I am seeing SO many people vouch for the death penalty for the cop who murdered George Floyd.
This is not some anomaly. It’s not like cops are violent and fucked up and we don’t know why because the rest of the justice system works hunky fucking dory.
It’s not like cops target black people and then the courts are like “this is bizarre, send them home!”
It’s not like cops arrested the Central Park 5 and then the courts didn’t send all these innocent young men to jail for years.
Making the courts as they exist stronger, making the prison industrial complex as it exists more valid, isn’t going to do a fucking thing about police brutality!
Like, let’s look at rape for a second.
Rape is considered legally and culturally abhorrent. The consequences for sexual violence are severe: Often you spend a lifetime on a registry, if not in prison.
This has not lessened sexual violence! This has made sexual violence SIGNIFICANTLY HARDER TO PROVE. Because the people who survive sexual violence often don’t culturally matter enough to risk throwing the book at an innocent white guy.
It’s naive to think it’s not going to play out the exact same way trying to prosecute police.
We have to acknowledge that the systems America is built on are functionally evil.
It doesn’t matter whether a specific member of the groups who uphold these systems are good or not.
We need to get brave enough to pivot to new systems. We need to get healed enough to let go of this idea that passing on the suffering is the same as resolving it. Namely, the people who are privileged enough to only get to think about this shit abstractly and ultimately have attachments to everything as it exists, REALLY need to heal enough to let that idea go.
And we need to do it quickly.
—melony ppenosyne
Flommist Melony Ppenosyne is a writer and weird artist type. In the last year alone, she’s traveled to Virginia as a competing poet, co-written a play on mental illness that is presently being produced, and crafted a published essay checking the privilege and scope of art galleries. Copyright © 2020 Melony Ppenosyne.
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