The End of Policing

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

A clearly and articulately written rundown of the major areas in which police exert their power and control in the modern US, the patterns of abuse that arise from such police control, reforms that have been attempted to address said abuses, and more profound/abolitionist alternatives to policing altogether towards which people can advocate and organize. While focusing primarily on policing in the US and covering policing of schooling, mental illness, homelessness, sex work, drug use, gangs, borders, and political movements/activism, Vitale also includes some history of the rise of the modern, militarized police and examples of policing in other countries which provide, variously, context, counter-examples, and further supports for his arguments.

If you’ve known for a while—or for your whole life—that the police are a racist system of surveillance and control, most of the information in this book won’t really be new or surprising to you. Still, it’s a clear-eyed summary of the scope and pervasiveness of the travesty that is policing in the US, and useful for its concise analysis of attempted reforms and potential alternatives; this would be a great book to recommend to folks newly aware of the racist and corrupt nature of the police. The chapter that felt the most “off” to me was the chapter on policing sex work. While Vitale acknowledged a few times that many, many people do sex work out of their own free will, there was still a vague but present sense that Vitale thought “most” people only do sex work because they have no other options or are otherwise coerced. Had Vitale more prominently centered the reality that a huge number of people do sex work not as a last resort but because it’s a job option that can provide a lot more money and a lot more control over your time than other careers, this chapter would have been more strong and accurate.

Overall a solid and accessible introduction to the horrors of modern US policing and a powerful argument for how ending policing altogether is the only way out.

Patsy

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

This is an oceanic novel: holding the minute and the massive, the mysterious and the mundane, moving with all the quickness of eddies and the profundity of great swells. Taking place over the titular Patsy’s lifetime, the novel chronicles her youth--her treatment at the hands of her deeply religious mother and abusive stepfather, the passion she nurtures for her childhood friend and teenage lover Cicely, the way her pregnancy at age 23 settles around her like a net and an anchor--as well as her departure for New York, leaving her daughter, Tru, behind in pursuit of Cicely, and the years that come after. How Patsy is shoe-horned into domestic labor by her status as undocumented. How Patsy comes to find that the distance between her and Cicely seems larger when they live in the same US city than it did when Patsy was thousands of miles away in Jamaica. How Patsy and Tru become separated both by physical oceans and oceans of silence. How Tru grows up almost entirely in the aftershocks of her mother’s departure, at first longing and hoping for her, then settling into a disappointed bitterness, and eventually into an acrid despair.

Patsy and Tru are connected by the tension between the call of their hearts and the expectations of others—and the material limitations those expectations place upon them. These expectations and limitations are manifold. They include those of gender, sexuality, race, class, immigration status, age, parental status, and experiences of trauma. For both Patsy and Tru, their passions and desires, their deepest senses of their own selves, are weighed upon heavily by the force of these limiting expectations: even while bursting forth like precious, queer flowers, the ways in which Patsy’s and Tru’s self-expression are seen by others as aberrations or sins can still turn them dangerous, frightening.

Dennis-Benn is a skilled novelist. While this novel can absolutely be plumbed for political analysis, gorgeous symbolic imagery, commentary on nationhood, nationality, and immigration, and all of the aforementioned layers of identity, it reads as an unimaginably rich unspooling of characters, dialogue, and quick-footed narrative, never as an allegory or a screed. It’s a novel to sink into, to gasp at, to lounge against, to cry over—it’s also a novel deeply worth listening to as an audiobook. Masterfully read by Sharon Gordon, the audiobook captures the various characters’ accents in a more visceral way than any book can, and also highlights the presence and absence of patois, and how these presences and absences pattern throughout the different settings and communities depicted within Patsy.

My only quibble with this book was the ending which, while satisfying in a way, was such a quick and fairytale resolution to a novel otherwise so complex and thorough that it felt incongruous. That being said, Patsy is a modern classic, a novel about categories and bonds and how they can be defied, survived, and redefined, and a thoroughly enjoyable big read.

Supper Club

Supper Club by Lara Williams

When I close my eyes to summon up an image that could represent this book, what I see is a sumptuous cake, perhaps deep chocolate or red velvet with curls of chocolate and palatial structures of frosting as decoration. The cake is on a cake-stand, creating an effect of floating. Instead of a slice taken out, there is instead a furious, hungry maul made in the crumb, the kind of cavity made not with a knife or fork but with a hand or a mouth.

Supper Club chronicles the time from main character Roberta’s adolescence through her early thirties. Tracking backward and forward almost dreamily in time, scenes and narrative threads intersect and trouble one another: Roberta’s departure from home for college, where she is overwhelmed with both ambient anxiety and specific trauma; messages she receives from her long-absent father; Roberta’s lengthy relationship with an older professor; Roberta’s time working for a fashion website, where she meets Stevie, who becomes a life-altering friend.

There’s something about Stevie that catalyzes Roberta. Always interested in food and cooking, the appearance in her life of a friend who is powerful, supportive, funny, and a little wild inspires Roberta to start the Supper Club, a transgressive gathering of women where, rather than attempting to silence, suppress, and shrink themselves, the goal is to feast, expand, shout, and generally unleash in community. But this consciously bacchanalian presence in her life does not magically transform Roberta. She is still plagued with a sense of living for others, of directionless and rootlessness, of being sure that she is an inconvenience, a disappointment, a drag. I was frustrated by her ongoing refusal to communicate with the people around her, the people who attempted to love her, but also appreciated this realistic representation of what can so often be the thing that holds us back from transformation. Without communicating about her desires, her confusions, her sorrows, and her traumas, Roberta is left floating upon the cake-stand, in abundant possession of all potential riches and sustenance, but ungrounded and alone.