Good morning, RVA: 666 • 21; taking down monuments; and eight police policies

Good morning, RVA! It’s already 73 °F! Today, you can expect another humid day with highs in the mid 90s. Relief comes maybe this weekend after a bit of rain.

Water cooler

Richmond Police are reporting that Jermaine R. Stroman, 30, was found shot to death on the third floor of the Rodeway Inn on the 3200 block of N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard early Tuesday morning.

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 666 new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 21 new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 69 new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 34, Henrico: 14, and Richmond: 21). Since this pandemic began, 195 people have died in the Richmond region. Despite those deaths, it’s hard to remember the pandemic—which is a weird sentence to write. New cases, reported deaths, hospitalizations, are all trending downward and have been for a couple of weeks. Even the percent positivity graphs for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield are all, generally, going in the right direction. Who knows what impact the loosening of restrictions and huge protests will have on our region, but, for now, the numbers looks better than they have in a while.

Huge news from late yesterday afternoon: Mayor Stoney and Councilmember Jones will submit an ordinance on July 1st to remove all of the City-owned Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue. Then, a hot second later, news leaked that today Governor Northam will announce plans to take down the state-owned Robert E. Lee monument. Shockingly, this morning I’m kind of at a loss for words! I’m incredibly late to the Take Down the Confederate Monuments game, having only been moved to action after a White supremacist shot and killed nine Black people in Charleston back in 2015. You can read my co-authored milquetoast thoughts from the summer of that year, which, at the time felt brave in the way a White person feels brave for thinking the tiniest thought about how the world is unfairly built and centered around them. I didn’t even call for the statues to come down! So, for the past five years I’ve learned a bunch, written a bunch about getting rid of these literal monuments to White supremacy, and (finally) joined the folks who’ve been doing the real work for the 100-plus years since the statues went up. Now, today, it sounds like there’s an actual path towards taking them down, and that’s, for me, equal parts amazing and unbelievable. OK, now that I’ve done another classic White person thing and centered myself in this conversation about racism, let’s move on to what happens next!

Since the State owns the Robert E. Lee statue and the State can do whatever it wants, that one could disappear first—and maybe very, very soon. It sounds like Northam wants to pull a New Orleans and take down the equestrian statue, leave up the stone plinth, and warehouse the bronze bits while they figure out a longterm plan. That could happen, like, as soon as they find a crew with a crane. For what it’s worth, most cities that have removed monuments in this way have done so extremely quickly, at night, without a major announcement. We’ll hear more about the Governor’s plans today.

As for the City-owned statues, the process is more and unnecessarily complex. For paternalistic and racist reasons, the State has and does prevent localities from taking down their Confederate monuments until July 1st of this year. Then if the governing body, City Council in Richmond’s case, wants to get rid of its monuments to White supremacy, it must host a public hearing and then can vote to “remove, relocate, contextualize, or cover” them. I’m a little unclear if Council will have to pass something before they can even hold a public hearing—which would extend the timeline. Regardless, I don’t think Council gets around to voting on this until the fall.

OK, here’s Ross’s quick, informal, and uninformed City Council vote count on getting rid of Monument Avenue’s Confederate monuments: YES—Lynch, Robertson, Newbille, Jones; NO—Gray, Larson, Trammell; ON THE FENCE—Addison, Hilbert. We’ll need a fifth vote from the fence sitters or the NOs to get this done, which means folks need to contact their councilperson. If you’d like some help writing this email or thinking through some of what the arguments councilfolk will have against getting rid of the monuments, please let me know. I’d love to help. I’ll make sure to update y’all if the vote count changes.

Finally, while these statues were literally erected with the intent to scare and intimidate Black people and they must go, it has been fascinating to see them become the focus point of the recent protests for police and criminal justice reform. It’s beautiful in a way. Last night, someone projected a picture of George Floyd onto the Robert E. Lee Statute, and, with the recently added context, it’s striking and powerful art.

OK getting rid of racist monuments is great! Enacting systemic reforms to prevent police from killing Black people is also great! Yesterday, the Mayor also announced “a commitment to enacting a crisis alert, also know as the Marcus Alert, exploring the creation of a Citizen Review Board (CRB), and reiterated RPD’s commitment to existing policy banning the use of chokeholds.” These are all wins. I’m trying to learn more about how a Marcus Alert would work, and you are steadily working your way through both Oakland’s (PDF) and Charlottesville’s (PDF) CRB ordinances, right? As for the last thing, chokeholds, police policy seems like an easy place to make rapid changes that do a lot of good and don’t involve passing laws at the local or state level. Along those lines, yesterday, @samswey launched 8cantwait.org, a website detailing eight policies that police departments can enact that decrease police violence—backed up by data! Here’s the list: ban chokeholds & strangleholds, require de-escalation, require warning before shooting, exhaust all other means before shooting, duty to intervene, ban shooting at moving vehicles, require use of force continuum, and require comprehensive reporting. I have no idea which of these the RPD currently have on the books, but figuring that out would be a good place to start while we work towards the other, more legislatively-involved goals.

VCU announced their Return to Campus plan, with the fall semester beginning on August 17th. Like UVA, they’ll end the semester before Thanksgiving with final exams conducted remotely after the holiday. While not as explicit about it as UVA, it does sound like both students and faculty should expect some mix of in-person and remote learning moving forward—and all of it subject to change as the world figures out what coronavirus looks like in the fall.

Tuesday’s email from RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras included an essay from Richmond’s own National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson, which I think you should read.

This morning’s longread

The Burden of (Finally) Being Seen

From local Ace Callwood, some good context for White people trying to make sense of it all.

It’s exhausting to not be seen. When our communities are dying at the hands of those sworn to protect us, it’s exhausting to have to protest. A free human should never have to protest their right to live. We should not have to lobby or beg or make a plea to your emotions to be afforded freedom, a fair trial, or the commutation of an arbitrary, illegal death sentence. We should not. Yet we do, regularly. We do it on top of our jobs and responsibilities and desire to laugh and enjoy our freedoms. We shouldn’t have to fight for that. Similarly and counterintuitively, however, it’s exhausting TO be seen. To have our melanin deprived friends, colleagues, and partners reach out with some expectation that we engage. There’s always the fear that if we don’t present correctly or respond appropriately that we’ll alienate a potential ally or confidant. You can appreciate the Catch-22.

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