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In Elizabeth City, N.C., the morning after a jury in Minneapolis found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of the murder of George Floyd, a unit from the countys Sheriffs Department dressed in tactical gear arrived at the home of Andrew Brown Jr. They were there to serve drug-related arrest and search warrants.

Within minutes, 42-year-old Mr. Brown was dead, shot at the wheel of his car. He was hit by five bullets, including one shot to the back of his head. The North Carolina prosecutor in the case has called the shooting justified.

If George Floyd forced America to face the question of whether an officer who abuses power can be held accountable, Andrew Brown Jr.s blood cries out from the ground of eastern North Carolina for deeper change. Justice demands systemic and enduring transformation something that younger generations will see and trust as authentic. We call it the Third Reconstruction.

Consider our recent history, starting with Mr. Chauvins trial. For us, it brought back memories of the summer of 2013, when a jury in Florida found George Zimmerman not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Mr. Zimmerman had shot and killed the 17-year-old boy who was guilty of nothing more than walking while Black in a gated community. Our legal systems failure to hold Mr. Zimmerman accountable for killing Mr. Martin sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. It rallied a generation of young people who refused to accept white police officers regularly killing unarmed Black people, not unlike how white Americans regularly lynched Black Americans in the early 20th century.

And that moment the rise of Black Lives Matter in turn recalled the movement galvanized by the death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, who was murdered with impunity in Jim Crow Mississippi. The horror of his lynching inspired a generation of children who looked like Till to confront a system that denigrated their Black lives and undermined democracy. Over the next decade and a half, they grew up to be the college students and young adults who led sit-ins at lunch counters, organized Freedom Summer in Mississippi, petitioned their fellow Americans to see voting rights as a moral issue at Selma and built a Rainbow Coalition in Chicago to advocate the dignity of all poor people.

The reckoning that Emmett Tills generation demanded took time and it was subverted and sabotaged at every turn. But the young people who saw themselves in Till eventually contributed to a Second Reconstruction of America in the mid-20th century, expanding democracy and pushing the nation toward the promise of a government that would represent all of its citizens.

Now the Trayvon Martin generation has come of age and is pushing the nation toward a Third Reconstruction. The death of Mr. Floyd, along with those of Breonna Taylor and so many more whove joined the litany of lives taken, marked a turning point in the movement: His cries of I cant breathe united this generation in a collective gasp for justice.

But what does that justice look like? Accountability for Mr. Floyds murder is not justice. If we cannot stop the killings of unarmed Black people before they happen, any collective affirmation of Black life rings hollow.

As hard as it may be to achieve, the Third Reconstruction is about more than Black people surviving encounters with law enforcement. Its about America taking steps to protect and value its Black citizens as it has never done before. A Third Reconstruction is about ensuring Black Americans are no longer twice as likely as white Americans to die in a pandemic. Its about remaking a system that saddles them with student debt and then offers them poverty wages.

A Third Reconstruction will ensure that all Americans can access decent housing for their families and quality education for their children, as outlined in a resolution introduced Thursday by Representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal, and supported by our organization, the Poor Peoples Campaign. Their resolution seeks to ensure all Americans access to clean and unleaded water and, in the face of widespread voter suppression efforts, a guarantee that their participation in American democracy is expanded and protected.

The Third Reconstruction is about confronting policies and practices that produce death, whether from police killings, poverty, lack of health care, ecological devastation or unnecessary war. It is, in short, a declaration that unnecessary death is intolerable and that democracy is still possible.

In 2020, following a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, we witnessed the most votes cast in a federal election in U.S. history, with a higher percentage of eligible voters participating than wed seen in decades, and maybe even more than a century. From the Fight for $15 to the Sunrise Movement to the Poor Peoples Campaign, this generation has linked up with movements to connect systemic racism in policing with systemic racism in economic inequality, ecological degradation, health disparities and voter suppression. In our work with the Poor Peoples Campaign, we saw thousands of Black, white and brown Americans reach out to millions of poor and low-income neighbors like them, encouraging them to join a movement that votes for a transformative agenda in our public life.

