W
hen
I
first
learned
Espresso Royale was
closing all of its locations
in early June, it felt like just another
thing fighting for my attention. Amid
the global COVID-19 pandemic and
Black Lives Matter protests following
the killings of George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor — only two examples
of white supremacy that have sparked
recent uprisings — the news that
the coffee chain was closing seemed
rather insignificant. That’s not to
say Espresso Royale’s closing, or the
closing of any business predicted to
not make it through the pandemic,
won’t have a real impact for some of
the 38.1 million Americans employed
in the service and retail industries hit
the hardest. Still, Espresso Royale’s
closing did not seem like the greatest
cause for concern at the time.
As I have had more time to reflect
on the news, I am left with all of my
memories sitting at Espresso Royale,
an incredibly important place for me
and many of my peers throughout
college. It was where we would study
on countless mornings, afternoons,
evenings and late nights; met with
friends in between classes; went on
or observed awkward first dates and
organized to work on group projects.
Espresso Royale was a reliable study
spot where you were bound to run into
people you knew.
While my peers and I ostensibly
went to Espresso Royale to study,
my favorite memories there were
when we barely got any work done
at all. You could always count on
finding someone to talk to when
you were avoiding homework. As a
very extroverted person who loves
to procrastinate, I would often go to
Espresso Royale between classes,
even when I had no work to do, just to
take refuge from the cold and find
someone to chat with for a couple of
minutes. While I stared at blank Word
documents hoping my essay would
type itself, I got to talk with friends or
acquaintances about what was new
in our lives, how we felt about school,
where we were coming from and
where we wanted to go. Since Espresso
Royale was open until 11 p.m., we took
shelter there for hours on end.
During my junior year, I found
myself bewildered by how much time
my peers and I had spent at Espresso
Royale’s State Street location, or
ERSSL as we would commonly
abbreviate it. It was impossible to
walk into ERSSL without seeing
at least three people you knew.
One night — while I was once
again procrastinating completing
my course readings — I took this
bewilderment online.
On Feb. 20, 2017, a fellow Michigan
Daily opinion editor and I started the
Espresso Royale (State Street) Fan
Club Facebook Group, an unofficial
fan page for people — mainly
myself — to post Espresso Royale
memes and commentary. The posts
in our unofficial fan club ranged
from a variety of topics: jokes about
Espresso Royale’s renovations or the
infamous “coffee12” wifi password,
photos of people drinking Espresso
Royale in their 8 a.m. class, questions
about how much to tip for a $2.50
latte and general posts about the
Espresso Royale experience. There
weren’t any rules dictating what was
appropriate to post, as long as it was
Espresso
Royale-related.
Despite
the page never gaining more than
342 members, I reveled in the local
fandom and small-town popularity
the group provided me, loving the
attention I got from strangers who
grew to know me as “the Espresso
Royale guy.”
While it was all just for fun, our
devotion to Espresso Royale left me
with the same question that inspired
me to start the page in the first place:
Why the hell do we spend so much
time at this coffee shop? My peers
and I must have clocked hundreds
of hours each at ERSSL. Given the
wide array of coffee shops in Ann
Arbor, I don’t think it’s controversial
to say that Espresso Royale was not
the greatest option in town. This is
no fault of Espresso Royale. After all,
how is one to compete with the likes
of Literati Coffee or Roos Roast?
Still, even without these elite
alternatives around to serve as points
of comparison, it’s not as if Espresso
Royale was trying very hard. The
coffee, service and seating, albeit
reliable, were all just okay. One day
during the summer after I graduated,
I went into ERSSL with some friends
to work on job applications only to
find the A/C was out. This memory
is representative of many ERSSL
experiences: Showing up only to find
something massively uncomfortable,
yet staying for at least an hour
anyways. While I would never go on
the record saying ERSSL was perfect,
the popular Zucchini bread, strong
cups of coffee and camaraderie kept
me coming back.
With so many other great cafes
to choose from, why did so many of
my peers consistently congregate
at ERSSL? There are certainly
some pragmatic reasons. Espresso
Royale’s State Street location was
relatively
accessible,
convenient
and open late. Espresso Royale’s
prices were not radically different
from other options nearby, such as
Starbucks, but they generally let
you use their space without buying
anything. Their openness to letting
people loiter in addition to the charm
and $2 Latte Wednesday deal — a
tradition celebrated like a holiday in
the Espresso Royale Facebook group
— made it a sufficient college study
spot. You could find several friends
in ERSSL on Wednesday mornings
even when, to our collective horror,
the latte deal was raised to $2.50
Latte Wednesdays.
