My Disconnect

As I have been reading this book, I have had a fairly easy time seeing things from Coates perspective and understanding his attack on American culture as a whole. He is good about blending his anecdotal evidence along with facts to make a literary concoction strong in emotion and logic. This was definitely the hardest reading for me personally, My father was a police officer and was a very good one. He believed that he was serving his community and was helping keep harmful people out of the lives of those not so dangerous. As Coates began his argument about the PG county officer simply being another cog in the wheel of the American Police State's grand scheme to destroy all change of African-American progress, I disagreed. It was at this point that I felt he generalized an issue far to broad, complex and geographically overarching. That officer was not a good officer. No, he should not have been able to go back to work. No, the police chief should not have received a raise. Yes, the officer should have been charged and investigated and punished had he been found guilty. But not all police officers are bad men.
I recently had a discussion with my father about this very topic. Many of the topics being brought up in this book have intrigued me and manufactured questions about the world that surrounds me. My father said that at the end of the day, he just wanted to go home to his family. His motivation was never to kill people, or find pleasure in beating someone. He wanted to do his job, do it well, and stay safe in the process. He also made a really interesting point. Low-income culture, not just African-American culture or Hispanic culture or any other ethnic based culture, has demonized the police force. Due to this demonization, kids raised in this culture never want to be police officers. The citizens in these communities feel no connection to the police and the police feel no connection to the communities. This makes the demonization more frequent and sever and leads to many misunderstandings and problems within these communities. Thus, the cycle continues.
I think one of the strongest dividers of the world and of community today is the vicious cyclical behavior of race, income inequality, and lack of understanding. Some may say, "There isn't any slavery today, so why does it matter now?" Well, during that time, Euro-Americans were able to advance their culture so much farther than African-Americans. Due to this culture dominance, a cycle continued that the dominant culture would remain dominant and the minority cultures would remain stuck in the position that they had been reduced to. This cycle continued even after slavery was abolished and minority cultures are fighting this cycle to this very day. This cycle is manifested socioeconomically and is marked by severe polarization within the country.