During the Fall 2019 semester, I had the pleasure of taking former Mason professor Dr. Angela Hattery’s Honors course entitled Policing Black Bodies. Since then, the murder of George Floyd has catapulted the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement into the forefront of public discourse. Her book, also titled “Policing Black Bodies“, tackles subjects related to the Black experience in the United States such as mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police killings of unarmed Black men. After recently reconnecting via social media, Dr. Hattery graciously agreed to do an interview with me to discuss BLM from her point of view as a scholar on the issues.
Jordyn Salmon (JS): When and how did you become interested in researching and writing about the Black experience in the U.S.?
Dr. Angela Hattery (AH): That’s a great question, and I think the answer is, of course, kind of long, and there’s multiple parts to it. But I’ll try to hit just a few highlights. As I often tell people, I grew up in probably the only place that’s whiter than Iceland, and that’s Minnesota, and rural Minnesota. So, not the sort of Minneapolis of George Floyd. That’s not the kind of community I grew up in. I grew up in a very white community. Race when I was growing up in general was kind of an abstract concept. It wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I often tell this story as an example of my blind spots, but I grew up in the part of the country where the study of the Civil War took up maybe a few weeks in fifth grade. We learned three things, which was Lincoln freed the slaves, it’s over, and we won. That’s all I really knew, which is very ignorant, and I’m aware now as an adult that it was much more complicated than I thought it was. I grew up in that kind of space, but at the same time my parents were very concerned that we be exposed to people different from ourselves. That took on all kinds of different shapes and colors. I grew up in a community that has a very small Jewish population, for example, and I went to Catholic school, but my dad worked with people who were Jewish. And so, we went to bar mitzvahs, and we went to Jewish weddings. We were exposed to people whose religious practice was different. There was one Black family that lived on my block, and my parents invited them to our house.
Those sorts of things that, when I reflect back on, were really important messages that difference is okay. It’s good to know people who are different from you. I think of that as sort of the foundation on which my interest was able to bloom and able to blossom. So then, like many people, I went to college. When I was a junior in college, I did a “study abroad” experience in the city of Chicago, and we lived in an incredibly diverse community. We were all spread out all over the city, and that was the first time that I really saw racial housing segregation in practice and we studied that exact thing. For me, it just didn’t make sense. I didn’t understand it. It wasn’t the family I grew up in, I really just didn’t understand it. And so I think that was the first time where I was like, I need to know more about this. I need to make sense of why racism exists. Why do people behave this way? Like, I don’t feel this way, so what’s this all about? And I was really lucky to have professors who were all community activists who wanted to talk about that, and encourage conversation and create safe spaces. Then I went to graduate school, and I was taking a lot of classes focused on gender and racial inequality. I was learning the sort of intellectual stuff about it and interested in it. The final turning point for me was when I was living in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and I knew nothing of the 20-year history of the case of Darryl Hunt. I came in at the very end of that, but I kept seeing news stories about his case which was extraordinarily controversial. For folks who don’t know, [Darryl Hunt] is a Black man who spent 20 years in prison for the rape and murder of a white woman for which he was wrongfully convicted and he was exonerated in 2004.
The community was ripped apart by this case. White people all thought he was guilty, and Black people all thought he was innocent, and it reignited a racial divide that had kind of been tamped down for the few years before his conviction in 1985. I started seeing things on the news and I didn’t understand it, so I wanted to learn more about it. His attorney’s daughter and my daughter did gymnastics at the same gym. So, I emailed him and said, “Hey, you know, I see you at the gym and I’m interested in [the case],” and I think this is the most important part of the story, “How can I help?” Not what can I take, but what can I give? That opened up a set of conversations with Darrell and volunteering with him. I think if anything can ignite your passion for racial inequality and racial equity work, it’s getting to know someone who spent 20 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, and the reason they were in prison is because they’re Black and that’s it. So, I think that was a really important sort of gateway for me into a dedication and a passion for not telling just his story, but telling the [whole] story.
That’s a long way into saying how I got to where I am, but I think what’s important from that is that it was really a personal journey. My personal journey was happening at the same time as my academic journey. The academic journey was super important because that allowed me to be an expert on the issue, but I don’t think if I hadn’t had a personal journey that was happening at the same time it would have exploded the way it did, which is I think we have to feel these things. If we’re white people, they can’t stay just in our head.
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JS: It’s definitely an empathy thing, and I think a lot of people who are maybe skeptical of the movement or learning about things such as that, it’s something that they really have to feel something [or experience something] to care and to want to get interested in it.
AH: I think, to your point, also to sustain the energy because we talk about racial fatigue. In fact, Dr. Smith and I were joking the other day about white people getting racial fatigue, they don’t want to talk about it anymore. But Black people can’t ever stop it. They don’t get to take a break from it. They feel racial fatigue because it’s happening every single day to their bodies. I think that’s what dealing with your white privilege is about, “if I don’t have to feel it, then I don’t have to care about it, and I don’t have to stay in the fight.”
JS: Every topic in your book with Dr. Smith has been launched into the forefront of everybody’s conversation. Every topic, from mass incarceration, to the school-to-prison pipeline, literally everything. And so my question is: is your teaching going to change at all about those topics?
