4. Reforming the Unreformable

GEORGE HILL still believes in structural accountability. For that I am grateful. He is giving you something to hold onto, Ezra. He believes that reform must be a priority. Beginning with Rusten Sheskey—a forlorn hope, it turns out. George Hill’s jersey read, presciently (to use the term loosely; there is nothing prescient about anticipating the next black death by police brutality), “Justice now.”

There is a moment in Fredric Jameson’s essay on utopia when he focuses on “omnipresent corruption.”1 In the process, Jameson argues that “omnipresent corruption” is at work in the “system at large, which is, in any case, too enormous and too complex to be susceptible to any decisive tinkerings which might improve it, let alone lead to something you could truly call systemic change.”2

As a slogan, “Enough,” as much as “Education reform” (and, in all probability, every one of the other inscriptions that adorned the players’ jerseys), is a reformist inadequacy designed to meet only the most pressing demands of our moment.

All the while the Leninist injunction obtains so “Enough” is decidedly not enough.

As Alex S. Vitale argues in The End of Policing, all talk about the reform of policing must be abandoned, for no reason other than it is an impossibility. And even if it were possible, there is no political will for it. And even if it were possible, the powerful police unions would do everything possible to oppose such policies. They would surely work to obstruct “meaningful” reforms and/or to delay its implementation.

After all, the Minneapolis Police union, as reactionary as they come, fought tenaciously to keep Officer Weber in its ranks.

This is the truth upon which the “Defund the Police” movement is founded, a truth as controversial in some liberal circles as it used as a blunt instrument in reactionary ones. Historically grounded, it is not surprising that Vitale’s work anticipated, symptomatically rendered, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor . . . Daunte Wright. Published in 2017, three years before George Floyd’s murder, Vitale is trenchantly clear: “We don’t need empty police reforms; we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems.”3

These “problems” include, as we well know, inequality in education as well as an economic system intent on either extracting maximum value from labor or, worse(?), condemning those superfluous to capitalism’s needs to a Hobbesian fate. An unsightly fate, best kept out of sight. (A recent study determines the United States as the most unequal of Western democracies.)4 Poorly educated minorities, homelessness, mental illness, the working poor and their lumpen cousins are not “problems” policing is either designed or committed to solving. Working to end white police brutality is what today demands. Such a goal requires opening up to the possibility of society free from policing entirely. What is necessary, then, is the imagining of a tomorrow that breaks entirely with the political logic—that is, with the reformist premises and constraints—that obtain today.

Our thinking of how to reorder the world must begin with the likes of Vitale and other critics of policing (Radley Balko, Joseph J. Ested, Jennifer E. Cobbina, Angela J. Hattery, and Earl Smith) who demonstrate, each in their own register, the futility of the reformist argument. A crucial component of the utopian project for Jameson is its capacity for self-reflexivity. Utopia as an unfinished or incompletable undertaking, a project in need of constant renovation and rethinking.5 In the terms offered by William Godwin (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice) and Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality), utopia as the project of “perfectibility.” To this end, let us aphorize Godwin’s position: in order to secure the “general good of the species” we must “reconcile” ourselves to the “desirableness of a government of the simplest construction.”6 Something on the order of More’s Utopia: a democratically organized society with few rules.

An odd place too, one where gold has no value. Gold is the stuff that kids play with in Utopia. One wonders what gold-ringed and necklaced professional athletes might make of such a prospect, such an inversion of values.

So rather than take the court for their playoff game, the Bucks players were talking with the Wisconsin attorney-general about how to ensure that Sheskey would be charged and brought to justice. It did not happen. (All the more reason to abandon reformism.) To ensure that the judicial process would be expeditious as well as just, the “Deer” were not asking the Magic players to join them in boycotting the game. Neither were the Bucks players asking for a postponement, which would allow for the game, in a series the Bucks were leading three games to one, to be played at a later date, although this is how things would eventually turn out. No. The Milwaukee Bucks players, in taking their stand, were making a clear statement: they were willing to forfeit their game. That is, in not taking the court, they were announcing their willingness to concede the game to the Magic. In doing so, the Bucks players were contravening the terms of their own union—the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), which has an agreement with the league owners that prohibits striking. And, striking is what the Bucks were doing, although the preferred nomenclature was “boycott.”