And then, 11 months after Mr. Floyds murder thanks to the courage of Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed Derek Chauvin with his knee on Mr. Floyds neck the nation witnessed a police chief testify against one of his own and a jury vote to hold Mr. Chauvin accountable for murder. It was a measure of accountability that Trayvon Martin and so many others were never deemed worthy of, and the crowds in Minneapolis celebrated with chants of I am somebody.

But even as Mr. Chauvins trial was approaching and underway, the police continued to kill Black and brown people. We added names including Donovan Lynch, Adam Toledo and MaKhia Bryant to the list of souls we mourn.

As with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the Second Reconstruction, any fundamental change in American policing will require federal legislative action that we do not currently have the political power to achieve. Even the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which does not fundamentally reimagine law enforcement but does introduce protections against the abuse of power, is languishing in a Senate where Republicans are using the threat of filibuster to silence any real debate.

The Third Reconstruction is about more than any single bill or the agenda of a political party. It is about building power to fundamentally reimagine what is possible in our society. Both the First and Second Reconstructions in American history happened because moral movements reclaimed the promises of democracy and a new, expanded electorate insisted on new priorities. If the Trayvon Martin generation has pricked the nations conscience and sparked a moral movement, we believe a coalition of poor and low-income people who have historically been low-propensity voters has the potential to shift the political landscape. We must organize around an agenda that lifts from the bottom so that everyone can rise.

No single verdict or election can bring about the racial reckoning America needs after 400 years of building systems that have rested upon white supremacy. But the generation of young people who saw themselves in Trayvon Martin knows that whatever the color of their skin, their lives will not matter in this society until Black lives matter in our public policy.

William Barber II is the president of Repairers of the Breach and a co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is the author of Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good.

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Opinion | George Floyd Died a Year Ago. The Third Reconstruction Is Underway - The New York Times

On October 26, 2020, police killed Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philadelphia, as his mother stood on the sidewalk, pleading for his life. Over the next few days, the neighborhood erupted in protest, and my phone lit up with alerts from Citizen, a public safety app. Writers for the app monitor and transcribe police scanner chatter, which is then converted into push notifications. There was a break-in at Rite Aid, a burglary at a nearby liquor store, a dumpster fire one block over, a trash fire 900 feet away.

As local news has been decimated by budget cuts and layoffs, apps such as Citizen and Nextdoor have ascended to fill the void. Citizen in particular has increasingly positioned itself as a news organization. We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe, reads an overview on the companys LinkedIn profile. Citizen often ranks higher than The New York Times among news apps in the Apple App Store.

In theory, the platform democratizes reporting; it allows anyone with a smartphone to post comments and videos to a neighborhood network. But in practice, these alerts and the neighborhood commentary attached to them often read like police stenography and amplify existing biases. Users are bombarded by discordant notifications of violence, devoid of meaningful context.

Last November, I deleted Citizen from my phone, grossed out by the tenor of the push alerts. But in March, curious about a nearby apartment fire, I downloaded the app again. This time, when I created an account, I was prompted to sign up for a new feature, Citizen Protect. For just $19.99 a month, a virtual safety agent would track me whenever I left my house. If I said my chosen safe word, the safety agent would start a video chat and, if necessary, send my exact location to a 911 call center. The service promised me that help from Citizens community of users would always be close at hand. Live monitoring, the ad said, means you never have to walk alone. (At this point, it seems Citizen Protect is only being promoted to some Citizen users. A Citizen spokesperson told me they were aiming to fully launch in mid-June but that they could not comment further at this time.)

As an illustration of what the app would look like in action, I was shown a faux, promotional push alert for a lost dog. More than a thousand people had been alerted about the dog, the screenshot suggested, and 475 people were looking for it.

