[Organized labor is a direct threat to white supremacy. We need to
put that threat into action.] [[link removed]]

“WE NEED YOU TO FIGHT FOR US TO BREATHE”  
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April Sims
June 4, 2020
The Stand
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_ Organized labor is a direct threat to white supremacy. We need to
put that threat into action. _

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[Related: Labor Council to Seattle Police Union: Address Racism or Get
Out]
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_Say their names: Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. Tony
McDade. David McAtee. Manuel Ellis._

Some days it’s hard to breathe. Here’s my truth:

I’m a Black mother raising Black kids.

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My son, Javonte, joined the U.S. Marines at 17 because he wanted to
make a difference, he wanted to serve his country. He came home five
years later only to witness his country condone and sanction the
continued murder and abuse of Black men who look like him. He won’t
tell me he’s scared; he doesn’t have to.

My daughter, Jasmyne, is a freedom fighter, always has been. As her
mom, I encouraged that fire; taught her to stand up for what she
believes in, defend others, and use her voice to speak truth to power.
Some days I worry I’ve failed her, that I haven’t prepared her for
the times she will need to give that power away so she can come home
safe. She won’t tell me she’s angry, she doesn’t have to.

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My daughter, Niah, is graduating from high school this year, she has
her whole future in front of her and has carefully planned every year
step. Like her dad, she’s always on time and is a dedicated list
maker and planner. She recently told me she’s not sure she wants to
have children because she knows they’ll be born Black, and the world
is too cruel to Black boys and girls. She won’t tell me she’s sad,
she doesn’t have to.

I’m a wife, married to a strong Black man.

My husband, Marcus, doesn’t share his fears openly or freely, but I
know he never does more than five miles over the speed limit. I watch
him make sure our cars are well maintained so the police won’t have
cause to pull us over and so we don’t end up broken down alone on
the side of the road where he can’t help us. I’ve listened to him
have “the talk” with our kids more than once. He won’t tell me
he worries; he doesn’t have to.

I’m a Black woman leader in the labor movement.

I spend my time working in systems and structures not designed with me
in mind. The diplomacy and code shifting required to navigate these
systems is sometimes exhausting, knowing I carry the hopes and dreams
of my ancestors and the voices of my community into every space, every
conversation, every decision. Some days the weight makes it hard to
breathe. I won’t tell you I’m tired, I don’t have to.

Here is the truth:

The system isn’t broken. The system is operating exactly the way it
was intended to.

We have lost so many of our sisters, brothers, and siblings to white
supremacy; COVID-19 is ravaging BIPOC communities that are already
systematically under-resourced and over-policed. Against the backdrop
of a pandemic already wreaking havoc on Black communities, these
recent, public murders of Black Americans are sickening. While they
may be shocking to some white Americans, this is the America that
Black folks have always lived in – the America that I have always
lived in.

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While the prevalence of camera phones fundamentally changed the
conversation around policing in America, in fact, what we are
witnessing is a steady stream of modern-day lynchings in real time.
Lynching is defined as a murder committed in public by three or more
perpetrators, for the purpose of punishing an alleged crime without a
trial. Eric Garner
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lynched. Michael Brown
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lynched. Philando Castille
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lynched. Charleena Lyles
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lynched. George Floyd
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And while laws may shield them from consequences, it was police who
lynched each of these Black Americans and our governments that
sanctioned these murders.

Policing in America is too often violence, disproportionately directed
at Black communities. There are clear, systemic causes leading to the
hyper-policing of Black bodies. We are not experiencing a mass
psychosis affecting police departments across the United States.
Rather, this police violence, primarily targeting Black Americans, is
the system of policing operating as designed.

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Furthermore, we know that policing was born out of slave patrols,
consisting primarily of white and poor men paid by landowning elites
to return escaped Black folks to the brutality of slavery for their
capital gain. With emancipation, Southern legislators passed laws
empowering these same poor whites to curtail the free movement of
formerly enslaved Black folks, attempting to recreate the subjugation
of slavery. Black people, previously covered by slave laws, were now
living under the same legal codes that whites lived under; thus, new
crimes were created to control Black Americans. White supremacy is at
the core of policing in America.

