The Costs of Policing Violence: Foregrounding Cognitive and Emotional Labor

Introduction

On 20 November 2014, unarmed and unsuspecting 28-year-old Akai Gurley was shot and killed in a Brooklyn stairwell by a police officer. Following this fatal shot, the officer responsible for the shooting deliberately considered not telling his supervisors of the shot—a deliberation that speaks volumes to the perceived value of Mr. Gurley’s life versus the officer’s valued employment. This unsettling fact suggests that to this officer, who remarked, “I’m going to be fired,” that black lives really do not matter. The officer firing the fatal shot has reportedly stated that it “was so dark. I was so scared” (Goodman, 2014). This notion of darkness, literally and racially, and of associated fear brings to the forefront the intersections of black males, the police, and the deep-seated white racist framing of black male threat and criminality.

On 21 March 2012, 22-year-old Rekia Boyd was shot in the back of the head by a white off-duty Chicago police officer. Officer Dante Servin also said “he feared for his life” after he thought he saw a man point a gun at him. That “gun” was only a cell phone and the “man” was a woman (Schmadeke, 2014). As in the cases of Mr Gurley and Ms Boyd, many white and non-white officers report racially framed notions of danger and fear in their policing, endangering, and ending of black lives. Much of this framing of danger and fear extends to black children, as noted in the deaths of Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tamir Rice (Hackman, 2015; Ohlheiser, 2014). Arguably, this fearful white framing of blacks of various ages and genders is never countered in white minds by the obvious and opposite perspective—understanding that blacks might reasonably fear whites, specifically those in uniforms and with guns.

This overpolicing and over-criminalization of black bodies of all ages and genders is one major result of centuries of systemic US racism, and especially its old and pervasive white racial framing. Since the 1600s, this white racial framing has suggested to most white minds that blacks are to be feared, while otherwise similar whites are not to be feared owing to their likely lack of criminal inclinations and superior virtuousness and morality (Byfield, 2014; Feagin, 2013). This well-developed white racial framing of black Americans is reiterated constantly by the mainstream media, reinforced by contemporary political regimes touting a “post-racial America,” and maintained by the larger “colorblind” racist practices of the US criminal justice system generally. The general white fear of African Americans and Latinos is often, but not always, associated with white stereotyping and fears of particular racially segregated neighborhoods as exemplified in several of the deaths noted above. In the work of Pettit and Western (2004: 153), they note that although crime rates, often used as a justification for overpolicing, may explain a modest portion of huge racial disparities in US policing and imprisonment practices; “a significant residual suggests that blacks are punitively punished, policed, prosecuted and sentenced”—and often killed. Moreover, lying behind such actions is the white framing of black Americans as threatening and troublesome. These extralegal factors in policing cannot be discounted as white police officers “tend to view disadvantaged blacks and Hispanics and the communities in which they live as unsafe” (Western, 2006: 55).

These aforementioned incidents are but a few of the thousands of black lives lost over several centuries owing to aggressive and violent overpolicing. Recent media articles noting the growing concern of the public over police brutality aimed at black and brown bodies are generally talking about many white Americans. Not surprisingly, a great many African Americans have long been very concerned about this police brutality. They have experienced and resisted the recurring cases of such brutality since the first slave patrols and police patrols of the 19th century engaged in great antiblack violence (Aleem, 2014; Feagin, 2013). The mainstream, mostly white-controlled media and local, state, and federal political regimes are substantially responsible for perpetuating this white racist framing of black Americans over several centuries, to the present day. For instance, President Ronald Reagan often made direct connections between class, race, and gender matters by constantly condemning so-called “welfare queens” and “criminal predators.” Moreover, by succinctly connecting a visual aspect (the recurring media depictions) of African American men and women as “cheats” and “street criminals,” Reagan effectively transitioned his new “war on drugs” to what was in effect a war on blacks. In white minds, including his, the drug problem unequivocally became a “black” problem.” This distorted and racially framed criminal image of black women and men is constantly exaggerated and disproportionately reinforced in the mainstream media, and most especially in the local (usually white-controlled) news programs that are the major sources of news for most Americans (Byfield, 2014; Feagin, 2013).

