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My preferred style of writing usually has two qualities: It is slinky—the sentence equivalent of being put into a light trance—and it is simple. Not didactic or obvious, just clear about what it means and transparent about the things it can’t answer.
These matters of clarity and obfuscation came up a lot for me this week while I read and listened to people offering their own explanation of what “Defund the police”—an old political demand that has emerged with new force as protests against police violence continue in all 50 states—really means. There are two basic versions of this act of interpretation. As the call to defund the police has spread to wider audiences, Melissa Gira Grant writes, “it has mutated, offering complex opportunities: both for new, uneasy political coalitions to advance the demand to defund and redistribute and a countervailing reactionary effort to suppress, distort, and strip it of its radical intention.”
To me, the former feels like a straightforward issue of objective. Some reformers believe that police have too much power and money but that policing itself is a necessary social good. (As Melissa noted, “‘Defund’ is part of an abolitionist project, but abolition is not necessarily a part of a project to defund police budgets.”) Coalitions are often tenuous and transactional in this way. There’s a path you walk together for a little while, until you don’t.
But when I encounter that second thing—the translation work that claims “Don’t worry, they don’t really mean it”—it feels more like a rhetorical trick. “When they’re saying ‘Defund the police,’ what are they saying?” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked earlier this week. “They’re saying, we want fundamental basic change when it comes to policing.” This is a refusal of clarity that, beyond concealing its own position, attempts to muddy the waters of what other people are saying quite explicitly. Why suggest it doesn’t mean that, when it’s so much simpler to say: “I don’t want that,” or “I won’t do that.” Taking that position means something, too. It seems only fair to be clear
about it. |
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A Fragile Answer to the Question of “Whose Streets?”
Zoë Hu on protest, space, and belonging is pure pleasure—lucid and inviting. “The sight of people retaking and improvising on their environment abstracts outward, to a set of values for a different, nascent city,” she writes. “Standing on the edge of this moment, one receives, like flecks of ash in the air, brief insights into a world where such things are possible.” |
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The Limits and Dangers of a Fixation on “Nonviolence”
Rebecca Pierce brings much-needed history, context, and precision to the question of “nonviolence” and the radical agency of the oppressed. External and coercive demands for so-called peaceful protest, she writes, emphasize “optics, when the focus of these protests is changing the material conditions of Black lives in a country built on violent white supremacy and colonialism.” People in the streets right now won’t be distracted. |
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Nihilism and White Bliss in America’s Most Livable City
Casey Taylor, reporting out of Pittsburgh, takes a pretty mundane incident—protesters tagged a hammer and sickle on a statue of hockey legend Mario Lemieux—and turns it into a deeply considered piece on gentrification, the destruction of historically black neighborhoods, whiteness, and the myth of the progressive city. |
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| This is another internal link, but who cares. Reading David Roth is always so fun. |
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