Racist Treatment of Black Men is Systemic.

By David Mosca
NJ Urban News

Paul Butler, a legal analyst on MSNBC and former federal prosecutor, was the latest speaker to be featured at Rutgers University’s continuing lecture series on “Democracy and Ethnonationalism.” 

Butler’s lecture on Wednesday, April 9, was titled “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” and it takes its name from Butler’s 2017 book of the same name. Butler is an international expert on critical race theory, criminal justice, and criminal law. 

The event, the fifth in a series, was hosted by Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSR).

“In my time as a federal prosecutor, I learned things about myself and how I felt about my role in incarcerating people of color,” Butler, an Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center, says. 

“The things I’ve learned are addressed in Chokehold. There is data that when someone sees a Black man, there is fear. But like many forms of racism, it is manufactured.” 

Butler began by going back to the beginning of African American history and the cyclical progress of that history throughout the centuries. 

When slavery ended and emancipation began, not everything was solved. Jim Crow laws followed in the wake of emancipation, enforcing racial segregation.  

“By the 1960s, even after Brown vs the Board of Education, not much changed until there were uprisings across the country in response to a Black man killed by the state,” says Butler. 

“By that time, the Supreme Court gave the police more power to detain people, even if they don’t have the legal grounds to arrest them. They might find a reason they can be arrested, and police were allowed to frisk suspects. It was at this time that the prisons were now teeming with Black people.” 

Butler would go on to the four problems addressed in “Chokehold” regarding the race and crime problem: Black Male Behavior/Culture/Masculinity, Under-Enforcement of the Law, Police/Community Relations/ “Fairness,” and Social Control of Blacks/White Supremacy. 

“Of all these problems, who is right?” Butler asks. “I find myself persuaded by the activists. In my life as a prosecutor and a Black man, I find that the activists have correctly diagnosed the problem.” 

Other topics for discussion included the Ferguson reports following the death of Michael Brown in 2014.  

“The problem is not bad apple cops, but that the system is working the way it’s supposed to,” says Butler. “These superpowers that the court has given the police. You could be arrested for just selling a tobacco cigarette. You’re put in a chokehold.” 

The lecture would eventually delve into more present matters, discussing how today’s political landscape reflects these problems.  

“In the movement of Black Lives, there is hope and skepticism,” he says. “Pessimism is based on what the law creates and can take away. Affirmative action doesn’t exist on college campuses. It is against the law to discriminate based on race, and now that’s being done away with.” 

Butler says that a recurring theme in Black history is responding to violence with violence, which he discourages. 

Another theme that comes up is capitalism, economic opportunities, and how financial success is the key component in the progress and the idea that African Americans need businesses to call their own.  

“The goal of all of this is to get the police to stop killing us, beating us, treating us like we’re not human beings,” he says. “One of the ideas I talk about in the book is abolition. Black Lives is an abolition of a new era of Jim Crow. What does prison do? People think it keeps them safe from those who would harm them. There are times when prison doesn’t do that very well. We’re left to ask how to keep our families whole instead of locking them in cages.”  

Before ending the lecture, Butler addressed the ongoing issue of police reform.

“The first time the idea of police reform was heard was during the marches for George Floyd,” he said. “When people called for defunding the police in June 2020, two months later, in August, cities around the country were removing money from the police budget and putting it towards social services.” 

When discussing the controversial topic, it was pointed out that defunding the police doesn’t mean getting rid of them but rather putting funds in more places that need them.  

“Some of this may have been for show, and some of it may have been on paper,” said Butler. “But some of it was real.” 

Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where he specialized in public corruption. 

He prosecuted a United States Senator and three FBI agents, among several other law enforcement officials. He is a graduate of Yale University cum laude and Harvard Law School cum laude. 

Rutgers will continue its Democracy and Ethnonationalism lecture series with “Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System,” featuring the author of the book of the same name, Yashica Dutt, on Wednesday, April 23, at noon.