Emotional and Cognitive Labor: More Costs of Systemic Racism

What is lacking in the mainstream media and many other analyses, including those of sociology and the other social sciences, that focus on policing is a full discussion of the larger consequences for black Americans and other people of color who are so severely hammered and abused by policing and other actions of the criminal “injustice” system. These consequences for Americans of color include the emotional and cognitive consequences of knowing that you, or someone you know and love, are not exempt from violent mistreatment at the hands of the police authorities, or those who are supposed to be the upholders of fairness and justice. Indeed, children, women, and men of color are a ready pool of potential police victims.

Thus, our conceptual contribution and innovation in this article is to examine the under-analyzed and under-theorized emotional and cognitive consequences of navigating a systemically racist society in which your life can be so easily and severely crippled or stolen, often with the justification of white fear. You can so often be publicly called “f*cking animals” while engaging in warranted activism and necessary protest against systemic racism, as was seen and heard following the 2014 police killing of the unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. Ironically, following this incident, the Ferguson mayor, James Knowles, dismissed the officer’s actions by saying, “they’re [officers] only human” (Fantz et al., 2014). The missing comment here involves the humanity of the black teenager who was killed. Thus, what are the consequences for blacks’ navigating daily life in the midst of negative media constructions and representations of black Americans and black American communities as dangerous, threatening, and crime-prone? What, too, of the visual representations of Eric Garner, the black man selling cigarettes on the street of an East Coast city, gasping desperately for air in a fatal police throat-hold, while white bystanders did nothing? What about the 12-year-old Tamir Rice playing with a toy gun who was shot by police within seconds of their arrival? How, cognitively and emotionally, should black Americans deal, collectively and individually, with recent polls showing that nearly 60% of whites believe that racism is not involved in the police use of deadly force against blacks (Blow, 2015)? What then are the consequences of black opposition, formally and informally, to these very public, visible, and numerous examples of chronic police brutality?

Connecting the Policing Past to the Present

As mentioned earlier, there is a strong connection between our white-racist past of much policing of black and brown bodies and our contemporary realities with similar policing and death, even in an era of supposedly “color-blind” racial politics and policing. In addition, the micro and macro black reactions and resistance to the racial injustice experienced as a result of our contemporary policing practices are not new. Both explicitly and implicitly, our persisting racial hierarchy is reproduced by numerous actions of an array of governmental agents. Consider one major and typical southern city’s policing background. The City of Houston’s police department has its ultimate roots in the slave patrols of the 1830s to the1840s, which were established to police the increasing numbers of enslaved black workers and their families. Soon after the end of slavery in 1865, these slave policing institutions in Houston and other southern and border cities evolved into ordinary police forces (Feagin and Bracey, 2015). Since that time, at least, many white police officers have historically played a major role in the regular subordination of African Americans. Indeed, across the country, during one short period from 1920 to 1932, white police officers killed substantially more than half of the blacks who were killed by whites. Additionally, white officers were often supportive bystanders, if not actual lynchers, in the 6000 lynchings of black Americans over nearly a century from the 1870s to the late 1960s (Feagin, 2013:156). Moreover, black Americans were not the only group subjected to this particular type of official violence. US Latinos, specifically Mexican Americans, were lynched by whites as well, often near jails and courthouses with the collusion of white policing authorities (Delgado, 2011).

Contemporary Realities of Policing and Resistance

This pattern of heavily policing, harassment, and brutality against African Americans continues, albeit changed in some ways. Though no longer publicly lynched per se, patterns of violent abuse remain systemic. Between April and August of 2014, at least six black men died at the hands of police under conditions indicating “unjustified use of excessive force and possible racial profiling” (Choudhury, 2014). This is striking, specifically when we revisit the notion that a large number of whites believe contemporary policing to be mostly or entirely colorblind. The black experience is quite different from this white illusion. One recent Gallup poll found that 42% of black respondents (and three-quarters of young men) indicated that they had experienced racial profiling by police officers over their lifetimes. Another Gallup poll found that almost one in four black men under the age of 35 reported the police have treated them unfairly just during the last 30 days (see Feagin, 2013; Newport, 2013).

