By B.L. Wilson
In an evening of serious subjects interrupted regularly by bursts of laughter, Taylor Branch, chronicler of the modern civil rights era, engaged activist DeRay McKesson in a conversation on racism, police violence, sexual abuse and identity.
More than 300 people filled the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theater Friday evening to hear Mr. McKesson talk about his new book, “On the Other Side of Freedom.”
Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose, which co-sponsored the event with George Washington University, characterized the book as “part meditation and personal memoir on resistance, justice, freedom and accountability and how to change our flawed system to lessen racism and provide for a better world.”
Mr. Branch said the most original chapter in the book provides new information about police in the United States. “It’s original scholarship,” he said, that points out the government can tell you how many inches of rain fell in the 1800s but not how many people were killed every year by law enforcement.
Mr. McKesson and other members of the Black Lives Matter movement wondered why police violence seemed to occur frequently with officers often unaccountable. He had been a public administrator in education before leaving to join protests in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown. He was familiar with teachers’ contracts, he said, and had a hunch that answers might be found in police union contracts.
Along with two other colleagues, he reviewed about a hundred police union contracts and discovered what he called some “shocking” findings:
In Maryland, the law says you can file an anonymous complaint against police officer for everything except brutality.
In Cleveland, a police officer’s disciplinary record can be destroyed every two years.
The Portland, Maine, police union contract says an officer has to be disciplined in a way that is least embarrassing to the officer.
When Mr. McKesson confronted the Portland police chief with that clause, he said, “She looked at me like, ‘This kid’s crazy. What is he talking about?’” She read the document and had no response. “There was no way to justify it.”
He said the data collected by Black Lives Matter activists, Mapping Police Violence, adds to information gathered by journalists at The Washington Post and websites such as Fatal Encounters and Killed by the Police.
“If you get killed in this country by a police officer and a newspaper doesn’t cover it, you’re just not in the data set,” he explained. The reports, however, are often limited to killings with guns while an officer is on duty and might not include victims such as Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a police officer. The victims also are often unidentified by race.
Mr. Branch drew on analogies to earlier civil rights movements that evolved from sit-ins in the late 1950s to the more tactical Freedom Summer in the 1960s to ask what comes next for the Black Lives Matter movement.
The movement has won the awareness battle, Mr. McKesson answered, and is now focused on structural issues. He worries that discussions focused on police training and unconscious bias among police officers lets the system off the hook.
“I don’t know how you train police not to kill a 10 year old,” he said. “The bias looks pretty conscious to me. We should normalize the idea that this just isn’t working.”
He cited as an example of what he calls failed law enforcement the Baltimore Police Department, which he says has a $500 million annual operating budget but makes arrests in about 20 percent of reported crime cases.
“Public Safety? What is that? Who is safe?” the activist asked, rhetorically.
Mr. Branch shifted the conversation to a discussion of Mr. McKesson’s personal life, his reconnecting with his mother that started out as a six-word story on Twitter, “I can remember her without sadness.”
The crux of the matter, he said, is that for a long time he believed that if his mother could leave anybody could leave. That traumatic experience along with being sexually abused by an older boy left Mr. McKesson feeling unworthy and like his body “wasn’t mine.”
Mr. McKesson said he does not want to make a career of activism and would like to return to teaching.
“The movement has to be about us imagining something bigger,” he said. “I think of freedom as not the absence of oppression but the presence of justice and joy.”