It is not difficult to imagine the many ways such a system could go wrong, particularly in a neighborhood such as West Philadelphia, where in 1985 the citys police bombed its own citizens, members of the Black separatist organization MOVE. The bombing killed nearly a dozen people and destroyed more than 60 homes along two city blocks. In May of last year, during protests over George Floyds murder, Philadelphia police drove an armored vehicle into the mostly Black neighborhood and tear-gassed residents, while the next day, a violent mob of white men roamed Fishtown largely unimpeded. An app such as Citizen Protect is aimed at my demographic: I am a white woman, living in a gentrifying neighborhood, who sometimes goes running after dark. If I felt ambiguously threatened by a fellow joggera Black man, for the sake of argumentand alerted my Citizen safety agent and the broader Citizen community, what would happen to him?

I signed up for a free trial of Citizen Protect in order to test out some of the features. What I learned did little to inspire faith that the app would protect everyone equally.

In many ways, Citizens new Protect feature marks a return to the companys roots. Citizen began as a crime-fighting app called Vigilante that launched in 2016. An ad for Vigilante shows a woman being followed and then assaulted under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She calls 911, and her call is transcribed by a Vigilante operator listening in on the police scanner. An alertSuspicious Man Following Womanis received by a guy playing chess, a ride-share driver, and a man working in a bodega. These three men arrive just in time, conveniently in concert with the police, and two of them shove a camera in the attackers face just as the perpetrator is knocking the woman to the ground.

The New York Police Department condemned the app, which was subsequently removed from Apples App Store. It relaunched the following year as Citizen, a more innocuous app for the professional bystander. (According to The New York Times, the NYPD spokesperson who condemned Vigilante now works for Citizen.)

Citizens new Protect service features safety agents who, according to one recent job listing, triage the level of severity of each call and make appropriate assessments of necessary next steps. The agents are required to offer support and guidance in real-time to any user who feels unsafe. The job qualifications are minimalcustomer service experience is a priority and experience working as a first responder is a plus.

Citizen connects you to a safety agent call center when you click a button that reads Get Help. The first agent I spoke with told me that she was able to monitor my exact location, pace, phone battery, andpresumably, had I connected my phone to, say, an Apple Watch or Fitbitmy heart rate. Another safety agent, Erin, told me that if I added emergency contacts, they would be able to alert those people if I were ever in trouble. Lets say you got into a car accident, said the safety agent, if you asked us to contact 911 and your emergency contact contactseven if we had to hang up the phone because 911 had arrived and you were being stabilizedwe could then reach out to your contact, to let them know whats going on.

As cities face a rise in murder rates and budget shortfalls, this Uber-for-private-security feature feels like an ominous sign of whats to come during the post-pandemic recovery. COVID-19 killed nearly 600,000 people in the United States over the past year, while the government put down uprisings for racial justice across the nation with a heavily militarized police force. The post-pandemic landscape feels both hopeful and post-apocalyptic. What has become clear over the last year is that safety in this country is just an illusion. How much would you be willing to pay for that illusion, though? To some, $19.99 a month might seem reasonable.

A feature such as Citizen Protect strikes me as mass surveillance disguised as a public good, poised to funnel generalized fear into something more nefarious. It will almost certainly lead to unnecessary police stops and, inevitably, to police violence. It will likely encourage vigilantes such as George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.

In the wake of the 1918 pandemic and World War I, the U.S. moved into the Roaring 20s, a period characterized as much by debauchery and cultural development as it was by income inequality and punitive policing. The Pinkertons, a private detective agency known for strikebreaking, and for serving as a goon squad for the wealthy, were omnipresent. If we are now entering our own Roaring 20s, it seems a new kind of Pinkerton is coming with them.

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. Shes on Twitter @reemccarthy.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Citizen 'Protect' sells safety everywhere you go for $20/month - Fast Company

Last month, in response to this years macabre spate of police killings, the Washington state Legislature did what governing bodies often do in such situations: They pushed through a series of accountability reforms. Among them was House Bill 1054, which outlaws or limits no-knock warrants, chokeholds and neck restraints an attempt at preventing the kind of reckless and negligent policing that led to the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Floyd in Minnesota. House Bill 1310, meanwhile, hopes to rein in the use of excessive force by police through a number of measures, including requiring approval from the highest elected official in their jurisdiction before deploying tear gas against citizens.

