From slavery to George Floyd: The racist history of U.S. policing

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From slavery to George Floyd: The racist history of U.S. policing

Jun 10, 2020

Democracy Now!

Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America," walks through the history of policing from the founding of the United States to today. "Going back to the mid-1600s into the early-1700s, colony after colony, from New York and Massachusetts to South Carolina and Virginia, passed a series of Black Codes or Negro Acts, various laws that were designed to empower everyday white citizens with the responsibility — and let me be clear — the duty to serve in an official capacity to surveil, monitor, to track and, when caught, to dispense corporal punishment against enslaved African people in the colonies," says Muhammad. "It was the largest bureaucracy dedicated to a form of policing that we recognize today. It was everywhere in the colonies." The author and historian also addresses the similarly racist foundations of the U.S. Border Patrol.



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