I am certainly not saying Espresso
Royale’s storewide policy was to
let anyone loiter. Although baristas
tended not to care about people
loitering, or were just too busy to
notice, I have still seen Espresso
Royale staff ask homeless residents to
leave. The best solution to the lack of
places to go without spending money
in a city as unaffordable as Ann Arbor
— whether to study, see friends or
simply take refuge from the rain — is
increased investment in affordable
housing and public community
spaces, not private coffee shops.
P
ast attempts at reform, even
in Minneapolis, have been
evidently ineffective and do
not satisfy community demands.
Instead of trying to change things
from within the system — what
reform sought to do — it is more
essential to defund and dismantle
the policing system that has dispro-
portionately targeted and harassed
Black communities for centuries.
By divesting and funneling finan-
cial resources away from policing
agencies, we can instead build and
invest in municipal programs that
work to fix the underlying chal-
lenges in communities — such as
poverty, poor education, inad-
equate housing, food insecurity,
drug rehabilitation, mental health
problems, etc.
There is reasonable confusion
over the true difference between
police reform and defunding the
police, creating subsequent hesi-
tance over the latter. When evalu-
ating your own confusion, it’s
essential to listen to the voices
that have been most impacted by
the continuous overabundance of
policing and surveillance. Black
Lives Matter co-founder Alicia
Garza stated, “When we talk about
defunding the police, what we’re
saying is invest in the resources that
our communities need. So much of
policing right now is generated and
directed towards quality-of-life
issues, homelessness, drug addic-
tion, domestic violence. … But what
we do need is increased funding
for housing, we need increased
funding for education, we need
increased funding for quality of
life of communities who are over-
policed
and
over-surveilled.”
When trying to disrupt a system
that has been maintained through
different mediums since slavery, we
must have a mutual understanding
of what we are hoping to disrupt
and of what our ultimate end goal
should look like. Many activists
have advocated for reforming the
police departments; others, for a
defunding model that would strive
to divest large funds from national
police departments and equitably
invest that money into commu-
nity services. However, we have
seen, with a prime example being
the Minneapolis Police Depart-
ment, that reforms are not success-
ful. TIME reports that “the same
reforms were recommended time
and again over the past two decades
in the MPD to increase account-
ability, curb use-of-force violations
and build up community trust —
with seemingly little implementa-
tion.” A recent movement called
#8cantwait advocates for banning
unnecessary measures of vio-
lence, for requiring police officers
to exhaust all alternatives before
shooting and intervening and com-
prehensive reporting, among other
things. Organizers claim this initia-
tive could reduce police use of force
by 72 percent. However, many activ-
ists are already criticizing this plan,
calling it “copaganda” and saying it
will improve policing’s war on the
Black community, as it does not call
for the removal of funds from police
departments and does not address
the entire issue of systemic racism
and brutality within the institution.
Decreasing police budgets is
the first step in addressing the dis-
proportionate amount of funding
that police departments receive
from
the
federal
government.
Calls for defunding do not mean
the removal of efforts for pub-
lic safety, but rather a demand
to stop spending millions of dol-
lars on military-style equipment
for poorly trained police officers.
The protests against police bru-
tality and the greater system that
Americans are witnessing and par-
ticipating in right now are nothing
new. From many past demonstra-
tions — including the 2014 Fer-
guson protests in Missouri that
ushered in the Black Lives Matter
movement to the 1992 Los Angeles
riots to the 1965 Watts riots — we
are reminded that the stringent
acts of racial profiling, oppression
and violence enacted by police
officers on the Black community
is a centuries-old problem. As dis-
cussed in a recent editorial, mod-
ern policing agencies in the U.S.
originated from slave patrols and
night watches, which were primar-
ily constituted of white men using
vigilante tactics to further control
and oppress Black individuals.
These groups worked for wealthy
white slave owners to punish, cap-
ture and return enslaved people
who escaped or were believed to
have violated plantation rules.
These first police forces were over-
whelmingly focused on respond-
ing to, and punishing, what they
considered disorderly, non-white
behavior rather than actual crime.
As American slavery gratingly
matured into a depraved regime
that denied Black people human-
ity while still criminalizing their
actions, they were considered
capable of engaging in crime but
“incapable of performing civil acts.”
Similarly, while the 13th Amend-
ment is credited with ending the
concept of slavery we are taught
in grade school, it stopped short of
ending slavery for those convicted
of crimes. The laws that once gov-
erned slaves were replaced with
Black Codes governing free Black
individuals, soon making the new
criminal justice system of America
central to strategic racial control.
These methods of oppression
intensified whenever Black people
asserted their autonomy or achieved
any degree of success. For example,
during Reconstruction, white poli-
cymakers and other white people in
positions of power invented offens-
es used to target Black individuals.