But such tinkering is woefully inadequate to the problem at hand.

Over the course of Chauvins recent trial, police killed more than three Americans a day. In each of the past five years, police have killed on average about 1,000 people across the nation, the victims disproportionately Black, Latino or Native American. Among the more recent victims are 20-year-old Daunte Wright, 16-year-old MaKhia Bryant, and 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

These recent efforts by the Washington Legislature and others bring to mind epicycles a term the first century Greek astronomer Ptolemy used to describe the aberrant motions of the planets. Ptolemy held steadfast to an ancient belief that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, a view strongly supported by the Catholic Church. Epicycles made only modest changes to the prevailing dogma without overthrowing it.

Police reform legislation is evidence not of progress but of an unwillingness to confront the foundations of American policing. Reform merely tinkers with the current system of policing and hopes everything will still fit. But tinkering didnt work for Ptolemy, and it wont work for American policing.

Eventually, in the 16th century, Copernicus put forth a radical new theory that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. But it took more than a century before Copernicus ideas overcame fierce social and religious resistance and finally found widespread acceptance. Whats needed today is a Copernican revolution in public safety one that would redefine the foundations of modern policing as Copernicus redefined the foundations of modern astronomy. It took overturning deeply entrenched social and religious beliefs to mainstream Copernicus heliocentric solar system. So, too, it will take overturning deeply entrenched social beliefs to bring about widespread acceptance of a new foundation for policing.

Activists calling to defund the police and reenvision policing are on the right track. But theyve not gone far enough far enough back, that is. These activists make the argument that American policing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up because of its origins in the 18th and 19th century slave patrols, and this is true. But theres an even larger, more encompassing argument for doing away with policing as we currently know it and reconstructing a modern system of public safety an argument akin to why Ptolemy was finally dropped in favor of Copernicus.

In fact, American policing is based on ideas about law enforcement originating in 13th century England, when most thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. These ideas have changed little since then; have easily adapted to racism and white supremacy since; and have no place in 21st century America.

In 1285, King Edward I enacted the Statute of Winchester, a decree commanding inhabitants of small English towns to establish police forces and to arrest anyone who wandered into their jurisdiction after sunset. If that person fled to avoid arrest, inhabitants were required, under penalty of arrest themselves, to raise a hue and cry and pursue the suspected transgressors from town to town.

Very soon, the contours of a public safety system came into view: a police force for each village or town, organized into watches and wards; the presumption of guilt of anyone not from a given locale. These were key features of the Statute of Winchester, which divided the populace into us vs. them, and demanded that each local police force protect the former from the latter. In the 13th century, the us were those of an English town or village; the them were persons out after dark, whether or not they had committed a crime.

For the United States, writes Jonathon A. Cooper, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Statute [of Winchester] set up a system of justice administration that would cross the Atlantic and form the basic framework of American colonial and post-colonial policing.

In colonial America, the us were the slaveholders, the them slaves. Early colonial laws, like a 1672 Virginia statute, called An act for the apprehension and suppression of runawayes, negroes and slaves, granted immunity to any white person who killed or wounded a runaway slave while in pursuit of them. It read: Be it enacted by the governour, councell and burgesses of this grand assembly, and by the authority thereof, that if any negroe, molatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, runaway and shalbe persued by warrant or hue and crye, it shall and may be lawfull for any person who shall endeavour to take them, upon the resistance of such negroe, mollatto, Indian slave, or servant for life, to kill or wound him or them soe resisting.

Colonial notions about policing slaves later found their way into the U.S. Constitution. They took the form of the fugitive slave clause (never repealed) and the Second Amendment, granting slave owners the right to have their slaves returned, and the right to form slave patrols militias to pursue those slaves.

In post-colonial America, serving in slave patrols was compulsory among citizens, but many wealthier white Americans resented that and paid less affluent whites to serve in their place, creating a paid slave patrol force and laying the foundations for a paid police force. These slave patrollers became some of the nations first sworn officers and were given a badge resembling the ones law enforcement officers receive today.