AH: Yeah, absolutely. We had approached, without knowing what May, June, and July of 2020 was going to bring, we had already arranged with our publisher to produce a new edition of the book. So, we were all of a sudden, like, how do we get all of this that’s happening [into the book], and we completely rewrote the book in June and July. How I see that is it will enter the conversation, not just in the classroom, but it’ll also enter the conversation for people who buy the second edition of the book. We worked really hard to bring in the new cases, and we expanded the chapter on Black women’s bodies significantly, which we had already planned to do. But [for example] Breonna Taylor provides an additional impetus to that. The social protests in Minneapolis and that are still going on in places bring all of this stuff in the book to like, well, now this isn’t four years old, this is two months old. It was a super exhausting, but exciting summer to get a chance to rewrite the book. We wrote the book originally before Charlottesville, so some of the features of the book are different. We took a much clearer stance against white supremacy. We talk a lot more about white supremacy in the second edition of the book. So I think it changes everything, right? I think it means a whole new classroom of students will have not just a memory of the experiences, but maybe marched themselves.
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JS: I think one thing that strikes me about all of the murders that occurred over the summer and that were talked about over the summer, was people on the “opposing side” looking for some way to blame those people for their own murder.
AH: Yeah, that’s huge. I remember we brought Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mom, to campus, and I had read her book. That was one of the things that was so devastating was to hear her talk about the fact that the defense claimed that Trayvon Martin used the sidewalk as a lethal weapon because he was lying on it, right? It’s just like, this is absurd.
JS: How do you feel the current president and his administration have encouraged backlash narratives against people having [what should be] basic civil rights and the Black Lives Matter movement specifically?
AH: I think the simple answer is that’s what they do every single day. When I think about the arc of history a little bit more (and I’m not a historian), I think that whenever power is challenged there’s a backlash that’s both, kind of what we’re seeing with people wrapping themselves in the Confederate flag and all of that. But also policy backlash. In many ways, I’m not at all surprised because anytime a group gains any little bit of power, this is exactly what the dominant group does. If you think about the supposed gains of the Civil Rights movement, almost all of them have been turned back. Not necessarily officially, but [for instance] Brown v. Board of Education. First of all, it takes 15 years to implement in places like Virginia, so they didn’t integrate schools until the 70s. They integrate for something like, one generation, which might be your parents’ generation. Then as soon as your parents have kids, suddenly it’s this, “we want our kids to walk to school” movement, which is coded racialized language, and pretty soon the schools are back to as segregated as they were when your grandparents went to school. I think if we watch the arc of history, we should not be surprised at all that this is what’s happening. I mean, Amy Coney Barrett, who is likely to be confirmed on the Supreme Court, has already said Roe v. Wade was decided wrongly. She has said marriage equality was decided wrongly. (Dr. Smith and I were talking about it this morning) Brown v. Board of Education will be next. So, in this case, we have a tool of white supremacy sitting in the White House. The thing I hope people will be alert to is this is not unexpected, this is exactly what happens. Every time a group gains anything, there’s an immediate backlash to try to [retract] those gains, and often they’re pretty successful. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, We Were Eight Years in Power, about the eight years of the Obama presidency, he argues that the best thing that Trump had going for him to get elected was the Obama presidency. That having a Black man in the White House for eight years was like embers just waiting to be lit on fire by Trump, and I think he’s 100% right about that.
JS: What would you say to those who are skeptical of the BLM movement?
AH: You know, I really struggle with this because as a social scientist, I’m an empiricist. I naively believed for a very long time that if you just showed people the facts, it would all be clear, but as you know it doesn’t work that way. I think in that way, it comes back to the experiential part. We have to give people lived experiences, and as many of them as we can, if we’re going to move the needle.
JS: Right, because if it doesn’t exist for them in their life, it doesn’t exist at all.
AH: Exactly, exactly. The facts aren’t going to change that because what’s most important to them is what they see. I think that’s, I guess, it’s a ringing endorsement for more experiences. And you and I both said that it’s experiences in our own lives that helped us move forward. So clearly, that’s got to be the case for other people.
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JS: What do you think are some impactful ways, or the most impactful way for your students and individuals in general to make direct changes?
AH: I think doing what you’re doing, which is talking about it to your friends and family and finding your lane. What is your lane going to be? Is your lane going to be in policymaking? Is your lane going to be in teaching? Is your lane going to be in healthcare? Where’s your lane going to be? And then when you get into your lane, what can you do to change the things that you have the power to change? I’m not a lobbyist. I don’t work on Capitol Hill. I don’t do those things, but some people do. Some people who will have taken Policing Black Bodies will do that. And so, how can they create a push for policies that will make a difference? If you’re a healthcare provider, how are you making sure that you’re educating? Let’s imagine that you’re a doctor in a clinic and that there’s these stereotypes that Black people don’t feel pain as much as white people. How can you educate the people you work with, so that when a Black person comes in, the assumption isn’t that they’re drug-seeking, it’s that they actually are in pain for whatever injury or illness they’re coming in for? How can you stand up at your school board meeting and argue for more inclusive classrooms? How can you be the person that is the point of change in whatever organization you’re in? Because I think what’s hard is, it’s really difficult to make change in places where you don’t have access or power. So, figure out where you have [power], and then figure out what you can do.