As part of the company’s “antiracism” education series, #Next20, Verizon vice president David Hubbard interviewed Khalil Muhammad, great-grandson of former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and newly minted professor of race at Harvard. During his presentation, called American History 101, Muhammad argued that America is fundamentally racist and needs a “new origin story,” replacing the narrative of “American exceptionalism” with the narrative that America was founded on “systems of racism” that remain at the root of our society. Muhammad argued that the Founding Fathers built a slave economy and that “this early version of global capitalism” produced the “economic incentives” that prevail to this day, with modern corporations “exploiting poor people in low-income communities” in a similar way to the slaveowners of the past. “This isn’t just Marxist talking points,” Muhammad said. “It’s just the fact.”
Later in the discussion, Muhammad claimed that the current American police force is designed to maintain a “two-tier society,” enforce geographic segregation, and protect the “wealth gap” between white and black Americans. The raison d’être of policing, Muhammad said, is to “make sure that kids are locked up,” “make sure that people stay in their communities,” and “make sure that they’re criminalizing poverty”—what he called “the bread and butter of systemic racism.” Black crime statistics showing that black Americans commit crimes disproportionately, Muhammad contended, “are themselves an expression of systemic racism,” used to establish “the collective guilt of black people” and to “[justify] inequality and racism and discrimination.”
What should be done? In another #Next20 conversation on “criminal justice reform,” Verizon hosted an activist named Adrian Burrell who openly advocated for “defunding the police.” As Burrell told Verizon employees: “I feel like over policing doesn’t work. And I feel like those same resources that are aimed towards hiring [police officers] with racist biases . . . need to be aimed at bringing more resources to the community at a at a root level, and then you just won’t need so many police.” Burrell added: “If you want to call that ‘abolishing the police,’ or if you want to call that ‘defunding the police,’ so be it.”
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