When I heard my friends and neighbors talking about defunding and disbanding the police, my first instinct was to dismiss it as ignorance. Nope. Absolutely not feasible.
When I heard them say all cops are bad, my mind immediately went to the kind police officers I had known in my life—to the engaged, cool-headed school police officer at the school I taught at in Baltimore, who we relied on to de-escalate fights between gang members; to my best friend’s brother, who was a police officer in my hometown in Missouri; to dozens of others, who I’d seen working hard to serve their communities. No, I could not accept others calling them “bad.”
When I saw my group of close friends—who are from diverse racial backgrounds, sure, but who are also mostly from middle-class (or wealthy) economic backgrounds, and who are all highly (often privately) educated—when I saw many of them passionately worked up about white supremacy, signing every petition that came along, and either sharing or trying check off as many of the items on the “10 or 25 or 75 Things White People Can Do to Be Anti-Racist” lists as they could in a weekend…(Read these books! Donate to these organizations! Say something on social media! Confess your privilege!)…No. I had seen the negative effects that the Christian concept of original sin, confession, and divine forgiveness can have, and I knew that token gestures and an (often socially-pressured) act of confession can provide a sense of absolution for people–and that that cleansed feeling can allow them to go on living exactly how they did before confessing, but guilt-free. Saved. Woke. Two sides of the same coin. I didn’t want my friends to seek absolution from the “black community;” I wanted them to seek actual change. I felt a sense of hardening toward them and the religious fervor that seemed to be overtaking reason and meaningful action.
And, as even more of my friends–who had spent the past several months scolding people in rural America for gathering in large groups during this pandemic–started, themselves, gathering in large groups in the pandemic’s epicenter, it was hard not to feel frustrated by their apparent hypocrisy and lack of concern for the vulnerable. No matter how they tried to spin it, they knew the virus was real. They knew who it impacted. And they were still making this choice to sacrifice lives (primarily the lives of others) for a cause that had been around for years prior and would be around for years after this pandemic. I wanted to scream, not now. No! And I did. To the only person within screaming-distance: my wife.
And while she had a lot of the same concerns, she had been thinking about them from a different angle: “I wonder if, instead of screaming ‘No,’ it might not be better to take a ‘Yes, and..’ approach to this movement.”
For those of you not #blessed enough to have friends who do improv comedy, the concept of “Yes, and..” is an approach to improvising a comedic scene. Rather than ever saying, ‘No,’ to your scene partner, even if they say or do something that is totally different from what you’d had in mind, you build off it and add to it. Improv comedy can be painfully messy. But you know you have the same goal of making people laugh, so you commit to keeping the momentum going and find your way together.
Now, most of us have never lived through a global pandemic like this one; many of us have never felt so out-of-control of our futures, so unable to plan. We are all being forced to improvise. We might as well embrace it, no?
That simple reframing of my reaction to the events unfolding in my neighborhood and around the world opened my mind and heart to the feelings and actions of my friends, and to the feelings and actions the thousands of neighbors, whose lives I don’t know, whose experiences are not mine, and whose feelings and reasoning I have no ground to judge.
To my friends and neighbors who felt moved to protest in NYC, I didn’t need to say, no, not now. I needed to say, yes, I understand this is important; and I understand that no one chose for George Floyd to be murdered at this moment and that something has to be done. AND we should keep social distance, wear masks, and quarantine after protesting until we can get tested for the virus to protect others whose lives are at stake. It is brave to take a stand and create momentum for an important cause, and it is responsible to protect the health of others. Your safety is my safety is all of our safety!
To my highly-educated, middle-class, racially-diverse friends and neighbors, yes, absolutely, we have a problem with race and with profiling; and yes, let’s acknowledge it and acknowledge that the problem endangers the safety and freedom of Black people. AND let’s also acknowledge that we also have significant, inextricably connected problems with wealth inequality and access to education. Yes, solutions to racial inequality will help solve economic and educational inequality. AND solutions to economic and educational inequality will help solve the problem of racial inequality. Truly, we need to solve all three problems in order to completely solve any one. AND solving those linked issues will also help us solve major issues that impact women, people in neglected rural areas, immigrants, and anyone else who has not had the opportunities or freedom or tools to fully empower themselves. Yes, there are problems of inequality specific to Black people, and there are problems of inequality shared by other oppressed Americans–white, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. AND all of them are connected. If things aren’t equal anywhere, they aren’t equal everywhere.
To those who call all cops bad, yes, I deeply understand how impossible it is to be “good” at your job when the system is broken—when you don’t have the right goals or the right tools. As a teacher, I work in a broken system, and I have harmed students. For instance, I have geared months of teaching around test prep for a bad English test (one that didn’t even have writing on it), even though I would have said that the purpose of teaching English was to help students develop critical thinking skills and to become deep, thoughtful readers and writers. I even told one student to “stop thinking so hard” if he wanted to do better on the test. I was stuck in a bad system—in a school that was funded according to its performance on a poorly-conceived test—so I became a bad teacher. Yes, students (mostly) liked me; yes, some would say that I was a very positive presence in their lives; AND ultimately, I was not doing the thing I was supposed to be doing as an educator, and many of my students’ were suffering. Many of them graduated without the reading and writing skills they needed, and I wasn’t saying enough about it. I wasn’t fighting the right battle in a lot of cases. Yes, police, like teachers, can do a lot of good AND simultaneously do a lot of harm. AND ultimately, our law enforcement system is as deeply flawed as (and directly connected to) our education system, so for all the good we might do, we are have all been bad at our jobs of protecting and educating our citizens and students. We don’t set police and teachers up for success. Their failure is my failure is all of our failure.
