| My preferred style of writing usually has two qualities: It is slinky—the sentence equivalent of being put into a light trance—and it is simple. Not didactic or obvious, just clear about what it means and transparent about the things it can’t answer.
These matters of clarity and obfuscation came up a lot for me this week while I read and listened to people offering their own explanation of what “Defund the police”—an old political demand that has emerged with new force as protests against police violence continue in all 50 states—really means. There are two basic versions of this act of interpretation. As the call to defund the police has spread to wider audiences, Melissa Gira Grant writes, “it has mutated, offering complex opportunities: both for new, uneasy political coalitions to advance the demand to defund and redistribute and a countervailing reactionary effort to suppress, distort, and strip it of its radical intention.”
To me, the former feels like a straightforward issue of objective. Some reformers believe that police have too much power and money but that policing itself is a necessary social good. (As Melissa noted, “‘Defund’ is part of an abolitionist project, but abolition is not necessarily a part of a project to defund police budgets.”) Coalitions are often tenuous and transactional in this way. There’s a path you walk together for a little while, until you don’t.
But when I encounter that second thing—the translation work that claims “Don’t worry, they don’t really mean it”—it feels more like a rhetorical trick. “When they’re saying ‘Defund the police,’ what are they saying?” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked earlier this week. “They’re saying, we want fundamental basic change when it comes to policing.” This is a refusal of clarity that, beyond concealing its own position, attempts to muddy the waters of what other people are saying quite explicitly. Why suggest it doesn’t mean that, when it’s so much simpler to say: “I don’t want that,” or “I won’t do that.” Taking that position means something, too. It seems only fair to be clear
about it. | 