Don’t “tone police” people who are outraged at police brutality

By Neha Myneni ‘21

On April 20, 2021, Derek Chauvin was declared guilty on all three charges for the muder of George Floyd. Nationally, there seemed to be a collective sigh of relief. At the same time, when discussing modern instances of racism, there is often a consensus as to the “proper conduct” of how BIPOC communities should react. The idea of proper conduct is both used to invalidate the arguments of marginalized communities and to allow people to self-congratulate themselves for that step and then slowly return to a state of apathy. 

While the guilty verdict itself is something to be celebrated, considering the rarity of charging police officers for their crimes, this cannot be taken as a cue that victims of police brutality will receive justice, or even that police brutality as a systemic issue against Black and Latinx people will end. 

Daunte Wright, a 20 year old man, was killed in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center on April 11 after being pulled over for having expired registration tags, during the trial of Derek Chauvin. Ma'Khia Bryant, a 15-year-old girl, was killed by the very police she called for help on April 22, recently after the verdict was delivered for Derek Chauvin. 

These killings have continued to build national outrage, as part of a noticeable trend of police brutality affecting BIPOC communities, as seen through the ongoing protests. However, there also continues to be a theme of tone policing marginalized communities most affected by police brutality. This is nothing new, as evidenced by the reactions to the protests last summer which were focused around the killing of George Floyd. 

As expanded upon by Tess Martin at the Medium, tone policing is a vicious way of denying outrage by condemning reactions of marginalized communities seen to be “too extreme,” while allowing, at least implicitly, for police brutality to continue. It is an ad hominem attack focused on criticizing and devaluing people’s opinions if they show emotion, where a statement is dismissed based on its tone rather than its message. Tone policing is very closely linked to respectability politics, which is centered around determining appropriate reactions, particularly from marginalized communities, to extreme situations. 

By addressing the emotion instead of the actual assertion, tone policers can avoid dealing with what is being said by invalidating the feeling, and consequently, the assertion. This tactic has especially been employed against communities of color and other marginalized populations, as a tool of further oppression, often with the person unaware that they are using it due to its societal prevalence. Some common examples of tone policing as an extension of respectability politics are telling marginalized people to “calm down,” that “they don’t need to get so angry,” or that “they are overreacting” when they express their emotions.

When marginalized communities affected by police brutality are tone policed, they are essentially told that their thoughts on the horrific experiences that they have observed are only valid if they present them in a calm, unfeeling manner. With their experiences of abject violence and pain, expecting them to be emotionless about those situations is impossible and they should not have to be in order to be taken seriously.

With the eventual goal of ending police brutality as a whole, the marginalized communities most affected must be heard and that cannot happen unless they are allowed to freely react. What follows here are images showing some reactions to police brutality.