In recent decades as in the past, police harassment and violence have continued, and have been openly resisted by black Americans. “Analysis of black community ‘riots’ for the years 1943–1972 indicates that the immediate precipitating event of many of these community uprisings was the killing or harassment of black urbanites by white officers” and as a result, “black residents openly protested police malpractice,” often leading to more police harassment and violence (Feagin, 2013: 156). This community reaction to police harassment or killings is also seen in more recent protests by black citizens in Los Angeles, Miami, and other US cities. Since the 1980s, many protests against police violence and other malpractice have been generated by black Americans and other Americans of color across the country (see Feagin, 2013: 156).

Cognitive and Emotional Labor Today

In December 2014, the first author did the unthinkable; she cried amidst her academic coworkers over a recent string of killings of black people at the hands of white police officers. Her day started with a remark to a coworker about the failure to indict officers over the killing of the street vendor Eric Garner in New York. As she said, “Can you believe that they did not indict that police officer,” one of her white coworkers shrugged, a shrug that apparently meant “so what?” As she continued with her day, she eventually had an emotional outburst with a coworker in the break room. As they discussed a school issue, Evans looked at her and said, “I can’t get his voice out of my head. He said, I can’t breathe.” As tears dripped from her face, she pointed at her own body and asked, “How can people just hate us, as a group, so much?” The colleague offered no answer. Evans then cleaned her face and returned to the office only to cry in front of yet another coworker. This had never happened to her in any public place.

This crying lasted for a few days as she replayed the voice of Eric Garner in her head. This disturbing racialized event—coupled with then recent deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless other black men, women, and children—was too much to handle. Evans was reminded of two major things that day: the true devaluation of black bodies and life, and the fact most whites do not share the emotional and cognitive burden of this revelation—the knowledge that at any moment you can lose your life or the life of someone close to you at the hands of those officials designated to “protect and serve.” This knowledge is just one of the major silent consequences of racial profiling, other police brutality, and other racial oppression shared by most people of color across the country. There is a reality to the countless hours wasted, energy expended, and tears shed over the reality of this white racism. Sadly, too, this emotional and cognitive energy loss is not new; many African Americans have collectively understood and shared this knowledge with significant others, for the sake of their lives and the lives of those they love. Moreover, this emotional reaction and everyday reality is a laborious process—the constant time and energy used to understand, analyze, and gauge racialized interactions. Then, too, there is the cognitive aspect of navigating the racialized social world that involves the carefully calculated way people of color have to interact with the police, to socialize their children, and to participate in everyday interactions.

An African American colleague of ours, a famous educational psychologist, once summed up these combined costs in this way:

If you can think of the mind as having one hundred ergs of energy, and the average man uses fifty percent of his energy dealing with the everyday problems of the world . . . then he has fifty percent more to do creative kinds of things that he wants to do. Now that’s a white person. Now a black person also has one hundred ergs; he uses fifty percent the same way a white man does, dealing with what the white man has [to deal with], so he has fifty percent left. But he uses twenty-five percent fighting being black, [with] all the problems being black and what it means (Feagin and Sikes, 1994: 295–296).

Racial oppression frequently appears as a vampire-like system draining the emotional, cognitive, and other energies of those racially targeted in most societal institutions. This torturous reality began with two-plus centuries of enslavement for black Americans, which were followed by nearly a century of the near-slavery of Jim Crow and a half century now of the continuing legacies of those oppressive centuries. From this professor’s estimate, African Americans still use half their creative energies over lifetimes coping with and combating such oppressive racial legacies.

