Pools, Porches and Police Brutality

When Chicago warms up, residents emerge from something close to hibernation. The public pool at my apartment complex will soon reopen. This year, the city has a huge amount of unreleased social and intellectual energy stored up since March, when COVID-induced quarantining became widespread.

We can’t release that energy by hugging each other or going to concerts or bars. But luckily, this summer promises us an outlet, whether it’s the continuous cultural upheaval over police violence and its accompanying protests or the drama swirling around the impending 2020 election. The selections that follow help listeners adapt to the chaos of reality by providing righteous anger through rap, insights on how we got here, unexpected perspectives on policing, and, most importantly, the simple bliss of a good groove.

Song: Dead Prez — “Police State”

The opening of “Police State,” a 1998 hit by the confrontational hip-hop duo Dead Prez, begins with this recording of Omali Yeshitela, the founder of the Uhuru African Internationalist movement and a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement:

“What is the State?

The State is this organized bureaucracy.
It is the police department. It is the Army, the Navy.
It is the prison system, the courts, and what have you.
This is the State — it is a repressive organization.

But gee, well, you know, you've got to have the police, 'cause if there were no police, look at what you'd be doing to yourselves! You'd be killing each other if there were no police!

But the reality is, the police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain't got.”

Listening to this caught me off guard with its colloquial eloquence and obvious relevance. And the song itself hit even harder. The first verse — “I throw a Molotov cocktail at the precinct” — immediately and powerfully conjured images of Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct ablaze in May.

If, for some reason, you are having a hard time getting yourself or someone else pissed off about racial injustice, police violence and the surveillance state, blasting “Police State” is a good fallback plan. Turn it up on Spotify here.

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show — “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful”

Put some sunscreen on, get outside, get comfortable, and prepare for a powerful, insightful conversation covering ground from race in America to the craft of writing, from the failures of the president of the Unites States to reasons to the misunderstood Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ta-Nahisi Coates, who wrote the searing “Between the World and Me,” recently joined Vox founder Ezra Klein on his show, which I listen to regularly. A segment discussing misconceptions about public sentiment toward Dr. King was particularly striking to me. Coates articulates:

“People forget that King got stoned in Cicero. They pretend like when King was leading these movements against Jim Crow and against segregation, that he was somehow the most popular man in the country. He was hated! He was hated by white people all throughout the country; he was hated at the very highest levels of law enforcement in this country by J. Edgar Hoover, who tried to get this man to actually commit suicide.

So part of this is not ‘what is the reaction to nonviolence in the midst of a riot?’ but ‘what is the reaction to nonviolence when it happened?’”

It made me ask myself: How did the NFL react to Colin Kaepernick “when it happened?” Another favorite line Coates delivers: “Trump is the guy with the knee on the throat.”

This 90-minute episode is worth listening to in its entirety, alone, without distractions. Hear it via Apple Podcasts here.

Audio Article: Ben Taub — “The Spy Who Came Home” (New Yorker)

Why don’t more news sites provide consistent audio version of their articles? In this masterpiece, Taub introduces the world to Patrick Skinner, a former CIA officer-turned-cop in his (any my) hometown of Savannah, GA. He has some views on policing that you don’t often hear from the police. Taub describes the flaws of Georgia’s police training program: “There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category.” As a result, police encounters in Georgia tend to go downhill quickly:

“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”

In my opinion, Taub is one of the best magazine journalists we have, and Skinner is an important figure to understand before painting police forces with a broad brush.. Access the audio version of “The Spy Who Came Home” here.

Song: Hiatus Kaiyote — Laputa (Taylor McFerrin Remix feat. Anderson.Paak)

This reimagined version of “Laputa” by Hiatus Kaiyote, the self-professed creators of “multi-dimensional, polyrhythmic gangster shit”, has real weight. Hiatus Kaiyote previously was nominated for a grammy when they partnered with Q-Tip on “Nakamarra,” another track that’s worth putting on repeat. With Anderson’s voice in the mix, the vocals of Naomi Saalfied somehow have an even more piercing impact than usual in this track.

Check it out on Spotify now.

Thanks for reading the first post on WILT. Stay tuned for our first Monday Music post on 6/15.