Problematic Black Women: Who Do We Include in Black History Month?
In 2020, two major moments in Black history were made. California Senator Kamala Harris became the first Black woman to accept the Vice President nomination: Carmen Best, Seattle’s first Black female police chief, resigned.
These women share many things in common. They were young Black women rising in the West, ascending the highest ladders of success in progressive West Coast behemoths of industry. America’s ambitious destiny had finally manifested. Where America could shed her sins and emerge triumphant.
And yet, these two became emblems of America’s regressive policing culture.
I, theoretically, should be excited about the Vice Presidency of Kamala Harris. She is a Black woman who has spent her career in influential government positions. She even bears a striking resemblance to my own mother. Yet we see with her, a continued pattern of using the law to disenfranchise Californians who have few avenues to challenge the state’s will.
Harris has a storied history of legal abuses during her tenure as California’s Attorney General.
- Laughing about jailing parents under California truancy laws,
- Blocking the release of parole-eligible inmates to combat wildfires
- Consistently defending the use of the Death Penalty
- Challenged the release of a man who spent 13 years in prison for possession of a concealed weapon, despite numerous pieces of exonerating evidence.
She ironically writes in her memoir:
“America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.”
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best inherited a police department in crisis. SPD had just finished being investigated by the Department of Justice, over claims of excessive force. This investigation had been prompted by the controversial killing of John T. Williams, a native American woodcarver with hearing disabilities in 2010.
“Our investigation has revealed that inadequate systems of supervision and oversight have permitted systemic use of force violations to persist at the Seattle Police Department,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.
This pattern persisted in 2020. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Seattle Police clashed with protestors for weeks in Seattle’s vibrant Capitol Hill neighborhood. Seattle Police deployed flashbangs, tear gas, rubber bullets, sound cannons, and other military-grade tools in Seattle’s most densely populated neighborhood. Residents of Capitol Hill reported tear gas seeping into their own homes. The tension came to a head when on June 8, the Seattle Police Department decided to abandon the East Seattle Police Precinct.
“The decision to board up the precinct — our precinct, our home, the first precinct I worked in — was something I was holding off,” Best says in an address to SPD officers, “You should know, leaving the precinct was not my decision.”
The next day, the iconic Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) was born. And with it, came an iconic policy failure that challenged Best and her legacy. Seattle’s Black leadership was torn: older Seattle Black leaders rallied behind Best’s leadership, while Millennial and Gen leaders decried her tenure. Bishop Reggie Witherspoon directly tells Carmen Best at a public town hall in Seattle’s historically Black Central District,
“Our only challenge to you is that you call out the bad cops. We cannot allow racist, bigot cops to remain as they are. We’re talking about police reform. I don’t know how you reform racism. I don’t know how you reform bigotry, but we’ve got to at least fix the system.”
After numerous violent incidents in the CHAZ, the city of Seattle chose to dismantle the area on July 1st and more protests emerged regarding SPD’s actions in clearing the site. On July 25, violent riots broke out in Seattle and 26 protestors were arrested. Months of protests that lead to hundreds of arrests and thousands of dollars of property damage continue to erode public trust in the Seattle Police Department. Under pressure from budget cuts, criticism over continued excessive force claims, and national media pressure, Best announced her resignation on August 11, 2020. She has now moved onto commentating for MSNBC.
What a tragic tenure for Seattle’s first Black Police Chief.
When do we come to terms with the reality that identity markers like race only inform our perspective, not define it? Being Black won’t necessarily make me kind towards Black people, being a woman doesn’t mean I will be a feminist. It’s a paternalistic fallacy that continues to excuse bad actions at the expense of justice.
With Harris and Best, the fantasy of identity politics is corrupted. No matter how marginalized we may be at our roots, we are all capable of creating significant institutional harm. This Black History Month, it is incumbent for the Black community to ask itself what kind of narratives do we want to uphold for the future of our community.