And to my friends who have called for the defunding and disbanding of the police altogether, yes, our police “reforms” have not gone far enough (again, similar to school reforms); yes, the trust between many communities and the police officers that are supposed to serve them has been broken, perhaps irreparably; yes, in fact, the very idea that we can “defeat crime” or win a “war on drugs” through violent and restrictive tactics is misguided and hasn’t worked. AND if we are going to talk about doing something as big as what we are talking about, we also need to address the underlying deep-seated inequality that leads to both police brutality and crime in general. We have to do more than just disband a department. Too often, I’ve seen failing schools closed, with every teacher fired, and then re-opened with a different name, in the same building, with the same teachers (and a few brand new ones), the same bad tests, the same tools (and a few new, sparkly ones), and, unsurprisingly, the exact same problems. If we simply disband a police department quickly, we will likely quickly replace it with something very similar but with a different name, a few new faces, and some shiny new tools—or, if we truly burn it down, we will replace police violence with privatized security and vigilante violence or “self-defense.” This is what happens in remote, rural areas (long distances from the nearest police department), where residents cite the lack of police presence as a primary reason for their need to own handguns. I don’t have statistical evidence to declare that Black people in these areas would be safer (or less safe) with armed citizens than an armed police force, but I would venture a guess that they are not. Our problems are deeper and harder to solve than simply disbanding police departments, and we know it! We know that without addressing systemic inequality on all fronts, the exact same problems will adapt and persist, with a new uniform or without one. So, yes, the entire focus of the way we address crime (and mental illness and addiction and desperate poverty) needs to radically shift; yes, that ultimately means defunding and disbanding the police as we know them; AND we need other support networks in place when we do this; AND we need to make this an all-encompassing community effort–including the voices and knowledge of experienced police officers, social workers, teachers, and mental health experts. If we are going to make true progress on violence against Black people and against all people (rather than exchange one type of violence for another), we need to make progress on all forms of inequality.
And to all of us recognizing our various forms of privilege and grappling with how we have played a part, knowingly or unknowingly, in reinforcing unfair structures, yes, let’s grapple. AND let’s talk about the specific actions we can take now, this year, and over the next several years to work to change them. Let’s hold ourselves and each other accountable for creating more than surface changes and gestures of goodwill in the spheres that we can influence. Yes, fine, let us all write our letters of support and social media posts; AND let’s think about the communities we can directly impact, even if it’s risky. Personally, I have been thinking deeply about the communities I can impact: the fields of education and theater, my current community in New Haven, and even my hometown community in rural Missouri. I am asking myself what can I say, ‘Yes, and…’ to?
Yes, I will join the campaign for the recruitment and hiring of more black teachers. AND I will ask for entirely rethinking our curriculum, priorities, and evaluation of success in education. I have been pushing for these changes within the school I currently teach at, and I will write about it. I will pilot alternative “assessment” ideas in my classroom. I will be a voice of possibility in faculty meetings. I will join committees. I will push hard, even if I ruffle feathers and risk my job.
Yes, I will join the call on theaters to do right by artists of color. AND I will specifically commit myself to rethinking both nonprofit and for-profit models of theatrical production in their entirety. I have been in the process of collaborating on a new, hopefully more equitable way of developing and producing theater (to be launched this year), and I will share the model’s successes and failures publicly.
Yes, I will continue to engage with my hometown community in rural Missouri about challenges that face people who live in cities. AND I will continue to speak to people in my community in New Haven, Connecticut, about the challenges that face people in rural America. I will commit myself to continuing to be a bridge between people who might seem very different on the surface but are very similar in the ways they think, dream, and make decisions. I will say my truth, even and especially when my truth is unpopular within my community. We need to fight oppression on all fronts if we are going to make progress on any front.
Yes, I will also acknowledge my personal wealth, AND I will find ways to use it to help fight inequality. Yes, I will continue to tithe my income to individuals in need. AND I will set a cap for the total amount of wealth I will allow myself to personally accumulate—AND I will commit to continue talking and writing about my own money in specifics no matter how uncomfortable it is. (I’m working on an article now.)
Yes, there are bad ideas out there, AND we can continue to challenge them, but too often, ‘No,’ really means, ‘That seems too hard’ or ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I’ve lost faith.’ That’s what it had come to mean for me at the start of this month. But a faithless life is its own hell. And I’m not living it anymore.
Yes, I will make mistakes and possibly cause hurt as I attempt to create change by leveraging power and privilege with inevitable planks in my eyes AND I will keep trying to remove those planks, and keep on keeping on—guided by the challenge to love my neighbor as myself. And not because I’m a particularly good person but because I know that my neighbor’s problems are my problems are all of our problems.
Yes, that is a lofty challenge, AND it is likely I will fail. AND it is likely, if you choose to partner in this creative improvisation, you will also fail. AND I will commit to being more generous when you do. We can commit to finding totally new ways to fail together. AND we can use that failure to learn and grow rather than to serve as an excuse for inactivity, callousness, or despair. Yes, it will be painful and messy, as improvisation tends to be. AND we can find the will to struggle through it.
When a neighbor expresses a concern, I’m committing to saying, ‘Yes, and.’ I’m committing to saying I see you and hear you. AND I’m committing to doing anything I can to help. Your cause is my cause is everyone’s cause.
Yes, at this unprecedented moment, our fatally flawed systems, under immense stress, are revealing their weaknesses and falling apart, AND that means we have the opportunity to fix the foundations and build something that none of us could have imagined on our own.
Yes, and let us find a way to do it together.
E.J. Roller is an educator and writer from Bolivar, Missouri.
