Umm, see, (or better yet read) Serpico. 70’s era NYPD cop ostracised for not taking money.
Don’t confuse talking with doing. And don’t confuse race with humanity.
One of my best days ever happened recently, when a young friend was trying to understand her immigrant physician mother’s hardass attitude at work. My friend was also in med school, at a traditionally black school - where they teach this kind of stuff in History and Sociology now. She did not understand how or why her mother took that attitude, when she is a genuinely kind person underneath. That she did not understand was absolutely wonderful! T have to actually explain the odds her mother had to fight was a high. No political parties, no social do-gooders, no bullshit talk instead of action. We made it because we worked so hard for it and wouldn’t back down. It made hardasses out of a lot of us - but our daughters now have opportunities we had to fight every inch of the way to achieve.
So, my greatest wish is to someday talk about this stuff with my grandchildren, and watch them try to exercise patience at my quaint tales from the past they will not have to live in.
So - go ahead. Keep on pinging racism. Troll Fink can accuse me of racism while posting insulting cartoon pictures of my own freakin’ grandmother. Ironically keep-alive the very thing you claim to hate at all costs! Rob my kids of their opportunity to have to have this explained to them. because YOU can’t quit living in the past and imposing on them. Try to make them a race, rather than the amazing humans they are because you love your effing drama so much. Keep on pretending that ‘institutionalized’ means something done on government letterhead instead of you.
But you will NOT get my cooperation in doing it, and you can kiss my grits meanwhile. The way I see it, this, as so many others, is about abuse of power. The problem is the abuse itself - NOT your 1-dimensional identity slathered on the victims. It doesn’t even matter what the victim looked like or how he (not you) chooses to identify. The task at hand is ending abuses of power, not categorizing and belittling its victims claiming the abusers and not you did that. You can be part of the problem, or part of the solution. But you can’t do both.
Good day to you.
OK, Alice is inspiring me to take another swing at this, although I’ll probably regret it.
Around here the school system (forcibly racially desegregated while I was in High School) is being re-segregated by wealth and social status. Because the majority of the poor in this area are people of color, this has caused many to start screaming racism at the tops of their pinkish lungs.
Acknowledging that certain types of discrimination disproportionately victimize certain groups is a great way to enlist the help of people and organizations that advocate or celebrate those groups. The NAACP is a significant and valued force in the fight to reinstitute fairness in education here!
But it’s generally counterproductive when efforts to attack the problem are framed in completely racist terms - “what can we do to help the black people?” - instead of functional terms - “how do we reverse the rapidly increasing inequities in our public education system?”
In my area this has been repeatedly demonstrated; the new laws are knowingly and unapologetically designed to decrease the quality of education available to the children of the poor by shifting resources to the children of the wealthy, so every challenge to them based on allegations of racism has failed, because fundamentally the laws themselves aren’t racist. They are classist and harm poor people of every tribe, although it’s true most of the (legally resident) poor people around here are of African-American descent. You see, we also have millionaires around here, of the highest social class, who aren’t “white” - and those people’s children are being helped, not harmed. So claims of racism are always trivially disproven, despite the presence of individual people within the unfair system who clearly are racists.
Redressing the harm done to my state’s children by the Choice, Charter and Neighborhood Schools acts will require clear understanding what that harm really is - instead of forcing reality into a racialist perceptional framework that implicitly endorses memes of racial inferiority by assigning victim status based on ethnicity. The wealthy control the lawmakers, and the poor have little to gain by splitting along color lines. We won’t triumph over racism by propagating it.
It may well be that Miami Gardens is a similar situation. The store owner may be Muslim, given his name, and that may well be the whole reason why police are harassing his employees and customers. The area may be impoverished, and that may be why police are able to misbehave with impunity. Or, maybe the police are all members of the KKK. I don’t know! But I understand why Alice refuses to assume racism based on the single data point that one victim is black. Such assumptions are racist, as far as I’m concerned, and I won’t leap to conclusions.
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Exactly. The old lines are pretty dead now, and that’s all good. And now, virtually everything we see that sets off the crazy is an issue of class and money. Not just this story, but even the larger ones about the government violating the civil rights of all citizens (and bunch of people who can’t even claim that status). If we allow something like that to be about who they might like to target individually based on demographics, we skip over the fact that we’re ALL the target because we’re now considered a lesser class than the abusers who profit from it. The abuse of power itself is the problem - not the fact that it may ultimately be used to discriminate against this person or that in particular.
We’re continually irresponsible with power. We like to make up laws and regulations, without bothering to safeguard those who will be affected. Regulations behind paywalls. Personal surveillance hidden in secret courts. Government workers who are not free to be whistleblowers, and who can be targeted for telling the truth . And that goes a LOT further than Snowden and has been gong on a whole lot longer than you know - because they cannot go public, as Saleh did. They may not jail all the whistleblowers, but they WILL starve you out and make you homeless if you cross them. Seen it done. Been on the wrong end of it. Even had a website shut down abruptly for passing information back to the GAO. The hosting company told me explicitly ‘it made them uncomfortable’, even though their only involvement was hosting a site. That was over 5 years ago. Snowden’s the one we’re hearing about right now, and I’m a huge fan - but I know others tried/are still trying. That’s why all the public intimidation plays.
And, as you mentioned, more local stuff with making school kids members of educational ‘classes’ and politicizing children. That has to end. I don’t even care if it turns out Saleh and his employee are Al Quaida operatives. This was still an abuse of police powers and that is by definition intolerable. We may not always agree about exactly how we can resolve these issues - that’s fine. Sometimes, that just generates better ideas. But if we can’t talk about it as the issue it is, we’re all gonna lose, and I mean big time. Hope we aren’t too late.
Thanks, Med. I know you get it. Just hope others start to see that as bad as it is, it needs to unify us - not divide us. Sorry 'bout the rant thing. True and necessary doesn’t mean I like it much, especially this time. That kid I mentioned died just a couple of days ago. Nasty stuff like cancer doesn’t care what shade you are or how accomplished you may be. She accomplished stuff while dying that makes the rest of us old school ‘hardasses’ look like a bunch of total pansies. Being her, she’d have jumped straight to saying it scared her and then in the same breath to asking whether the Saleh and his guys needed anything and being mad that she couldn’t jump in and lend them a hand, even if only to say hi and fix them some lunch. If there’s a sick ironic twist to promoting discrimination by wildly disclaiming it, there’s also an equal and opposite irony in making hardasses look like pansies by practicing basic humanity with such wild abandon. That’s a whole other kind of ballsy. Seen: We can do better. We ought to.
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