in the US will allow it.
Italians and the Irish and Germans and European Jews were subsumed into broader USian whiteness, but are the mechanisms by which that happened available today (and available to enough people) of MENA ancestry or Latin American ancestry or South Asian ancestry?
racial formation in the US isn't as simple and neat as "white people have power and new populations will become 'white' in order to access that power."

There's a systemic/structural dynamic to this as well: Does the world *treat* you like a white person?
Read 10 tweets

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