A blog post written by Rachel Kulikoff, 2018-2020 Fellow
On October 5, 2018, Jason Van Dyke, a Chicago cop, was found guilty of the second-degree murder of unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald. I ducked out of my cubical to take a walk and listened as the jury foreperson read the 16 guilty verdicts for the 16 counts of aggravated battery (one for each shot). It was a powerful, visceral moment.
Chicagoans were rallying in the streets, and most of my Twitter feed was celebrating. Finally, finally, finally a police officer was being held accountable for shooting a black kid; finally, there was some measure of justice. Even as the relief and celebration continued, some folks, especially those active in the abolition movement, were beginning to grapple with what justice looks like in a broken system. Some were frustrated at the focus on the punishment individual rather than structural inequities and the criminalization of black bodies, while at the same time supportive of Laquan’s family achieving a measure of peace. Many were openly skeptical that the system was capable of providing justice, especially with the deployment of hugely increased police presence in the city for “public safety” ahead of the verdict (whose safety?).
I have been humbled by the experience, thought, and action that Chicago activists shared around Laquan’s murder. The important questions that they ask are ones that I also think about often in the context of my work in the fellowship program. What does progress look like in a system that benefits some and harms others? How do you stay patient and hopeful and committed to justice when you’re working in those very institutions and systems? How can incremental changes bracketed by long periods of talking and meetings and bureaucracy be enough when, for example, in Wisconsin black babies are dying three times as often as white babies?
When I think about what progress looks like in a government setting, my brain often goes to a panel I went to during the Facing Race Conference, attended using fellowship professional development funds. It was about how to find an open window to advance racial justice in government, and the presenters were sharing their own success story. They were from a county in which half the population were non-English speaking, with some Spanish speakers and many others speaking indigenous Mexican languages. The phone trees in the county office were all solely in English, and after months (or maybe years) of work, they were able to add an option at the very beginning to hear the tree in Spanish. While I understand progress is incremental, and slow, and complicated, and changing institutions is hard, I was pretty discouraged by the celebration of this improvement, which seemed like such a bare minimum.
Meanwhile as part of my position, I’ve had the opportunity to interview community members. I’ve heard feedback that the impression of my workplace is that we’re all talk and no action, and that we have a lot of institutional power, so why aren’t we using it. And it can be hard to be in the position of representing the organization when I kind of agree: why can’t my workplace throw its weight behind opposing mass incarceration and supporting the demilitarization of police? Why aren’t we bolder about using our voice, our power, our money for policies like a living wage or paid family leave? Why are we always talking about health and racial equity and floundering on how to put it into practice?
And I know things aren’t that simple; that there are some valid reasons (fear of state preemption, rules against lobbying, inexperience with venturing so far beyond direct service) for caution, and that my workplace and other institutions are thinking about and taking steps toward racial justice and systems change. And yet these questions remain, and I know that I’ll continue to contend with them for as long as I live and work in systems that feel so broken, that advantage some and dehumanize others.
I have no answers to these questions and will probably continue not to. But what I’m trying to find-- what the fellowship program is helping me find-- are ways to proceed in current reality. Community partnerships and building up individual (if not institutional) trust with community members is a good starting place, but I know that I sometimes need to latch on to something more concrete and immediate. Two examples of concrete ways to work within systems came up at a recent Human Rights Festival that I went to in Chicago. One was a harm reduction program that aimed to get Naloxone and training to use it into the hands of people with substance use disorder, as they most often are in the position to save the lives of peers. Another is the CityKey program in Chicago, a municipal id that can act as in a limited way as government identification, with less stringent requirements than state and federal id. Specifically geared to be useful to marginalized populations, undocumented folks have access to CityKey, and you can self-identify your gender. I don’t know what it might look like for an entry level employee like a fellow to push these types of concrete programs, but they offer insight on what working slowly but productively within a system might look like.
Jason Van Dyke was in the news again in January, when his sentencing took place. Instead of the aggravated battery charges, which carry a longer sentence in Illinois, he was sentenced to 6 ¾ years on the charge of second-degree murder, and he could get out in as little as half of that time. One thing that immediately struck me is that the special prosecutor in the case said afterwards that the system worked, and that justice was served; some community activists might say that the system did work in the sense that it continued to devalue black lives. Again, I have no answers, but at the end of the day, I’m learning to believe that incremental improvement inside systems and radical change from the outside of systems can coexist, if not without tension.
Given that my placement site sits squarely within the system, I am hopeful. I am excited to be entering into the education and advocacy world in maternal and child health. I’m lucky to be at a placement site and with a preceptor who is open to both having conversations and innovating. And I’m grateful to be in a fellowship community in which space is intentionally created to be welcoming of questions and critiques, where we can both grapple with the systems we work in while being gently nudged out of frustrated burn-out.