After slavery, the us became white Americans and the them became Black Americans, but police still protected the us. Much of the brutality of the post-Civil War and Jim Crow era saw police openly and covertly killing Blacks. During the 1866 New Orleans Massacre, police killed scores of Black men during a constitutional convention aimed at universal suffrage. Many police officers during this period were also members of the Ku Klux Klan, which, together with paramilitary forces and demagogic politicians, unleashed campaigns of terror and extrajudicial killings directed at Black Americans. The NAACP estimates that nearly 5,000 Blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968, often with tacit or explicit support from law enforcement.

As American cities grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the them expanded to include not only Blacks, but groups like the Irish and the Poles. As the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad said recently, The Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles. And so this dynamic that's playing out is that police officers are a critical feature of establishing a racial hierarchy, even among white people. But over time the once marginalized Irish, Polish and Italians assimilated into the dominant us. What remained were groups that would never become part of the us, including Blacks, Asian and Latino immigrants, and American Indians.

Us vs, them policing is the underlying problem we face. Police should not exist to protect the us; they should protect the all all citizens of this nation. In a democracy, the police should be especially committed to protecting the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority. And citizens should not be empowered to enforce this us vs. them boundary either. Echoes of the 13th century origins of policing resound today: neighborhood watch patroller George Zimmerman claimed he was protecting his community when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as did George and Travis McMichael, when they shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery.

When the Statute of Winchester came into effect, the Copernican Revolution had not taken place and most people believed the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth. Surely we can do better than to continue supporting a system of policing based on such medieval ideas about law enforcement. Britain, where the Statute of Winchester was born, dropped it as the basis of policing by the early 1800s, adopting in its place the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. Few other institutions of modern American society are based on practices and principles that are 750 years old.

Demilitarization, better training, greater accountability and transparency, civilian control of police top experts are not hopeful that such reforms will actually bring about the needed change in policing.

Yanilda Gonzlez, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said: I'm always such a pessimist with police reform. [We] have to distinguish what works with what can last, what can actually endure without coming under the typical strain of police resistance and politicians' incentives to undermine police reform.

Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the Kennedy School, goes a step further: What I think we're up against is not just a fairly conservative block of folks who are embracing law and order, and want to quell any kind of dissent. We actually also have kind of silent support among those folks who would present themselves as being fully in favor of progressive change.

A broad swath of Americans are in this conservative block, even those who would not ordinarily consider themselves law and order advocates. Shortly after George Floyds murder, a former mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, argued that the problem with policing is not the police, but rather the society from which the police emerge. She held out particular scorn for members of her own demographic.

"Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience, Hodges wrote in the New York Times, and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live, where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death. Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and their property."

This makes for stiff headwinds. The police, politicians, most of the public and even those who would otherwise consider themselves progressives are explicitly or implicitly arrayed against fundamental changes in policing. But that does not mean we should stop agitating for a change. Copernicus was up against powerful social and religious forces that disregarded the science behind his observations. It took a century, the efforts of Galileo, Isaac Newton and many others, and the acquiescence of the church to finally cement the notion that the Earth revolved around the sun.

If we mark the start of the modern-day effort to change policing to the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s, that still leaves about 40 years before we might expect to see any meaningful change in policing. But it is possible for the arguments to be made, and the steps taken, to bring an end to us vs. them policing and to disengage modern-day policing from its roots in medieval English society and America slavery. Not only will communities of color, under the ongoing threat of police killings, violence and brutality, be safer, but all Americans will be safer as well.

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Reforms aren't enough to end 'us vs. them' policing in America - Crosscut

It would be an understatement to say the police murder of George Floyd last May rattled the nation; it upended it. People could no longer ignore Americas long, dark history of unchecked police brutality and racial injustice after the world watched Floyds last breath being pressed out of him by a white officer.