The Bucks were striking, in the strict labor sense, by withholding their labor, but also striking insofar as they sought to strike a blow against police brutality by absenting their bodies from public view. The Bucks were bringing attention to systemic American racism by, to mix sports metaphors, giving their particular inflection to the baseball phrase “striking out,” a term that itself is redolent with both “failure”—the inability to make contact, as in a baseball player missing a pitch, strike three, and is called “out”—and violence—to act physically, with malicious intent, against another. That, however, would be misleading, because what the Bucks were doing was striking out (speaking determinedly, and angrily too, one imagines, against racial injustice)—by not playing—against the horrific police violence meted out, in this specific instance, to Jacob Blake.

If any among us had doubts about the depth of white racist sentiment among police officers, then such hesitation or ambivalence was done away with, rudely, by the Trump-inspired insurrection of January 6, 2021. The significant number of law enforcement officials involved in storming of the capital laid bare the extent of white supremacist thinking in the ranks of the police. It should have surprised no one. Instead, it should have told us what we should already know: there can be no reforming the police.

If any of us had any doubts, the shooting of Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old Latino boy by a Chicago police officer, should have put paid to that. A thirteen-year-old boy, in a dark alley, holding up his hands, surrendering. Shot, once, fatally, by officer Eric Stillman. The Chicago police union chief defended the officer.7

Here too, however, the strategy that is dual power has a role to play. In April 2021, the Maryland legislature voted to repeal its police Bill of Rights,8 overturning a veto by Governor Larry Hogan. The Bill of Rights was one of three pieces of legislation repealed, of which the police Bill of Rights is salient because it provides police officers with immunity from investigation and prosecution for actions committed during the course of duty. The Bill extends to police officers due process privileges not extended to ordinary civilians.

The repeal by the Maryland legislature should not, however, be understood as standing in opposition to the defund the police movement, but as its corollary. Undoing undue police privilege and protection before the law is what representative politics can do. It is appropriate that Maryland should be the first state to repeal a police Bill of Rights because it was the first state to enact such a bill, in 1974.

The Maryland repeal might, or might not, mark the limit of representative politics’ ability to reign in police brutality and make it accountable to the citizenry. What it cannot do, however, is solve the problem.

(In fairness, however, let us score this as a win for reformism. With the precondition, of course, that such a reformist victory recognizes itself as temporary and as furthering the cause of its ultimate negation.)

What the imposition of restraint on police violence can do, however, is open up a pathway to thinking how a society can organize itself in such a way that obviates the need for policing. And it raises the difficult question of how to ensure nonviolent, harmonious, and conflictual living (utopia does not seek to do away with conflict; instead, it works to organize those propensities) without the threat of repressive force. How can everyone live safely without a repressive apparatus?

An onerous undertaking, to be sure, but a necessary one.

Especially necessary in light of the history of policing, a history of violence against vulnerable constituencies that obtains with a virulence in our moment.

Repealing the police Bill of Rights as the first step toward living in a safe, police-free utopia. Appropriating the progressive tendencies in representative politics in order to undo it completely.

Consolidating dual power into a singularly utopian project.

In acting unilaterally, the Bucks players were going against their own union and against their own league. The NBA is a black majority league, in terms of the players if not majority ownership, which, it must be said (especially under the leadership of Adam Silver,9 the NBA commissioner), has historically been the league most sympathetic to and attuned to the struggles of their players—and, by extension, their communities. (The NBA and the WNBA are by far the most progressive of the four major sports leagues—baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey.) That the Bucks, moved to inaction by Hill, were acting as a sovereign political entity was obvious—perhaps more obvious in retrospect than in the moment itself; still, no matter—because their opponents were not alerted to their decision. The vanguardist Bucks led from the front. And they did so out of a geopolitical and, if you insist, personal, imperative. Jacob Blake lived within the larger environs of Milwaukee, their city. It was, as they correctly understood it, a responsibility that geography had determined fell to them. They, the Milwaukee Bucks, before anyone else, had to act. Not only them, in the end, but they had to lead. It was up to the Deer to lead their community in a moment of racist Fear.

“Systemic change” cannot be achieved in the current conditions because, as Jameson puts it, staying with his theme of political corruption, “representative democracy is irreparably corrupt and incapable of fulfilling its promises.”10

At the very least, then, what Jameson offers is the need to reflect upon the insufficiency of “Enough” and how such a constitutive insufficiency demands a confrontation with the failures of previously “unfulfilled promise(s).”

However, it is also important to acknowledge the role that the Leninist concept of “dual power” plays in Jameson’s diagnosis. That is, as much as the historic limitations of representative democracy must be kept in the forefront of our thinking, this does not mean that George Hill and the Bucks should not have made, in that moment, and in its aftermath, should not continue to make, demands upon the powers that be in Wisconsin. (And they did, as shown below.) It simply means that such a “representation” to power is but one of the two axes along which the “politics of the instant” run.11 Dual power demands that two struggles be conducted simultaneously.