Resistance and Activism: Necessary Cognitive and Emotional Labor

In this article, we introduce and emphasize this concept of cognitive and emotional labor as a means of better understanding the larger consequences of racial oppression for black Americans—primarily here in regard to their collective realization of and reactions to continual police brutality, racial profiling, and other policing malpractice. This cognitive and emotional labor is deeply linked to clear understandings and articulations of the severity of the chronic societal problem of brutality, including for most, knowledge of centuries of policing brutality and general devaluation of black lives. As mentioned earlier, African Americans have generally had to cope with and adapt to the pervasive racial politics of this country. Contextually, we as social scientists have to consider the cognitive and emotional costs and outcomes of attempting to demand and gain full humanity when multiple avenues have been actively sought over time—through legislation, formal and informal, and sometimes through violent methods of protest—yet only to realize that there is a permissive environment for police and other agents of social control to assault and murder black men, women, and children, and frequently with impunity.

During recent years, media accounts of rational black protests against policing violence, such as in Missouri and New York, are often constructed in the mainstream media to be times of disorganized frenzy, with looting, theft, and violence against others at the hands of black people (sometimes termed “rioters”). Following the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, before any street protests had taken place, white Missouri governor proclaimed loudly that he “would not tolerate violence.” He did not mean, of course, police violence. Similarly, there were periodic calls for “peace” from white political and policing officials during the nonviolent protests (Alcindor, 2014). This warning, before any resistance had arisen, reiterated the white-framed imagery of violent and dangerous blacks, while failing to critically examine why protests, those violent or not, might rationally take place. In this white-framed atmosphere, it seemed difficult for mainstream media commentators to construct Michael Brown as primarily a victim of violent policing, even as he lay dead in the street for all to see. Instead, the media commentators and government officials highlighted his alleged criminality, thereby providing a justification for his life being lost. This reaction, coupled with media images of violent protesters, provided justification for more black deaths while upholding and solidifying notions that blacks are arrested and killed just because they are criminals.

What do those committed to real “liberty and justice for all,” namely black Americans and supportive whites, do with this information known to be untrue? What do they do when faced with witnessing these horrific and unjustified deaths and their official no-punishment aftermaths? Consider the case of Eric Garner and the fact that we were allowed to visibly observe his death a great many times in the mainstream media. What of the thousands of video presentations of Michael Brown’s blood-soaked dead body lying in the street for hours while community members stood by horrified? What are the consequences that follow from a country witnessing these unjustified violent deaths so many times, yet there being a resultant failure of any significant official punishment for white killers? What are we to believe is the value in black lives and, more specifically, how does recurring police violence influence the cognitive and emotional labor of those whose communities are regularly targeted by policing violence?

Individual and collective cognition, or what we know, what we remember, and how we think, contribute greatly not only to lasting knowledge production but also to associated social and emotional behavior (Reisberg, 2013). Consider a critical dimension of cognitive labor—the labor necessary to deconstruct the white-racist views imposed by white others in interactions with people of color. This cognitive puzzling and strategizing often occurs before and/or with the production of emotion management and emotional labor (Evans, 2013). Research in employment settings suggests that emotional labor often involves the effort necessary:

. . . to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. (Hochschild, 1983: 7)

Moreover and unsurprisingly, this emotional labor is connected to emotion management involving those emotional acts done privately. Typically, private emotion management can become an altogether public type of emotional labor when it involves employers or coworkers at the workplace, thus appearing central in many settings. Here, we note that for Americans of color, emotional labor and emotion management, both types of emotional work, often occur outside of workplaces, permeating most all formal and informal interactions (Evans, 2013). Although often invisible to whites, this emotional work outside the workplace done by most black Americans and other Americans of color is always a possibility because of mistreatment at the hands of white police officers and many other whites as well.

Racialized institutions and environments generate this recurring need for tiring emotional labor. Recurring systemic mistreatment and white racial framing in societal institutions has for centuries shaped the cognitive processes of understanding that racism, especially in regard to how to effectively navigate and respond to its deadly threats, is a pervasive reality in communities of color. Historically, black lives and communities have been shaped cognitively by centuries of “knowing” the reality and brutality of racism. Specifically, this system of knowledge and meaning-making reflects matters of life and death. For that reason, it is deep and nuanced in understandings of context, as Feagin (2013: 184) has noted:

Because the white racial frame is itself gendered, with black boys and men generally seen as more frightening and dangerous than black girls and women, teaching the counter-frame is also often gendered. Given the aggressive white targeting of black boys and men for discrimination in areas such as policing, black parents often provide stronger and earlier lessons about being cautious when around white police officers and police brutality for sons than for daughters. Such lessons about being wary of white officers and officials have long been important parts of black counter-framing.