It also served as a wakeup call for Bonnie Chapman, the daughter of Dog the Bounty Hunter, the brash former bail bondsman who tracked down on-the-run criminals for a living. She began participating in protests in Denver and devoted her sizable social media platform to speaking out on various social justice issues, including systemic racism, LGBTQ rights, the surge of violence against the AAPI community, and even YouTuber James Charles.

The 22-year-old has now gone a step further, joining the reality show The System on Unleashed Entertainments new crime and justice streaming service, TVUnleashed. The raw series follows a group of young adults as they become activists, join protests, and work to eradicate the failings of Americas criminal justice system.

I decided, I have a voice and it shouldnt be muted, Bonnie tells The Daily Beast. I have to use it especially when there is such injustice. Ive always been kind of a scaredy cat, honestly. I thought it was time to stop living my life in fear of what other people say.

That fear mainly came from publicly breaking with the ideology of much of her familys fan base, who often have conservative political beliefs, Bonnie explains. I was very scared of the reactions from those who have seen me growing up and further reactions to how I have grown up, she says. I think that people expect me to believe what they believe. I am my own person and I make my own decisions about my groups, my politics.

So, when she began openly supporting Black Lives Matter and resharing tweets that criticized former president Donald Trump, Bonnie was attacked online by fans. And when she joined The System, it damaged her relationship with her 68-year-old father.

In fact, Bonnie hasnt spoken with him since informing him shed be appearing on the show. She isnt even sure when shell be hearing from him again, describing their overall relationship as OK.

We dont talk very often, she admits.

Everything came to a head when Bonnie auditioned for the show about two weeks ago, she says, and was told by the crew that she should probably inform her father, real name Duane Chapman, that she was in the process of joining the series.

In late March, the digital network announced it had cancelled Chapmans upcoming show Dog Unleashed before it even aired, citing a breach of contractual agreements. In a statement at the time, Unleashed Entertainment said, We stand for equality and justice, and we will not be associated with projects that are not congruent with these values. Though it saddens us to part ways, we cannot in good conscience continue to work with those who do not share our values.

The company later sued a Colorado-based cannabis company that Chapman was working with, accusing the reality star of piggybacking off the marketing from his canceled show to produce Dog Unleashed CBD. Unleashed Entertainment claimed the $100,000 that the partnership had raked in were ill-gotten profits.

The network finally gave a fuller picture for why it had parted ways with Chapman this month, claiming they investigated an allegation that he made racist and homophobic remarks about some of the cast members on The Systemthe same show his daughter would eventually be a part of.

Bonnie said she was completely unaware of Chapmans remarks when she auditioned for the show, only learning after meeting with the crew. Bonnie, who announced she was pansexual in 2019, declined to disclose exactly what Chapman said, but admitted she found his alleged comments offensive.

I dont want to misquote him, put words into his mouth, she explains. I was made aware of some comments, they might have been a generalized version of what he said. I dont want to put that out there if Im not 100 percent sure.

This is not the first time Chapman has faced accusations of making racist remarks and put his television career in jeopardy. In 2007, his Dog the Bounty Hunter show on A&E was temporarily suspended when his son Tucker leaked an audio recording to The National Enquirer, where Chapman repeatedly said the N-word while discussing how he didnt want his son to date a Black woman.

I want to show people that it is not me. That is someone completely different. My father's actions are his own, and my actions are my own.

Its not because shes Black, Chapman says in the taped phone call. Its because we use the word n****r sometimes here. Im not going to take a chance ever in life of losing everything Ive worked for, for 30 years, because some n****r heard us say n****r and turned this into the Enquirer magazine. Our career is over. Im not taking that chance at all, never in life, never. Never, never. Its not that theyre Black. Its none of that. Its that we use the word n****r. We dont mean you scum n****r without a soul. We dont mean that shit. But America would think we mean that.

Despite the damning audio, A&E eventually put the show back on-air after a brief hiatus and Chapman apologized.

Bonnie wants to make clear that she does not condone her fathers racist remarks, either then or now. That was a hard time and its just something that will never go away, she says, speaking of the 2007 tape. I want to show people that it is not me. That is someone completely different. My fathers actions are his own, and my actions are my own.