These included breaking strict cur-
fews only for Black people, loiter-
ing, vagrancy, not carrying proof
of employment from a former slave
owner, etc. Those caught for such
actions were quickly apprehended
and American slavery persisted in
the form of convict leasing, where
Southern states could lease their
prisoners to large plantations,
mines and railways — all for profit.
Later, in the second half of the
20th century, a new political fear
would emerge during protests
over harsh inequalities and civil
rights. Black and brown people are
still disproportionately targeted
by these policies that were not as
explicitly racialized as the Black
Codes, although their implemen-
tation has been characteristically
similar. Former President Richard
Nixon’s “war on drugs,” “broken
windows”
policing,
mandatory
minimum sentences, three-strike
laws, children tried as adults, etc.,
were all implemented. The rhetoric
of “law and order” and subsequent
focus on suppressing the Civil
Rights Movement was adopted as
a centerpiece for Nixon’s platform,
which white authorities heavily
utilized to criminalize Black indi-
viduals fighting for equal rights. As
“cracking down on crime” became
a codified tune, no distinction
was drawn between civil rights
activists, traditional petty crimes
and rebellions. Within the past
weeks, we’ve seen President Don-
ald Trump invoke the same racist
rhetoric as he declared himself the
“president of law and order” and
also quoted a racist 1960s Miami
police chief by tweeting, “when the
looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Unfortunately, many prominent
politicians, including Joe Biden,
former vice president and pre-
sumptive Democratic presidential
nominee have not voiced their sup-
port for what Black communities
across the country are calling for
and are instead “opposed to cut-
ting police funding and believed
more spending was necessary to
help improve law enforcement and
community policing.” Many activ-
ists advocating against reforms at
this time are calling for politicians
to “read the room” and to listen to
the people. However, many fear
that instead of taking political risks
to implement the much needed sys-
tematic changes in this country,
politicians are more worried about
alienating moderate white voters.
For example, in response to an
uproar of protests against systemic
racism and police brutality in May
2015, former President Barack
Obama and a selected team crafted
“The Final Report of the Presi-
dent’s Task Force on 21st Century
Policing.” This report consisted of
various reform approaches, many
similar to those of the #8cantwait
campaign
circulating
recently.
These reforms have made no per-
manent or effective progress and
local activist groups are continuing
to reject broader pushes for more
reform-based training. Johnetta
Elzie, a civil rights activist and
organizer, stated, “People in power
— politicians and policymakers
— are still talking about reform.
We’re beyond that. We’re over
that. If they wanted reform, they
would have done it six years ago
when we actually had the chance
to. But that’s not what happened.”
Instead, it is time to reimagine
the ineffective and systemically
racist notions of policing agen-
cies and their superficial proce-
dural reforms by defunding the
police and investing in specific,
community-focused
safety
and
prevention
programs.
Produc-
tive steps forward could include
the installation of multiple com-
munity departments and facilities
that interactively work with com-
munity residents, to an equitable
degree. This is suggested in the
#8toabolition initiative, which was
initially made by activist group
Critical Resistance and was then
reproduced by an ad team that cre-
ated a website providing a variety of
shareable graphics for social media.
In Minneapolis specifically, a
report was published in 2018 that
outlined all the reforms the police
department has embraced, includ-
ing body cameras and various train-
ing sessions that cover mindfulness,
implicit bias and crisis interven-
tion.
The
Minneapolis
Police
Department also forfeited money
to training programs and better
equipment, but there was little to
no decline in Black fatalities caused
by law enforcement. With that in
mind, it is pertinent that a budget
seeks to resolve the facets of life
that often incite petty crime such
as drug abuse, mental and physi-
cal illness, food insecurity, poverty
and the other impairments that
disproportionately affect the dis-
advantaged areas of the larger city.
ALLISON PUJOL | COLUMN
‘When do you think the protests will stop?’
“
When do you think the protests
will stop?” My mother asked me
this when we were both sitting
in the kitchen a few days ago. “Didn’t
they arrest the cop who killed that
guy? I don’t understand why there are
all these violent protests still. And how
does it benefit anyone to vandalize a
building?”
My mother is the daughter of two
Cuban immigrants. My father is the
proud son of two Cubans who also
came to the United States decades ago.
Many older members of my family,
including my grandparents, have
likewise voiced concerns about the
legitimacy of the protests erupting
around the country in the aftermath
of George Floyd’s death. One of my late
relatives was imprisoned in Cuba for
more than 20 years for his activities as a
political activist. I have been wondering
lately what he would have to say about
my family’s response, given Cuba’s own
history of protest. Likewise, political
activism before and during the 90s
in Cuba bears notable distinctions
from the contemporary protests in
the United States, but there are also
important parallels.
