Hi, I’m Rund Abdelfatah.
And I’m Ramtin Arablouei.
ABDELFATAH: We co-host NPR's history podcast Throughline. To help give some historical
context to the police killing of George Floyd, and so many other Black people in this country,
this week we’re bringing you the deep history of policing in America.
ARABLOUEI: We wanted to understand how the relationship between police and the Black
community had evolved to one so bloody and tragic.
ABDELFATAH: So we reached out to this historian:
My name's Khalil Gibran Muhammad. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School.
ABDELFATAH: In his book, "The Condemnation of Blackness," Khalil lays out a historical
argument for how Black people have been criminalized over the past 400 years in the U.S. And he
does that by telling parallel narratives about the history of policing in the North and the
South. These stories share one key feature: the use of brutal force to control Black Americans.
ARABLOUEI: Policing in America started in the mid-1600s with the Boston Watch, essentially
a neighborhood watch group.
But some of the first police forces in the South were created to control enslaved Black people.
They would come to be known as “slave patrols.” Almost all white men had
to serve in these patrols.
ABDELFATAH: Their duties were written into law, like this slave patrol statute from Louisiana
in 1835:
Arrest any slave or slaves, whether with or without a permit, who may be caught in the
woods or forest with any fire or torch, which slave or slaves thus arrested shall be subjected
to corporal punishment, not exceeding 30 stripes.
MUHAMMAD: So the tying together early on - the surveillance, the deputization essentially
of all white men to be police officers - and then to
dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning.
ARABLOUEI: The Civil War eventually brought an end to slavery in America. But for most
Black people in the South, it didn’t fundamentally change their lives.
ABDELFATAH: And by the early 20th Century, the KKK would emerge to enforce control over
Black citizens in the South. And this pushed millions of Black citizens to flee to northern
“progressive” cities, as part of what would become known as The Great Migration.
MUHAMMAD: police officers receive African American migrants in the same way that their
white neighbors and community peers did, which is with contempt and hostility. When a white
person throws a Molotov cocktail into a new Black homeowner on a street that had previously
been all Irish or all Polish or all German, the police come and they arrest the Black
family and defend the white mob. And this happens time and time, over and over again.
They are policing the racial norms of white supremacy from the very beginning in the North.
ABDELFATAH: Black skin becomes equated with criminality.
ARABLOUEI: And according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the system hasn’t fundamentally
changed since then. He says that pointing out the problem is clearly not sufficient
to fix the system.
MUHAMMAD: Because the problem has been known for a century. The evidence has been presented
for a century. The recommendations for change, for holding police officers accountable, for
charging them with criminal offenses when they behave criminally.
It's a century of the same story playing out over and over again.
It seems to me that's what's possible is recognizing that police officers and police agencies are
incapable of fixing themselves.
And so the question that has to be asked in the wake of George Floyd, and I think this
question is being asked and answered by more white people than I've seen in my lifetime
is: Do white people in America still want the police to protect their interests over
the rights and dignity and lives of Black and, in too many cases, brown, indigenous
and Asian populations in this country?
ARABLOUEI: Our whole country is waiting to hear the answer to that question. That was
historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad. I’m Ramtin Arablouei.
I’m Rund Abdelfatah. You can listen to this full episode of NPR’s Throughline
wherever you get your podcasts and at npr.org/throughline.