And let’s not forget that ultimately, white supremacy was designed
and is upheld even today to divide working people. We see this from
the very beginnings of this country. The Virginia Slave Codes —
which denied certain rights to all Black people enslaved or not,
explicitly creating racist differentials in treatment intended to sow
discord amongst working people — were passed as a direct response to
Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising where working people of all races
banded together against wealthy landowners. White supremacy is at the
root of our institutions, planted there intentionally.

And while we can find examples throughout our history of white
Americans combating white supremacy — white clergy joining the
Freedom Summer, for example — overturning and reshaping white
supremacist institutions requires more than some well-intentioned
accomplices.

White supremacy provides a ruse of racial superiority that is
progressively fooling fewer and fewer people. We’re recognizing what
actually limits us as working people: the concentration of the wealth
our labor produces in the hands of bosses and billionaires at the
expense of our families and communities.

As that consciousness rises, none of us have the privilege of waiting
to confront police violence. While Black folks disproportionately face
the brunt of police violence, no one is immune. Black folks are
canaries in the coalmine, often the first to be subjected to
oppression. Collectively, our society has allowed abusive policing in
historically disenfranchised communities of color. This failure has
allowed unaccountable, increasingly militarized policing to become the
norm in all our communities, as we’ve seen all too clearly in the
past week. Anyone that threatens the power structures that police were
created and exist to protect is a threat.

At our best, organized labor — with our belief in the humanity that
each of us share with one another, with our commitment to solidarity
with all working people, to bettering the conditions of all of us —
is a movement focused on our common power as working people. This
solidarity with all working people across race is a direct threat to
white supremacy.

We should be proud to be that threat; but more than that, we need to
put it in action.

As Frederick Douglass lamented, “Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never has, and it never will.” Policing cannot reform
itself. The politicians that have empowered unaccountable police
forces cannot reform the system. And as policing is built explicitly
out of attempts to control Black people, we must question if police
can be reformed at all, or if rather, we need to entirely re-conceive
what policing looks like.

If we’re going to live out our commitments as unionists, we need to
remake policing to uphold our ideals. This requires action from all of
us. Historically, protest movements have been successful in
fundamentally altering the course of this country when they channeled
the energy on the streets into the halls of power. We can do our part
supporting this work by ensuring we elect good partners who will fight
for and win needed policy changes.

This means when we’re electing officials who back working people —
and ensuring they remain accountable — we need to be clear we’re
talking about all working people, including Black people.

If elected officials don’t fight for Black people, they don’t
fight for any of us. If they can’t unequivocally say that Black
lives matter, then they don’t truly believe the lives of working
people matter. And if they don’t back us, we’ll vote them out of
office.

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In Seattle in the past few days, we’ve seen police armed to the
teeth on the same streets where only months ago nurses marched
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the bare minimum in safety protections and respect on the job. Police
in body armor are well-equipped to fight people exercising their
constitutional right to protest while medical professionals across the
state have been begging for the PPE they need to fight COVID-19. Think
of how twisted our system must be if we’re prepared to arm people
for murder, but not to save lives.

Black Americans need our allies in labor to show up for us. This
violence sits on us most heavily but it is not on us to fight it
alone. We need our siblings in the movement to hear our truth, to do
the uncomfortable but necessary work of fighting the white supremacy
that is choking us. We need you to fight for us to breathe.

_APRIL SIMS IS SECRETARY TREASURER OF THE WASHINGTON STATE LABOR
COUNCIL, AFL-CIO, representing the interests of more than 600 union
organizations with approximately 550,000 rank-and-file members._

_To learn more about the formation of race as a tool to divide working
people, check out Race to Labor: Can Organized Labor Be an Agent of
Social & Economic Justice? on our website
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For more on the origins of policing and white supremacy in our
criminal justice system, check out The New Jim Crow by Michele
Alexander. To learn more about the epidemic of police violence in
America, check out The Washington Post’s database of police
shootings
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and mappingpoliceviolence.org [[link removed]]._

The Stand [[link removed]] is a service of the Washington
State Labor Council, AFL-CIO (WSLC [[link removed]]) and its
affiliated unions, THE STAND was launched on May Day 2011 to restore
the kind of progressive populist source of information that once
thrived in our state, but has disappeared thanks to media
consolidation and corporate influence on the press. THE
STAND features news about — and for — working people. Its reports
and opinion columns focus on creating and maintaining quality jobs,
improving our families’ quality of life, promoting public policies
that will restore shared prosperity, and other things that the rest of
us care about.

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