When the Soviet Union dissolved
in 1991, Cuba lost its main trading
partner as well as the source of
much of its international political
support. An economic crisis soon
unfolded within Cuba, resulting in
strict rationing, rolling blackouts (for
up to 20 hours) and severe medicine
shortages. In 1994, nearly a thousand
Cubans gathered at Havana’s Malecon
(a sea wall along the country’s capital
known for its tourist appeal) to voice
their frustrations. Protesters broke
windows and destroyed property as
others recorded the events unfolding,
desperate for their voices to be heard.
The uprising was effectively quelled on
the same day it started because police
shot, beat or threatened protesters
who would not leave the streets. Nobody
really writes much about this uprising.
But many Cubans solemnly remember
it, even if they no longer live on the island.
Cuban-American communities should
bear those parallels in mind when
considering their role and respective
privilege in the broader context of police
violence against people of color.
Despite the destructionist tactics
used by protestors, the Maleconazo
riot is a point of pride for many Cubans
who now reside in the U.S. If my own
community’s continued willingness to
speak out against past injustice at the
hands of Fidel Castro’s military and
police force is any indication, many
Cubans who now reside in the United
States would not be so quick to condemn
the Maleconazo riot more than 25
years ago. I struggle to imagine any
of my grandparents criticizing those
protestors who vandalized buildings
in a display of their frustration against
their country’s deteriorating economic
conditions. No Cuban-American I
know speaks out against those who
stole boats that same year to flee to the
United States. In some ways, the lack
of understanding that many Cubans in
my community have exhibited towards
those protesting police brutality and the
United States’ long legacy of systemic
racism is surprising. In many ways,
however, this reaction is predictable.
Despite the history of anti-Latino
sentiment in the United States,
Latin American communities have
not always been compassionate or
responsible partners in the fight
against racism. Even though people
of Hispanic descent have been racially
profiled by police or are increasingly
the target of hate crimes, racism has
been deeply internalized in many
immigrant communities. As Karla
McKanders, a clinical professor of
law at Vanderbilt Law School, writes,
instead of seeing themselves as
natural allies in the fight for social
and economic justice, many white
and white-passing Cuban-Americans
see themselves in competition with
Black
Americans.
Furthermore,
George Martinez, a professor of law
at Southern Methodist University,
writes that some Latinos “often
sought to ‘pass’ as white … because
they thought that becoming white
insured greater economic, political
and social security … [which] meant
gaining access to a whole set of public
and private privileges, and was a way
to avoid being the object of others’
domination.” Like many privileged
Cuban-Americans,
I
personally
have been guilty of implicit bias and
racism — both intentional and not —
and am still learning how I can most
effectively dismantle the subtle, yet
powerful hatred that often exists in
my own community.
Whether these comments are
intended to belittle Black activists
or not, many of the critiques I have
heard of the ongoing protests are
nonetheless reflections of that same
subtle hatred. Deflecting to concerns
about property damage belittles the
real and immeasurable pain that
police brutality has inflicted upon
Black
communities.
Responding
to the international outcry over
the irreplaceable loss of lives with
reports of damaged vehicles or stores
suggests that perhaps, in fact, you
might not think Black lives matter as
much mass-produced, replaceable
objects from Target. (As an aside, it
is never a good sign when a multi-
million dollar corporation’s response
to looting is more charitable than
your own). Dismissing these protests
as “violent” and thus irredeemable
avoids an important discussion
about why protests are taking place
at all and does not consider the larger
history of protests across the world.
This response in particular also
reflects a choice to be ignorant about
the way the police have responded to
protests about police brutality with
more police brutality.
The protests in the United
States today are not about me or my
family. I chose to write this article
because I thought it was necessary
to use my platform as an opinion
columnist to purposefully critique
the response many of my family
members and members of my
community have taken toward the
protests and this country’s history of
anti-Black racism. The way to begin
to destruct internalized racism in
our own homes and communities
is to acknowledge privilege and
have conversations about ongoing
discrimination and injustice, no
matter how painful or uncomfortable.
Allison Pujol can be reached at
ampmich@umich.edu.
MAX LUBELL | CONTRIBUTOR
The final $2.50 Wednesday latte
Max Lubell is a graduate of the
University of Michigan and can be
reached at maxlubell@gmail.com.
From The Daily: Divest to invest — the reality of dismantling the police
O
n Sunday, June 7, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council acknowledged that the current system of policing is not working
and that they intend to “defund and dismantle” the city police department. Council President Lisa Bender stated, “(We need) to
listen, especially to our Black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working and to really let the solutions
lie in our community.” While still in the process of planning exactly what these new, transformative and community-based initiatives
may look like, the goal is to implement a model of public safety that actually keeps each community safe. Conversations of defunding
and dismantling police departments have popped up all over the country, and many are concerned about what exactly this means.
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
12 — Monday, August 31, 2020
Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com