“I CAN’T BREATHE” has been the rallying cry for protests against U.S. law enforcement’s excessive use of force targeting African Americans. The phrase obtained its symbolism after Minneapolis police choked and killed African American George Floyd while arresting him for passing counterfeit currency—a non-violent crime. Yet, this short sentence also embodies the systemic racism Black Americans have suffered, as well as the toxic U.S. policing culture that has evolved to prey upon them. The protests are enlightening more people than ever about U.S. racial dynamics.

Broken windows and a racial chokehold

   One of the earliest and most infamous cases of murdering innocent Black Americans was that of Emmett Till. On Aug. 28, 1955, two white men kidnapped, beat, and shot 14-year-old Emmett and threw him into a river for allegedly flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white grocery store worker. Ruled innocent by an all-white jury and protected against double jeopardy, the men eventually admitted that they in fact had committed the crime. In 2008, Bryant herself said that her claims in 1955 were false. Emmett’s mutilated body became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act. Although Black deaths due to unofficial law enforcement have decreased since Emmett Till, African Americans suffered from (and continue to endure) systemic racism, which often drives them to poorer neighborhoods with more crime—and to more lethal interactions with police. Blacks have thus faced unwarranted and excessive violence from police for decades.

   But their interactions exacerbated noticeably after the broken windows theory was incorporated into policing from the 1990s. Introduced in 1982, broken windows claims that visible signs of civil disorder encourage further crime, inducing more serious crimes. It encourages a hardline stance against minor offenses such as loitering, public drinking, and jaywalking to create an atmosphere of lawfulness. Combined with Regan’s hardline war on drugs policy, a policing culture of zero tolerance was created, falling harder on communities of color and especially Blacks. As of 1991, African American men had a 29.5% lifetime chance of going to prison, disproportionately high compared to 4.4% for whites and 5.1% for the entire population*.

Defund the police

   As police were increasingly tasked with more intensive surveillance and response, they naturally came to require more funding. Funds for other social organizations began to be cut, developing a disproportionately heavy reliance on U.S. police for solving social issues in addition to crime. A prime example is that U.S. police officers—instead of counselors and addiction experts—are tasked with responding to those in mental health crises and curbing the drug abuse epidemic. Police often lack the proper training to subdue these unstable individuals effectively, resulting in unnecessary injuries and a significant number of deaths; 21.7% of civilian deaths by police have been directly related to “issues with the victim’s mental health or substance-induced disruptive behaviors**.”

   Although the frequency of such non-violent tasks requires police to be better trained in subduing rather than exercising violence, U.S. policing culture has adopted a disproportionately militant atmosphere. A popular lecture adopted by many police departments, for instance, is “killology,” taught by visiting lecturer Dave Grossman on the psychology of taking a human life. This training creates the notion that killing is a highly necessary component of the job, and as there is no federal agency governing police recruitment, no system is in place to dismiss officers who take this predatory philosophy too far***. Efforts to check this training have been thwarted even after high profile, police-induced innocent deaths. Prominently in 2016, the mayor of Minnesota banned killology training after an overreacting police officer who had taken this course shot and killed African American Philando Castile. However, the head of the Minnesota police union Lieutenant Bob Kroll openly announced that he planned to defy that decision and encouraged officers to take the training in their own time****.

   In the past 40 years, overall spending on policing in the United States has tripled to total $1.5billion, with cities such as Los Angeles spending over 40% of their budget on maintaining a sizeable police force*****.

   It is difficult to know exactly how many deaths have been caused by excessive U.S. police violence, as they have been known to misreport death counts according to the Washington Post. The Post thus created a database compiling reports based on press coverage. They have found that since 2015, an estimated 1,000 people have been killed by police each year.

The Asian factor

   2020’s BLM protests are exceptional in that more people than ever are participating. Various polling centers claim anywhere from 15 to 26 million U.S. citizens have participated as of June 22 in what some claim is the largest political protest movement in U.S. history******. Net support for Black Lives Matter among the voting population has risen 3-11%, though the support rate has dropped since late May and June*******.

   The protests have also attracted enthusiastic participation of many white and other racial populations so that in some regions they have outnumbered Black protesters. “Tensions culminated once [between Asian and Black Americans] during the L.A. Riots,” stated Professor James Kyung-Jin Lee, an Asian American literature professor at University of California Irvine with an intense interest in U.S. interracial tensions. “But the fundamental issue—Asian Americans identifying with whites and accepting a certain degree of discrimination at the sacrifice of Black Americans and others—was left unresolved. These protests could be an opportunity to start alleviating historical racial divides.”

   Tensions between the two minorities rose when the “model minority” stereotype was given to Asian Americans. Though first used to describe the socioeconomic success of Japanese Americans, the phrase paints other minorities as relatively insolvent and prone to crime and ignores socioeconomic issues among Asian American communities, while politicians adopt the phrase to justify government inaction towards disparities between racial groups********. Animosity between Korean and Black Americans specifically worsened after Soon Ja-du shot 11-year old Latasha Harlins in her grocery store, allegedly catalyzing massive violence against 2,200 small Korean American businesses by African Americans that came to be known as the L.A. Riots. Although Korean Americans in more recent studies claim Du’s actions were caused by cultural differences and customer-owner conflict, the general American population and media perceived the incident to be race-driven*********. Such mounting distrust between the two minorities was left unresolved.

   2020’s BLM protests show clear change in this dynamic, with more Asian Americans supporting the cause than any other non-Black American race; 89% of Asian American adults support the movement and 73% feel connected to it according to Gallup, while 65% of U.S. adults support the movement and 50% feel a connection. Asians have also been taking direct action such as participating in and leading protests and starting “Letters for Black Lives,” an organization that provides multilingual resources to help people talk about BLM with their families. “The Asian community owes a lot to African Americans for the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Act of 1965,” stated Amber Lee, a student protest organizer from Occidental College, Los Angeles. “It is time [to] overcome differences and resist the racial discrimination that harms us all.”

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   Despite this enthusiastic turnout, the protests and political reactions have been shifting away from BLM as presidential candidates appropriate the more general and thus more attractive principle of police reform. The clamor against police aggression and American fascism has overshadowed the original concern for BLM, something several protesters are struggling to revive. “I feel that the cause the protests are for in July are important as well,” Amber Lee continued in her interview. “But several other protesters and I are now asking ‘Can we please talk more about Black Lives Matter?’” For Asian and black Americans, these protests could be an opportunity to unite and remedy a flawed system—or risk leaving mutual tensions and grievances unresolved to erupt another time.

*Jan M. Chaiken, "Crunching Numbers: Crime and Incarceration at the End of the Millennium," National Institute of Justice Journal, January 2000.

**“Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement: Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States 2009-2012”

***The StarTribune

****The StarTribune

*****The Guardian

******blacklivesmatter.com

*******The New York Times

********NBC News

*********Poon, OiYan, Dian Squire, Corinne Kodama, Ajani Byrd, Jason Chan, et al. 2016. "A Critical Review of the Model Minority Myth in Selected Literature on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Higher Education." Review of Educational Research