The Fall of Minneapolis

Review

I have a complicated relationship with police.

I am certain that I was racially profiled by police one time in my Burgundy on the inside Burgundy on the outside ‘97 Buick Riviera, and always had the fear thereof. My mother hated me having a giant afro or cornrows allegedly because it could exasperate these situations. In this case, the police driving on the other side of the street saw me and did a sudden and hectic U-Turn to get in the opposite headed traffic I was in. By happenstance my registration was a day or two expired, and what started off as a crazy conversation beginning not with license and registration please but with how long have you been out of jail, they ran my info and were calmed by my demeanor. I also learned to never attempt to step out the vehicle without being instructed to. Other police have driven next to me and let me go with a warning for having no daytime lights on.

You cannot let your politics, radical or reactionary, get in the way of The Way. Our Lord and Savior, the light of light which came into the world, taught us to love one another. And that category is expansive enough of a definition to include the totality of humanity. Growing up on ‘90s boombap and beyond, you can imagine my mind was formed to have an orientation toward the police that at maximum screamed FUCK THE POLICE, and later at minimum, FILM THE POLICE. In high school, I did a research paper for American History on the Black Panthers, who exclusively referred to the police as pigs and swine. I read The Black Panthers Speak and Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism.

In university, I dived deep into theory. I read about transformative justice, prison abolition, and police abolition. From anarchists who are communists and anarchists who are capitalists. I had my fancy exceedingly tickled by how traditionalist societies dealt with crime and punishment. Prof. Efrem Isaac relayed to me and a group gathered at my parish how the Oromo compelled victim and offender of a murder case to eat cattle gallbladder (or something like that) together to make peace, or else be banished from the community forever. I learned about the Hmong (and other Zomians) from novelist Anne Fadiman’s incomparable The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, anthropologist James C. Scott’s scholarship, Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Turino, and the personal testimony of a bigoted suitemate from Minneapolis. He had a prejudice against Somali, whom I knew, and Hmong, whom I came to know. I even later lived in North Dakota, frequenting Minneapolis, and lived in Merced, both of which are locations the Hmong were relocated to by the CIA after their aid in secret and dirty wars in Southeast Asia. The Hmong culture is a historically tax-gatherer dodging one that relied on slash-and-burn agriculture. There’s no room for police and prisons in that world. Instead, you get shamans as arbitrators. When physical space runs out, and nature fills the vacuum of power she abhors, these traditionalist societies get subsumed by bigger neighbors who use police and prisons.