Bix dot Blog

The tension right now between protestors and politicians is about where in the iceberg to aim policy interventions. Protestors, to my view, appear to be pushing for changes in “system structure” by demanding shifts in not just the way police officers interact with people of color, but also in the way they’re funded and the laws they enforce. The politicians, for the most part, seem hopeful that by dealing with the “event”—particularly punishing the “bad apple” police officers who are directly responsible for specific acts of violence—they will solve the problem. While holding individuals accountable is certainly part of the solution, the iceberg model clearly shows that in order to create more wide-scale and lasting change, you must intervene deeper in the system, just as the Black Lives Matter movement and many others before them have been advocating. The point of demands like defunding the police and changing laws/policies that are overwhelmingly aimed at policing Black and brown people, is to focus on the more deeply-rooted “systems structure” rather than just the “events” that sit at the surface.

—Noah Brier, in “Why is this interesting? - The Systemic Edition”