Kevin Alexander Gray of Columbia, South Carolina, is a political cultural writer, activist, and organizer. A longtime contributor to The Progressive, he is the author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics, and one of the editors of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence. What follows is excerpted from an interview on WORT-FM Community Radio in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 10.
Q: Let’s start with the militarization of police and campus security.
Kevin Alexander Gray: When I was in college, you knew the campus security officer, you might even go visit his office. They didn’t carry guns. Their job was to protect the students. Now, in South Carolina, I looked up the statute and saw the main goal of a campus security officer is to uphold the laws of the state and act as a police officer.
I’m thinking of ways that you can actively get serious about changing the conditions of our country being so militaristic. This idea of violence. [Our leaders cannot] bring themselves to say our land is a land of descendants of people who are victims of genocide and people who were kidnapped. Every time I see the term African American slave, [I think] well they weren’t African Americans during the time that they were enslaved. They were Africans who were enslaved.
If you go to war and fight for imperialism based on this idea of white supremacy or settlerism, colonialism, against people who don’t look like you. Well, you’re part of that problem. You are racist.
There’s a lot about the language of violence and the language of oppression that people really need to take a look at. Even the language of lockdown. Your school is on lockdown. Your city is on lockdown, which is all prison language that comes out of the war on drugs, which expanded the role of the police in communities and the expanded militarization of the police departments, where you have SWAT teams in cities large and small or no-knock searches, where people just hit the door, go through your house without a warrant, without announcing themselves. That’s what led to the death of Breonna Taylor, and earlier Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit with a TV crew in tow.
If you talk about defunding the police, you have to put some meat on the bones. A lot of people don’t think that that’s possible. Of course that term is up for discussion, but part of what we can talk about, in regards to defunding the police, is ending the militarization, ending this idea that the police are operating in a war zone, and that citizens are its enemies. Those are the ways that you defund the police. Take away some of these vehicles that look like military vehicles.
Q: We have protestors, we have young people wanting to talk about difficult things, and it’s such a contrast to how our administration wants to talk about things.
Gray: I mean, I support the protests. I’m a realist and I tell people I’ve been black for sixty-three years. I live in the heart of the city, in the heart of a black community, and my grandfather was a sharecropper. I come from that background. My mother’s father was a Pullman porter. I come from a background of people organizing or people having to make do with what they had. But in learning how to effect change, you still have to go from protest to politics.
In going from protest to politics to achieve change, you have to have what I learned working with SCLC and the Rainbow Coalition through the years, you have to have movement discipline. You have to have a focus and you have to be at the table in some fashion when the laws are being discussed, when change is being discussed.
The problem that I have these days, especially in the black community, is that people elect people out of racial solidarity. A lot of the people they elect . . . end up aligned with the various structures that are being used against them. Back to my point, you can be out in the streets protesting, but you still have to move from that to politics to achieve change, and that takes organizing.
Q: You ran the Reverend Jesse Jackson's South Carolina presidential campaign in 1988. Talk a bit about its values and goals.
Gray: Establishing a multiracial, multi-issue coalition based on common ground for people of color in this country, and their allies, to understand what we can do together. When you look at what happened with Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, it was a Palestinian businessman that made the call to the police. Obviously, the progressive movement worldwide is aligned with the Palestinian movement. Now, if you were to go into those communities and ask people, “What do they know about Palestine?” What do they know about the struggles between Palestine and Israel? I could give you a history of that and why we ought to be allies.
When you talk about what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, it was an East Asian businessman that called the police. Also from a culture of colonialism. You can go all the way back to Latasha Harlins and the L.A. riots. The person that made the phone call there was a Korean business person. Look at that picture of that Hmong officer standing over George Floyd’s body; he comes from Laos. I suspect it probably was his grandparents or great grandparents who escaped the killing fields.
How could he not know [the struggle of the] person who his colleague had his knee on the neck of? He should have understood and related more to his struggle than to the person with the knee on the neck.
Q: One of the first cops that I saw taking a knee with protesters was actually in southern Wisconsin, in Beloit. Do you think this was genuine?
Gray: They can be genuine, but look, I was at a rally here in Columbia, for George Floyd. A young man, who was related to a young man that had been a victim of police violence, had been in the military, and he said, “I was in the military” and the crowd cheered. I said to the person standing next to me, “They ought not be cheering him because he was in the military. You ought to be cheering him because he got out of the military.” Then he said, “I was a sniper in Iraq,” and they cheered that too. I said, “Man, they’re just cheering a sniper that went to a war based on lies.”
If you go to war and fight for imperialism based on this idea of white supremacy or settlerism, colonialism, against people who don’t look like you. Well, you’re part of that problem. You are racist. When I was in the military, now I didn’t have anybody shooting at me, and luckily I didn’t shoot at anybody because I was in between wars. My brother, who went to Vietnam, and the people that fought a war for colonialism, well, they fought in a racist war.
Of course, everybody now is taking a knee or wearing kente cloth. Everybody is against racism. When push comes to shove, what are they going to do to fight back against the erosion or denial of equal protection or treatment, due process of law, equal opportunity and access to publicly owned institutions and organizations, and economic development in our community?
You can take a knee, but you need to open up that vault and figure out ways to get resources to people so that they can build a better life for their children. You should be out front supporting universal health care for all. I have long been a supporter of reparations now [and] just like defunding the police, that could mean a whole lot of things.
We have to figure out how to repair our community in a way that’s sustainable for the future, for the kids, for our children. It can't be all developer- and Wall Street-driven. It has to be driven neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community, and a redistribution of resources around our country, a radical revolution. Or maybe a radical evolution.