Morgan Godvin
Godvin is a student at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. She lives in Portland.
When I stand in Chapman Square, I see the Multnomah County Courthouse, the Multnomah County Justice Center, and the federal courthouse. All three of those buildings have incarcerated me for sentences ranging from seven days in jail to five years in prison. Police have served a no-knock warrant on my apartment, bursting through my front door at night, pointing guns at me and shouting. I threw my hands up and said, “don’t shoot!” In 2013, the justification that police used to search my car – which led to a felony conviction – didn’t match the facts as I knew them.
I am white, and therefore had fundamentally different and safer interactions with police and the system and was likely spared a longer prison sentence because of my racial and class privilege. I was not targeted by police based on an immutable aspect of my identity, the color of my skin, my race or my ethnicity. I was targeted based on my addiction and conduct, things bound in time and context.
Since March I have lived outside of the United States. I came home to Portland, the city where I was born, raised and lived my entire life on the 4th of July. I promptly went to Chapman and Lownsdale Squares to attend a protest. The Black Lives Matter movement, the unifying force behind the protests across the country, is something I support wholeheartedly. I recognize my own racial privilege, especially in my interactions with the justice system.
Between some of the protesters’ conversations, the signs and the graffiti, I came to a painful realization. Subtlety and complexity have been sacrificed for certainty. Certainty of good and evil, of friend and foe, of right and wrong.
The criminal justice system labeled me a “criminal” and put me in a cage. I was cursed at, screamed at, denied feminine hygiene products. I was subjected to dehumanization. American carceral systems are adept at dehumanizing entire populations, a human rights crisis and social justice issue I will spend the rest of my life fighting against.
Somehow this is controversial. but I want to point out that all cops are not bastards. “ACAB” has become a rallying cry, but it’s one that obfuscates humanity. The American system of policing is broken and unjust, our carceral systems are shaped by racism, our communities under-supported, but the individuals that comprise our police forces are not “all” anything. They are a diverse group of people, a mix of good and bad, just like each of us. Generalizations don’t allow for the complexity inherent to humanity itself. (If the cops hijacked ACAB to mean, “All Criminals Are Bad,” I would be livid.)
You cannot decry dehumanization while in the same breath calling cops “pigs” and advocating for their slaughter. I doubt anyone means “kill cops” literally but Portland Police were thrilled to use images of that slogan in their latest press release. Murder is wrong, always. It is why the state should not commit it, judicially, extrajudicially, or ever.
Dehumanization and sweeping generalizations are not solutions to dehumanization and sweeping generalizations. I will not resort to the tactics of my oppressors, lest I become them.
I am complicit in the reductive Twitterification of complex concepts. Over-simplification comes at the cost of true understanding, without which we will simply over-correct from one extreme to another. Lasting solutions include nuance. Seeking mutual understanding is not the same as seeking to agree.
Before jumping to the intellectually lazy but gratifying conclusion that people I disagree with are just “bad people,” I seek to understand their perspective. Once you declare someone as your enemy you stop seeing them as multi-dimensional human beings.
I am horrified by police killings, repulsed by police brutality and appalled by the common instances of cruelty committed by police and correctional officers. I disagree with police tactics and often officers’ individual politics. But I can still try to understand, after all, I could be writing this from a very different perspective. Before the drug war ensnared me, I once wanted to become a police officer. I wanted to serve my community and help people, not bash heads. Systems failures cannot be laid at the feet of individuals alone.
I am not pro-police, I am pro-humanity. It is why I am anti-racist and anti-incarceration.
I am not a meek moderate. I, too, demand radical change. But lasting societal change means we must reject over-simplification, sweeping generalizations, and dehumanization. Yes, even when talking about them. The political normalization of those tactics has gone on for too long. The side of justice is the side of humanity, in all its messy complexity.
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