That is, it is necessary to make demands on the apparatus of power in Wisconsin while also asking seriously, and without preconception, What might be enough? How do movements that engage in “politics of the instant” want to organize—rather than only reorganize—society? How can a “politics of the instant,” what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have named the “multitude” (as Jameson reminds us), organize itself so that it can “tinker” with institutions as they are, but only with the intention of doing away with the society as we know it entirely? “Enough,” then, as the place where a utopian imagining—or any other imagining—has its genesis rather than marking a terminal (political) ambition.

From the vantage point of the still unaware Orlando Magic, just going about their usual shoot-about routine, the terms of the “contest,” to misrepresent the matter, went from the sloganistic, NBA-appropriate, “Fear the Deer” to the politically charged “Follow the Deer.” That way, as indicated by the “Deer,” lies the path to justice, beginning with ensuring that the appropriate punishment is meted out to Rusten Sheskey. Alas. In vain. It turns out.

Soon enough, the Magic players were informed of their opponents’ decision, to which they assented. Consequently, all of the NBA games for August 26 were postponed. Following that, after a players meeting (and in consultation with the NBA), all of the games for the 27th were similarly put on hold. (Play resumed on Saturday, August 29, with the Bucks sweeping aside the Magic.) Player-coaching staff-commissioner solidarity prevailed, if only after several hours of tumultuous discussion among the players. NBPA solidarity, under the leadership of Chris Paul (then of the Houston Rockets, now of the Phoenix Suns), forged out of a series of difficult conversations amongst the players in the NBA’s Covid-19-imposed “bubble,” dictated that no forfeiture was necessary. (Conversations that were mediated, in their most fractious moments, by Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls legend who is now the majority owner of the Charlotte Hornets.) However, before the agreement was reached to continue playing, the Lakers (led by LeBron James) and the Clippers were in fact willing to go further. (This after voicing their displeasure at the Bucks’ unilateral action.) The Lakers and the Clippers, two of the teams fancied to win the 2020 NBA championship, wanted to end the NBA season entirely. The two-day postponement represented a compromise, part of which was a commitment to keep social justice in the forefront of the remainder of the NBA postseason.

Out of the specter of forfeiture, which itself marks a willingness on the part of the Bucks players to sacrifice professionally (protesting police brutality is more important than playing the game of basketball), emerged the athletes’ movement against racism and injustice.

Let us propose “Enough” as the first articulation of dual power. Black athletes, led by the Bucks and supported by a host of NBA teams such as the L.A. Lakers (under the impetus provided by LeBron James), the Charlotte Hornets, the Houston Rockets, and the Miami Heat, made their organizational facilities available as polling places.12 By actively encouraging their fan base to vote, the NBA, the WBNA, and the National Football League (NFL), inter alia, and the players union operated within the structures of power. They worked at the level of representative democracy, registering their opposition to Trump and his policies. In pursuing this mode of political intervention, the NBA and its players worked actively to offset the Trump regime’s constant efforts to suppress minority voter turnout. It worked. Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. This campaign by the NBA, WBNA, the NFL, and so on showed itself important within the context of U.S. electoral politics. Reformism as necessary both in the moment of the now and, in all probability, for the foreseeable future.

Outside their NBA bubble, the world around them seemed to be everywhere aflame. Literally aflame in Kenosha, where buildings were set alight, where police clashed with protesters as soon as darkness set in and the state-imposed curfew was ignored, and while the Kenosha police stood idly by while a gun-wielding teenager, Kyle Rittenhouse of Antioch, Illinois, strutted through Kenosha’s streets shooting and killing two people and badly wounding a third. Rittenhouse found himself hailed appreciatively by passing cops and thrown a bottle of water for refreshment, by the cops, into the bargain.13 Literally aflame in already-much traumatized Minneapolis, still trying to emerge into some form of public life after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, where the death of a man on August 26, 2020, sparked conflicting rumors—suicide, homicide, police brutality. In a country on the edge, Minneapolis was perhaps the most finely balanced, ready to tip over, once more, into civil unrest, understandable, given how high tensions were running. The flames of racial animus were further fanned, once again, as they had been ever since Donald Trump took office, from the White House, playing host to the Republican national convention, from whence nary a word emerged on the shooting of Jacob Blake and the vigilante justice of Kyle Rittenhouse.