On Tuesday evening I attended an Illumination event geared at building positive community and police relations through listen sessions around critical social issues. In this instance the issue is the torrid relationship between, primarily, the African American community and the police. With what appears to be the State, as in the nation, sanctioned rituals of violence and violations against African American bodies, and the death and injury toll rising daily, the series of listening sessions in Charleston set up by Illumination is haunted by the quickly approaching anniversaries of the killing of Walter Scott and the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church.
Though new to this community, at this event I asked questions about processes of critically strategic training and retraining of police and community members/citizens as to the range of what, under the present climate, one can expect in community/police encounter and how the society can go about building mutually beneficial and productive future encounters, without losing site of the role of power (however broadly defined).