July 9
GUEST: Stuart Schrader, research scientist in sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration and Citizenship, and author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, talks about the racist connections between foreign and domestic policy when it comes to law enforcement.Badges Without Borders
I know many reformers are hesitant to go beyond immediate problems. They have good, liberal instincts, but worry about diluting their causes by looking at other societies or countries. Finding the common threads between the racist police in Baltimore and the racist IDF soldiers in the West Bank is simply off the table.
Of course, both probably received the same training. The Baltimore police even traveled to Israel to study tactics, in a country where racist brutality is reserved for the underclass of Palestinians. Are there further connections between racist cops and US foreign policy? Our country has invaded and occupied any number of countries since the World War II. Did we learn a racist viciousness killing Koreans in the 1950s, or Vietnamese in the 1960s? We certainly killed enough to learn all the tricks of subjugation and repression. The young men and women who were lucky enough to come home often enrolled in police departments, to turn their service experiences into careers. The same is true for our endless wars in the Middle East. Shooting "ragtops" in Iraq and Afghanistan is as good training as they could get in punishing people of color in the US.
So is reform the answer? Or is the question broader than that? What does American militarism in the rest of the world do to our own country's standards of social justice? Trained as killers in American colonies abroad, and sent to Israel for additional skills, what other type of policing are these new recruits capable of providing to US citizens who happen to be Black.
Our leaders and our mainstream media will never connect these dots for us. We have to work it out for ourselves, with the help of writers like Stuart Schrader.
