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The systemic racism of institutions like the criminal justice system, the prison industrial complex, and the American public education system cannot be institutionalized without the complicity of individuals. All machines require maintenance for their continued, successful operation and machines can only be maintained by people. So, in my estimation, it is never enough to say that the machine is doing the damage. The machine is indeed doing the damage, but all machines have operators—even if they’re operating via remote control.

Lately, we have been inundated with stories about injustices carried out by police. It’s as though the media has just discovered the inherent rottenness of the criminal justice system. As though they didn’t know before that our modern-day police forces sprung up whole from the plantation system, that police officers are merely contemporary overseers/patrollers/patty-rollers, that the primary function of the police force is to protect the property and wealth of the 1% from the other 99%, that the shorthand for the 99% is black skin.

Some folks will say #NotAllCops! And I think those folks miss the point that it’s completely unnecessary for an individual police officer to be a “bad person” to uphold injustice. In the course of “just doing their jobs,” police officers are committing injustices because the laws themselves are often unjust, often skewed, often white supremacist, often patriarchal.

Cops are trained to believe that their own actions are always just, always justified, always righteous—even when they are blatantly abusive, immoral, murderous, violent, and unjust.

Cops are trained to rewrite history in their little journals. In these notepads, which are admitted into the public record as evidence when cops testify in court, they write down how things would have gone down in an ideal situation. But their PRACTICES, what they actually did and do in these situations, is wholly different from what they recorded.

The rest: http://sonofbaldwin.tumblr.com/post/94158431495/cant-stop-wont-stop