Law-and-order rhetoric justified police brutality and fed rebellion cycles.

Evidence

By 1968, both Democrats and Republicans had popularized the call for “law and order.” It became a motto for defending the Planet of the Whites. “Law and order” rhetoric was used as a defense for police brutality, and both the rhetoric and the brutality triggered urban rebellions that in turn triggered more rhetoric and brutality. And no one could explain all of this better in early 1968 than a giant of a man and thinker and writer, the former convict turned Malcolm X disciple Eldridge Cleaver, who had become minister of information for the Black Panther Party. “The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order,” Cleaver explained. “A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1013

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core goal: a vivid instance of policy/rhetoric (law and order) preceding and justifying racist ideas, plus a feedback loop of brutality-rebellion-rhetoric. — connects to: Neoliberal limited government rhetoric coexists with a strong police and military state. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 166