Just because he is my father, that does not mean that I have his views, that does not mean that I have this path, she stresses. I love my father, no matter what he thinks, even if his beliefs disagree with mine. I think he's a good man who went through a horrendous trauma, she adds, speaking of her mother Beths death from cancer in 2019.

I dont think he will ever be the same, but thats okay. As long as he grows and takes accountability for growing as a person.

Bonnie says she has had previous conversations with her dad about Black Lives Matter and the police killing of Floyd, saying he agrees that his death was a result of unchecked police brutality.

Its hard to have those conversations, but the things that are hardest for us to do are the things that are the most important, she says. Speaking to our parents and those who we love about these things, is only going to do well for those who may be uneducated or may be afraid to speak what they really think. These conversations help the people around you realize that not only are you passionate, but you are an ally, and you are there to learn.

Bonnie is self-admittedly slightly embarrassed about how long it has taken for her to become a public ally for those less privileged than her, recalling how she felt outraged when Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman in 2012.

I wasnt completely aware, especially growing up in Hawaii, I wasnt completely aware of the police brutality and how it can affect so many people, she says. Every day there are Black people who are scared at a traffic stop or scared they are going to be pulled over. I was completely oblivious to [police brutality] for quite some time, which Im kind of embarrassed to say.

I remember feeling this shouldnt have happened, but yet it did, she recalls of hearing about Martins death in school. There was no justice for him. Thats something that was really upsetting for me, because there is a family that no longer has their child.

But after the police killing of Floyd, Bonnie was compelled to act. With George Floyd specifically, it really called me, she says. I have an obligation to use my voice for those who may be silenced. That is what I feel I need to do. I want to be a voice and help those who may have been silenced.

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Dog the Bounty Hunter's Daughter Is Taking on Police Brutality - The Daily Beast

The Nonconformists

Paul Rossi and Andrew Gutmann reveal the dangers of conforming to Critical Race Theory.

Paul Rossi used to work at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan as a math teacher to the citys privileged children. On the Upper East Side, a former investment banker named Andrew Gutmann used to walk his young daughter past the security guards dressed in red cardigan sweaters onto the elite grounds of Brearley School. Both Rossi and Gutmann had never crossed paths before they wrote their letters excoriating their schools embrace of Critical Race Theory, a rebellion that severed their ties with these schools. These two men seemed to have little in common based on outward appearances, yet the names of Rossi and Gutmann will be yoked for the time being and perhaps into the distant future because of their refusal to conform.

When the letters from these two men were featured on the Substack page, "Common Sense with Bari Weiss," the reaction was instantaneous and their names became known overnight to many Americans. In many ways, what they did was far from remarkable. They argued for a return to the principles of the Enlightenment that helped found America and for the rejection of Critical Race Theory that colored these very principles as white supremacist. What made the acts of Rossi and Gutmann remarkable was they took the step their fellow Americans feared. They wrote their letters to confront an ideological force that threatened their dissent with the charge of racism, the modern-day scarlet letter that can lead to unemployment and ostracization of varying sorts. Indeed, Rossi and Gutmann were branded as racist.

This battle began decades earlier. The academics behind Critical Race Theory had woodshedded their ideology for years, sharpening each branch of their belief system into buzzwords or mantras that could be introduced piecemeal into our brand-driven culture. "White Privilege" became the major flashpoint during the George Zimmerman trial. "Systemic racism" largely defined the town of Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed. It was not until the killing of George Floyd that Critical Race Theory, the mother ideology to all of these buzzwords, including antiracism, was mainstreamed into the American public.

What gave Critical Race Theory its vast power was that it offered Americans the moral absolution from the charge of racism in return for conforming to its tenets. It did not matter that this offer was illusory and self-serving.

During my interview with Rossi, he explained that the Critical Race Theory vision of America actually preserved the privileged WASP culture that sits on top of the American society and runs many of its elite schools. These American aristocrats had excluded blacks and Jews (like Gutmanns family) from their institutions for countless years; they sought to escape this mark of shame by embracing the woke spirit of Critical Race Theory.

