Like many other literary organizations, last week our company Winning Writers sent out an email responding to the latest incidents of police killings of black people and the protests they’ve inspired:
Winning Writers stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and all those who are speaking out, offering mutual aid, and peacefully protesting to end state-sanctioned violence against people of color. We are grieved and outraged by the police murders of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and many other African-Americans. We believe in the power of art to offer hope, inspire empathy, and correct the white supremacist American history that we were taught.
This was followed by some book recommendations by black authors and/or on civil rights topics. We received mostly positive feedback and a couple dozen hot complaints from our subscribers. Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much I can say to someone who thinks it’s a
controversial statement that black people’s lives matter! I guess because I’m white and haven’t faced this first-hand, I was caught off-guard by the intense fury that this simple declaration triggers. But I remember the immaturity, economic stress, and status anxiety that led me to stake out some unwittingly racist positions as a college Republican, and I try to hope that some of our readers can also be moved by powerful stories and good arguments. I highly recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s book
So You Want to Talk About Race (Hachette, 2018) for thorough, accessible debunking of common errors we white people can make.
As a starting point, let me briefly address some of the most frequent objections we received:
We are stifling artistic freedom by politicizing Winning Writers.
It’s our company, folks. We can have a point of view. While we value diverse perspectives, some views are not worth entertaining. “Black lives don’t matter” is one of them. As contest judges and literary tastemakers, we strive to be fair rather than neutral. We feel that actors that claim to be neutral are often upholding (intentionally or not) the interests of the powerful and the status quo.
ALL lives matter; singling out black people is reverse discrimination.
Where did anyone say that only black lives matter? The BLM movement and its supporters focus on black Americans because they’ve been uniquely singled out for oppression and extermination for the past 400 years. All lives don’t matter equally in America. We want to change that.
Black Lives Matter is a far-left violent movement. BLM are looters and violent protesters.
The same people who say this, often say “Bad cops are not representative of the police.” Contradict yourselves much? White Americans generally get to be judged as individuals, whereas black lawbreakers’ behavior is attributed to the group as a whole. This too is racism. Moreover, protests have been infiltrated by right-wing agitators who want to stir up violence so black activists will be blamed. In the cellphone camera era, we’re suddenly seeing
how often the police lie about the causes of altercations with suspects, inventing attacks to justify police brutality as a defensive measure. According to
the Marshall Project, the problem is so widespread that some big-city prosecutors have “do not call lists” of cops who are untrustworthy witnesses. Be a critical thinker and double-check your news sources.
BLM wants to defund the police, which will make everyone (including black people) more vulnerable to crime.
Supporters of the current protests comprise a diverse group whose views on the police range from reform to abolition. Endorsing the movement doesn’t imply endorsing every viewpoint or action of its members. Politics is always a trade-off. (I’m looking at you, every Christian who voted for Donald “grab them by the pussy” Trump because he would appoint pro-life judges.) Additionally, the catchphrase “defund the police” doesn’t always mean complete elimination, but rather, radically changing our city and state budget priorities to divert money from armed forces to human services. For a look at what it could mean in practice, see
this Atlantic article by Annie Lowrey. She writes:
Defund the police…is also and more urgently a statement of first principles: The country needs to shift financing away from surveillance and punishment, and toward fostering equitable, healthy, and safe communities. As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols—to law and order, meted out discriminately. It has an equally extreme budget commitment to food support, aid for teenage parents, help for the homeless, child care for working families, safe housing, and so on. It feeds the former and starves the latter.
[Defund the police]…would mean ending mass incarceration, cash bail, fines-and-fees policing, the war on drugs, and police militarization, as well as getting cops out of schools. It would also mean funding housing-first programs, creating subsidized jobs for the formerly incarcerated, and expanding initiatives to have mental-health professionals and social workers respond to emergency calls.
Winning Writers, and Reiter’s Block, are on board with that agenda. Want to help? One thing you can do is donate to your local community bail fund.
Good afternoon Jendi. This is Denise again. On Jan. 8, 2020, I sent you an email along with a civil rights poem to show that there was still hope for black people in the United States due to our recent watershed moment in civil rights. Well, also in recent days, unfortunately, the Democrats and Republicans could not even come together as one to agree with and propose one police reform bill. This goes to show us that we all need to look towards God; for He is the only ONE who can heal the land.