Contextually, police brutality and other malpractice—and the grounded knowledge of that possibility—thus produce a form of agonizing and enervating labor, namely emotional and cognitive labor. This labor is indeed arduous work, as it involves routinely navigating difficult and dangerous societal environments. Although not necessarily within the microcosm of employment per se, this individual and collective labor is directly connected to the racialized realities of racism and sexism, including the preexisting white framing and black counter-framing of what represents blackness. This cognitive labor, a form of self-protection, involves the process of thinking through racialized interactions, including those yet to occur. It includes the painful anticipation of unfortunate racist and gendered-racist experiences. For instance, the brother of Rekia Boyd made the following statement concerning Michael Brown and the Ferguson police department: “I wasn’t too interested in following the grand jury decision [in Ferguson] because I already knew what it was going to be. I just looked at Darren Wilson and I thought, ‘they’re just going to let him go.’ I already knew the end of the story’” (Bellware, 2014; emphasis added). This individual and collective reality of knowing the depths of the racist system well stems from discrimination’s cumulative impact on black lives, over decades and centuries.

Conclusion

This cognitive and emotional work involves much more than silent knowing and feeling, and is usually shared through contemporary interactions and collective memory. The amount of time and energy expended to develop effective counter narratives and forms of everyday resistance involves both thinking through and analyzing negative interactions as well as developing a satisfactory way to respond, cognitively and emotionally. This labor is indeed continuous in all racialized environments. As a result of systemic racism and systemic gendered racism, black Americans have generally and recurringly engaged in forms of activism, including through lawsuits and street protests. As we have seen, such resistance, always part of an enduring struggle over systemic racism, can have many latent consequences for the individual and for the collective. The physical, cognitive, and emotional energy connected to resisting whites’ racial discrimination has significant personal (and community) health costs—including being injured through violent police tactics and from everyday encounters with white discrimination.

As we consider the voices and understandings of the racially oppressed, we all must consider well the consequences of their navigating, understanding, and resisting racialized social worlds. Though often unseen, unless in an explosion of frustrated emotions, most black Americans live with quiet desperation a life punctuated by hundreds of everyday incidents of oppression and micro aggressions (Feagin, 2006). Many in the mainstream media argue that the general awareness of police brutality is increasing, but this is true only or mostly for white Americans, for there has always been an acute awareness of the array of police malpractice in most communities of color. Technology is giving us the ability to publicize what African Americans and other Americans of color have been experiencing for many generations. Even so, this growing white awareness still frequently leads to people of color feeling hopeless, because even with the undeniable and well-published evidence of policing violence, little or nothing is changing at the local or national levels, at least so far. As a result, Americans of color typically live in a constant state of fear of actual and recurring policing violence, even as a white “fearfulness” created by centuries-old white-racist framing is often used as a justification for these murders of innocent black men, women, and children.

How then is this policing violence shaping contemporary cognitive and emotional labor? In part, what we see through recent protests by African Americans is but one critical dimension of their cognitive and emotional labor, including their public and collective display of well-based anger. In addition, African Americans and other Americans of color must develop and deploy various significant forms of micro-resistance in all areas of their everyday lives, including major counter narratives and resistance that helps protect them from denigration while hopefully minimizing the risk of severe white retaliation (Evans and Moore, 2015). Such counter narratives are generated with much cognitive and emotional labor. To a substantial degree, they include recurring and intense conversations with friends and family, and especially with children, about what one can and cannot do in the public spaces that for whites involve no such cognitive and emotional labor. As has often been said, “being white means never having to think about it.”