In an interview with Rebecca Traister published on The Cut, Maxine Waters addresses her historical connection with people of color who have been discriminated against and her political beginnings in the fight against police brutality and extrajudicial killings by police.
Representative Waters said:
Rebecca Traister: Can you talk about your longtime fight over the language of insurrection and unrest versus rioting? Why does language matter?
Maxine Waters: I’ve been reflecting on what was going on back in the day, when I was confronting Daryl Gates, starting when the police shot Eula Love, which brought me in contact with the police commission and brought me to taking a look at what was going on with police/community relations. Take a look at one of the quotes from Daryl Gates on chokeholds. [In 1982, in the midst of an investigation of the killing of 20-year-old James Thomas Mincey, who was stopped by the LAPD for a cracked windshield, then beaten with nightsticks, thrown to the ground and killed by choking, Gates famously said of the disproportionate use of chokeholds by police against African-Americans, “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.”] He was saying that we in essence die when others, when “normal people,” wouldn’t be dead. He was differentiating “black people” from “normal people.” And if you don’t think of us as being “normal,” you’re not looking out for our welfare.”
Representative Waters went on to say, “A lot of negative language gets used against black people, describing what whites often believe is true about us: that language includes “lazy,” “criminal,” and “rioting.” It’s all negative language used far too often in a description of black people by folks who fundamentally don’t see black people the same way they see whites and others. So when they talked about rioting in 1992, what I saw was an explosion of a hopelessness being played out. I’d been working with those children in public housing and understood what was going on with crack cocaine, that these communities had been dropped off of America’s agenda, and the only real interaction they had was with police: the use of a battering ram to break down a door, as Daryl Gates did, or stopping young black men on the street to have them spread their legs to be searched by police. So when this unfortunate situation happened, where we had a lot of these young people in the street, they were acting out in anger and frustration. It reminded me of much of which I saw this past weekend, with people who had been cooped up because of COVID-19, who have lost jobs, whose family members have been getting infected, and then you have this police officer put his knee on the neck of George Floyd and hold it for eight minutes-plus, while his life drained out on the sidewalk … that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So yes, I said “insurrection”: People acting out of frustration and hopelessness and understanding that they don’t have an establishment — political or otherwise — that really cared about their ability to work or have good health care. Yes, I choose to call it an insurrection.
Read the entire interview HERE.