There has been discussion of the oppression of Black people in Freeport, the Midwest, the United States, and the world.
It has happened for decades in the civil rights community; it has happened in light of the actions taken by our current national government; and it has happened after the police shootings of several Black Americans this summer, most recently of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
I believe this excerpt from Robin Diangelo’s book White Fragility explains the reality of systemic oppression well:
“Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression. If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires.
If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage.
But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird.
Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not.”
To be able to understand the “birdcage” as a whole better, I would like to share what some of these individual barriers are.
One of those “wires” in the USA is healthcare. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2020 CDC article explains that “research has shown that racial health disparities don’t just affect poor African Americans, but they also cross class lines.”
Dr. Ana Langer, director of the Women and Health Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston stated that, “Basically, black women are undervalued. They are not monitored as carefully as white women are. When they do present with symptoms, they are often dismissed.”
Another “wire” in the birdcage is housing. A US Department of Housing and Urban Development report from 2018 found that, “Despite making up 14% of the population of the state, Black Illinoisans make up 30% of residents experiencing poverty and 59% of residents experiencing homelessness.” They found this to be true in rural, suburban, and urban areas.
The statewide coalition Housing Action Illinois, in their Sept. 2019 report, identified some of the systemic causes as disproportionate rates of mass incarceration and eviction, as well as segregation and discrimination, which contribute to Black people in Illinois being 8 times more likely to experience homelessness than white people.
Per Illinois DCFS data as of May 31st, 2020, Black people make up 13.8% of Illinois’s population, yet Black children make up 43.8% of the children that have been removed from their homes by DCFS.
During my senior year of high school, 21.7% percent of my classmates were Black students. There were 140 out-of-school suspensions that year, 45.7% of them were for Black students. Two Black young adults were the only students that were expelled. These figures are from a 2015 survey required by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
These different areas do not exist in a vacuum. Together they form a structure of oppression that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individuals.
As the past three months of protests have indicated, a significant force of oppression is our prison-industrial complex. I’m not going to list the statistics on the rate at which Black people are brutalized or killed by the police in the US compared to white people. You already know by now. Neither will I list the rate at which Black people are incarcerated in the US compared to white people, nor the United States’ per-capita incarceration rate compared to any other developed Western country.
I won’t delve into the conditions of the jails and prisons in Illinois and the country as everyone that’s familiar with our carceral system is aware that there is little to no rehabilitation in our correctional facilities, only dehumanizing punishment that does remarkably little to deter crime or reduce recidivism.
If you’ve been seeing or hearing “ACAB” or “all cops are bastards”, they are most likely not saying that they have met every single law enforcement officer and found that they are all mean, immoral people who intentionally dislike others because of their race.
The sentiment is probably closer to the chant “No good cops in a racist system”, which reflects the role that modern American police forces play in the oppression of Black people and other marginalized groups.
We spend over ten million dollars a year on punishment and incarceration in Freeport and Stephenson County. It has been shown time and time again that the structure of modern policing in the US is not an effective, cost-efficient, or even a humane approach to public safety, especially for people that are not white, able-bodied, cisgender, wealthy or English-speaking. I encourage you to research and to discuss lasting alternatives to punishment and incarceration.
If you are not familiar with prison abolition yet, now is a great time to learn.
Austin Anderson is a local Spanish interpreter with an academic background in the colonization of the Americas from Northern Illinois University. He is a white, bisexual, cisgender man that listens to music too loud and can’t wait for international travel to be safe again.
