Episode 3: Dehumanizing: White America’s Justification for Police Brutality

Justice Talks in Wyoming

In this weeks episode, Matt Klein sits down with Dr. Frederick Douglas Dixon of the University of Wyoming, to discuss how the dehumanization process of Black people in the United States helps us understand a culture of accepting police brutality as a normal practice. The discussion ranges from the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, through reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement and Dr. Martina Luther King Jr., the Black Freedom Movement and Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, all the way to the recent assassination of George Floyd. We explore the ways in which a country and its government, and law enforcement agencies, have perpetrated violence and systematically created a subclass of human that has lead to an acceptance of the murder of Black people at the hands of police officers. Through a discussion of in depth history, reformist movements such as Black Lives Matter, and personal stories of a young man growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the midst of a notoriously corrupt police department, Dr. Dixon provides prospective and insight into understanding how and why our system and society allows for acts of violence against the Black community as a normal course of daily activities.