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Rossi then explained how this benefited the WASP culture in two key ways. The admission of "we are all white and we all suffer from these biases" allowed these WASPs to erase class distinctions and appear to be "more of a common man" as they achieved a sense of solidarity with the Americans beneath them. At the same time, this move allowed the WASPs to feel morally superior to other Americans who refused to submit to this ideology, especially the poorer and "racist" whites.

Put another way, this embrace of Critical Race Theory preserved the supremacy of the WASP culture while doing little to nothing to make lasting and transformative change in the lives of the American underclass.

When one understands this, it is not surprising that the first major battles over Critical Race Theory began in the elite private schools in New York City. There was plenty of money and will to hire Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) companies to affect rapid change in the curriculum of these schools.

When Gutmanns daughter attended kindergarten five years ago, she was encouraged to express herself freely while painting her self-portrait. Today, kids in the same class are given flesh-colored crayons with the exclusive task of getting their skin color right.

The true power of this elite class parents, school officials, academics, DEI consultants lies their willingness to use one of white supremacys evils to advance their agenda: racial discrimination. One of the key tenets of Critical Race Theory maintains that it is morally permissible to racially discriminate against another race as long as it racially engineers blacks and other approved minorities upward.

In valuing racial engineering over development, these elites exposed Critical Race Theory not as a force for the good but as Americas latest racial ideology. And in the tradition of racial ideologies, Critical Race Theory has already produced racial absurdities, such as condemning the principles of Enlightenment as white supremacy while using the tools of white supremacy to racially engineer change.

When I interviewed Gutmann, he described how Brearley School wanted to impose Critical Race Theory not only into the classrooms but into the homes of the students as well. This overreach revealed that these elites knew that the strength of their racial ideology depended on their ability to force others to conform. They knew deep down that if enough folks began to question their use of race to advance their cause, their house of cards would fall.

These elites did not want the "compliance" type of conformity where individuals pay lip service to the ideology while leaving their private beliefs unchanged. Nor did they want the "identification" type of conformity where individuals embraced the behavior and beliefs of the ideology but only in the presence of the ideologues. What these elites wanted was the "internalization" type of conformity where the students and parents fully internalized the tenets of Critical Race Theory to the point of becoming true believers. They prized this level of conformity to the point that they saw no issue with ridding the school of a teacher as intelligent, insightful, and principled as Rossi.

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Both Rossi and Gutmann refused to conform to this ideology because they saw that the molding of minds into true believers came at the expense of educating well-rounded and independent individuals. There is perhaps nothing worse than hearing school children from Miami to Anchorage recite mindlessly the same ideological cliches over and over: "More work needs to be done," "We want to have difficult conversations," "Check your privilege," "Silence is violence"

Neither Rossi or Gutmann would object to education reforms to reflect Americas diverse peoples; what they refused to accept was the reduction of timeless and, in many cases, universal education principles down to skin color. They also objected to the elites reducing the complex and rich humanity of Americans down to an over-simplistic dichotomy: racist and antiracist. They knew that this produced a distorted sense of reality that benefited only the few on top. After all, what can the rest of Americans do with a racial ideology that demands conformity in how they think, how they speak, and how they view themselves without offering any real solutions to the larger problems in society?

So Rossi and Gutmann embraced the long cherished American tradition of nonconformity. After withstanding the initial howls of racism, mockery, condescension, and after being placed on leave (Rossi), and after losing friends and colleagues, Rossi and Gutmann stand stronger than ever, unbowed. They knew that the act of conforming cut themselves off from their true selves and the only way to reclaim the purest of freedoms was to become a nonconformist. In doing so, they reminded me of a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: "When you adopt the standards and values of someone else you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your own surrender, less of a human being." This is perhaps the most significant lesson that Rossi and Gutmann imparted upon the youths in their world and the rest of America when they decided not to conform to those who use the tool of race in the name of "progress."

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The Price of Conforming to Critical Race Theory - Fox News