Column: Abolish rather than indict

Last week The Daily Tar Heel ran an edition focusing on issues of race. It left me with a central question: Why should one compromise when talking about racial justice?

Don’t get me wrong — I’m happy that The Daily Tar Heel made the choice to highlight the University’s lack of support for students of color and broader manifestations of racism in our community. But racism cannot be confined to conversations around hollow terms such as “diversity,” “race relations” and “bias,” which obfuscate where power exists within our social hierarchy.

The disproportionate police citations and traffic stops of black folks in Chapel Hill and Carrboro cannot be scapegoated by the simplistic idea that “all humans have biases,” as Carrboro Police Department spokesman Chris Atack said.

To say so is to erase the way our society has been organized and constructed around anti-blackness. It frames the oppressive regime the Black Lives Matter movement seeks to protest as situated within benevolent and well-intentioned people rather than institutions.

Akai Gurley, a black man, was killed in November by rookie Officer Peter Liang during a stairwell patrol in a public housing complex in Brooklyn. It was announced Wednesday that Liang will be charged with manslaughter.

Black lives have always mattered, and rallying cries to affirm this truth exist within an unforeseen danger. Should we be seeking justice within the carceral and punitive system that contains and perishes innumerable black bodies? Equating indictment and incarceration with justice is to effectually state that prisons, the courts and policing have the potential to provide justice.

The police’s supposed responsibility is to protect and serve. But who are they serving, and from whom are those people being protected? Patrols to police Native Americans and black slaves were the forerunners to modern-day law enforcement in the United States. And given that black people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, why should we expect impartiality from the police themselves?

Eric Garner’s videotaped killing shows that Obama’s $263 million funding for body cameras will not realize justice. The NYPD patrol guide bars the use of chokeholds — this too was insufficient to save Garner’s life.

Black student activists calling for the renaming of Saunders Hall is part of a broader push to re-narrate the histories that all institutions construct around their racist legacies.

These movements remind us that under these same blue skies of the South, thousands of black people were lynched. Police brutality, referred to by many as modern day lynchings, represents the devaluation of black life within the everyday.

Prison abolitionist, activist, and scholar Angela Davis provides us with a starting point.

“Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root,’” she said.

Taking Davis’ words to heart, we must instead indict the institutions that have oppression blueprinted in their own roots.