What Did Young Activists Gain From White House Meeting? What Did the President Get?

Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor

04 Dec 2014

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

After sending an extra hundred FBI agents to Ferguson in the days just before the grand jury decision, the White House invited young activists opposing police murder and impunity to a Monday meeting with the president. Black Agenda Report spoke briefly with Mr. Phillip Agnew of Dream Defenders, asking what was gained or lost.

NOTE: This article has been significantly amended since initial publication on Dec 3, including the insertion of several links, most notably one to Davey D's much longer interview with Phillip Agnew of the Dream Defenders at its very end, which was broadcast on KPFA-FM after our initial publication date.

What Did Young Activists Gain From White House Meeting? What Did the President Get?

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

An public audience with Pharaoh, or with the president, as young activists against police impunity got early this week is surely kind of a big thing, especially in the US, where ordinary people are utterly deprived of direct influence upon the polices dictating how their lives are lived.

It's safe to say that everybody at the table for such an occasion expects to get something done, whether it's obtaining or delivering assurances, promises or concrete gains, the chance to get an important message out, or maybe just the opportunity to dissemble, to distract and to blow smoke in the public's face a while longer.

It's easy to see what the White House got out of Monday's meeting. For the millions who still cling to the notion that their First Black President is working behind the scenes to make stuff better for ordinary people, President Obama and his team got to pose before the cameras as attentive listeners to the stories of black youth living at the sharp end of America's runaway police and prison states. The president got to double down on the image by dispatching Attorney General Eric Holder to address a crowd at the highly symbolic locale of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church the same day, and by seizing the moment to announce a new bucket of federal money, almost a quarter billion dollars to deploy 50,000 police body cameras. The Attorney General made variations on his by now standard promises to rewrite guidelines, this time to require their use, and also to ban racial profiling by federal police agencies.

My own guess is that the president and his team were not much listening to the young people in that room. The notion that assembly of politicians, aides, top cops and misleaders like King Rat Sharpton are simply unaware of what cops and prosecutors do every day doesn't pass a laugh test. Obama represented Chicago's south side in the Ilinois state senate. Sharpton cut his teeth on this kind of thing. These guys have been hearing horror stories of police misconduct for longer than some of the young activists have been alive. For their purposes, the day's participants were not much more than props in a production aimed to convince some larger audience that the same president who sent an extra 100 FBI agents to Ferguson MO just before the grand jury decision to gather information on dissenters was still fishing for facts on why there was widespread outrage in the first place.

Black Agenda Report asked Phillip Agnew of the Dream Defenders what the top two takeaways of the White House meeting were for him.

“The first was that it was the movement that got us this meeting, the unrest in the streets, and yeah a meeting with the president is kind of like an audience with Pharaoh. We weren't there to negotiate, because the movement is so much deeper than us” Agnew told us. “The second was that we've got a long, long way to go to where officials in this administration feel anything like urgency to meet even the mildest of our demands.”

We also asked Mr. Agnew whose idea the White House meeting was, at whose initiative it happened.

“One of the original demands soon after Mike Brown's murder was that the president come to Ferguson MO and listen to people there. That didn't happen. But that was months ago... the time for that is long past... I don't really know who set the process for this meeting in motion, but I got my invitation from the White House,” he told Black Agenda Report. “They said they wanted to hear from the ground what was going on on the ground.”

“We didn't have much time to prepare, but we laid out a number of demands. We demanded an end to 1033 (the program which provides military grade weaponry to police departments). We demanded the president use his bully pulpit, his last two years in office to shift the culture of policing, imprisoning and prosecuting, and we demanded that they use their federal executive powers to rewrite guidelines in ways that will cut off federal funding to police departments that don't make this shift. We told them that actions in the streets are going to continue no matter what.

“We understand what the White House got out of this meeting. What we got, what the movement got is yet to be told. In the long run, we're gonna get more..”

We at Black Agenda Report hope Mr. Agnew's optimism is justified.

"..thousands of individual cops are disabling and deactivating their body cameras every day already.."

When rumblings from below make Pharaoh invite you to a meeting at the palace and you attend, the least you're obligated to do is tell him to let your people go. The young activists did that. And to their credit, they did raise the specific demand that policing be demilitarized. The president flatly rejected this, conceding only that there would be “transparency” in how the military hardware flows to local cops. This is NOT a loss, the young activists know; it's a step in an ongoing process. The demands you make of power shouldn't be things they're already about to give you any damn way.

Nobody fully awake imagines that body cameras are a panacea. Surely they will save some lives and inhibit or implicate some violent sociopaths on the public payroll, as do dashboard cams. But thousands of individual cops are disabling and deactivating their body cameras every day already. There are serious questions too, in a digital age where no surveillance data EVER fully disappears, as to whether cops will eventually tie facial recognition software to body cameras and use them for blanket surveillance in the same manner they already use license plate scanners, who will have access to the footage, and how long it will be stored.

"...the torch is indeed being passed to a new generation in struggle, and that can only be a good thing..."

In hindsight, could the young activists have done better? Maybe. They could have used the moment on the way in and out of the White House to address the media with 2 or 3 or at most 4 simple, sound-byte demands aimed as much at capturing the public imagination and changing the conversation as at Pharaoh and his court, something like:

End the militarization of police
Gather official federal stats on the use of excessive force by police, instead of leaving the job to private underfunded groups like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Pass legislation that will overrule state and local “police bill of rights” laws which protect violent, abusive cops from public scrutiny and even from departmental discipline
End the 40 years war on drugs. Really end it.
Do whatever it takes to reduce the US prison population from its present 2.4 million to under 1 million over the next few years. Maybe they could announce that they're all wearing a black flower or something till the prison population dips below 1 million, and asking everybody else to wear one as well

Still, the activists acquitted themselves well enough. It appears that the torch is indeed being passed to a new generation in struggle, and that can only be a good thing. It's a long road, with lots of lessons for all of us, young and old, to learn and to un-learn. There are plenty of unanswered questions as well... a visit to the Dream Defenders web site after our conversation with Mr. Agnew showed us a beautifully produced video titled “Vest or Vote”. It's a sort of Vote Or Die pitch, juxatposing a the wearing of bulletproof vests by black children as the likely consequence of not voting, as if the hacks in the Congressional Black Caucus who tell us low voter turnout killed Michael Brown are right after all. What's up with that?

But questions are good things too, as long as we keep each other honestly looking for answers, pursuing the truth, and struggling.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Later on December 3, several hours after this article was published, Hard Knocks Radio, Davey D's priceless drive-time show on KPFA broadcast an in-depth interview with Phillip Agnew of the Dream Defenders. We encourage our readers to click here to download it.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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