#BlackLivesMatter is not just about police brutality, it's about ending mass incarceration and the narratives that drive it.

After taking time to process what is happening in the context of what I've been studying about the root causes of poverty and violence in the inner city, I've come to several insights. Just as Malala said, it wasn't a person who shot her, it was an ideology--what we need to fight are the ideologies and narratives that created the situation where police officers are able to treat people of color as if they are not human beings, as if their lives are disposable.

For centuries, the ideologies of white supremacy and the narratives manufactured and used by white supremacists to dehumanize, pathologize, and criminalize black and brown people has enabled the white power structure to justify and legislate racist policies of mass incarceration to keep black and brown people from asserting their human rights and accumulating economic and political power.

More recently, the power structure used backlash against the riots of the 60's and 70's to exponentially increase spending on law and order and build up militaristic policing and gargantuan prison systems. Then in the 80's and 90's, the power structure used the "War on Drugs" to continue to mass incarcerate people growing up in poverty, which further reinforced the traumatization, impoverishment, and stigmatization of families without resources---creating a devastating spiral where people with no opportunities to earn a legitimate living in the mainstream economy, felt compelled to say yes to the opportunities that were available to them in the underground economy. Compounded with the under-investment in education, inner city schools unfortunately became no better than pipelines into prisons.

Ending police brutality is not enough. We have to end policies of mass incarceration and economic racism that perpetuate and are perpetuated by narratives originally created by white supremacists. We have to create new policies and legislation to reverse the historical devastation of black and brown communities unleashed by these broken policies.

Sources and recommended reading:

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi