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

