Defunding the Police

Revaluing Care in the Times of Covid-19 Series

On July 18, Jessica Covil moderated a panel over Zoom called “Defunding the Police: Confronting Anti-Blackness, Centering the Margins.” This seminar gathered to discuss the role of anti-blackness in the U.S. policing system, and the need to protect society’s most marginalized populations by defunding the police as a form of redistributive justice and communal care.

When Covil began organizing this panel with the help of fellow graduate students Tania Rispoli and Yanping Ni, they agreed that the seminar should include both academic and non-academic voices and be led by people of color. As a white person, Covil hoped to help generate space rather than take it up; that is, she wanted to lend organizational labor, promote accessibility, and help set the scene for a conversation without dictating its content.

She was thankful to end up with an amazing panel—one that spanned from the East coast to the West, and included folks of various ages and forms of knowledge. The conversation was led by: Steph Hopkins, Durham activist, member of BYP100 and Durham Beyond Policing; J Kameron Carter, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, author of forthcoming book The Religion of Whiteness: On U. S. Political Theology; Vincente (SubVersive) Perez, UC Berkeley PhD Student, performance poet, activist, and author of B(lack)NESS & LATINI(dad); Meghan McDowell, Assistant Professor of History, Politics, and Social Justice at Winston-Salem State University; and, Stephanie Green, Duke Undergraduate majoring in Public Policy, and member of Duke Black Coalition Against Policing.

Conversation flowed easily between them. Covil limited her commentary, but enjoyed listening to the conversation and recalling her own research in Black Feminism. At one point, she typed “Sylvia Wynter vibes! <3” into the chat in response to one of Perez’s points, and he responded that he was “absolutely thinking alongside her.” The panelists also cited other black women thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe.

Counterbalancing these scholarly references, Hopkins and Green spoke to the activist work their organizations are doing in Durham and at Duke. Hopkins reiterated that “defunding the police” is really about the ability to “imagine something different.” Green discussed what defunding the police would mean in terms of investing in necessary resources, “including, but not limited to, affordable housing and healthcare. On a university campus, that can mean more resources for mental health services for students of color…anti-violence programs, educational resources, the list goes on.”

McDowell, as the sole non-black panelist, directed some of her comments to “white people specifically.” She said that “being anti-racist is not something you are, it’s something that you do; so, it’s not an identity, it’s a practice.” This reiterated Hopkins point that abolition depends on “trusting black people,” and that it has taken, and will take, “generations of anti-racist work” to transform society.