Cameraphone footage of police violence mobilizes white allies toward reform

Evidence

On that long-ago day, when I saw the white police officer beating up a black citizen, and Mommy told me that it just “happens sometimes,” she wasn’t wrong—and she still isn’t. Police brutality continues to this day, often without justice or repercussions. But decades later, there has been a small shift: As such acts are now caught on camera and widely viewed, more white allies discover what black Americans have long known—and are demanding reforms. If you’d told me, in 2016, that Americans would be marching in the streets of every major city, during a global pandemic, calling for defunding the police and other systemic reforms, I wouldn’t have believed you. Neither would I have thought that 71 percent of white Americans would call racism “a big problem.” But I’m glad that the summer of 2020 proved me wrong and made me hopeful about change. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 565

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated interest in how Brown builds her argument: she opens the book’s close with the visible-evidence analogy (camera footage) precisely because tax harm has no equivalent — the hole in the evidence is her whole rhetorical structure. — connects to: Journalists being caught in police violence shapes how protest history gets written — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 38; Media coverage asymmetrically brands property damage as violence while normalizing police violence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1548
• CANDY: The 71 percent of white Americans calling racism ‘a big problem’ is a striking, tweetable data point.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Journalists being caught in police violence shapes how protest history gets written — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 38; Media coverage asymmetrically brands property damage as violence while normalizing police violence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1548