What would the correct reaction be when you see somebody with a gun at school?
Do you think that the police wouldn’t have gone if they were told the guy with the gun was white?
All this incident shows is that some people in the US have implicit bias against blacks. Everybody knows that.
Every action was sensible given the circumstances. The most important being that the police didn’t shoot the guy.
Unfortunately, the action that created the circumstances wasn’t sensible. It was racism.
Dude, you trollin, or what?
You say this incident demonstrates racism, then in the next breath, that every action was sensible.
So come on then, out with it - - are you saying racism is sensible?
It wasn’t a gun, it was a glue “gun.” Have a look a photo of one; they look almost nothing like real guns. On top of that, the student was doing nothing with it that could be construed as threatening (except, of course, wearing black skin).
The original clip was about an artist who couldn’t think of the colour black without acting out. On a personal level I saw it as dark humour related to my mental health triggers which were also seemingly innocuous. I could either laugh or cry about it, and in this case I chose to laugh.
In this context I was thinking along the lines of how authority figures overreact* to people doing innocuous things just because they have brown or black skin. I don’t think that was what Charlie Higson had in mind at the time though.
* a bit of an understatement
Do we at least agree that the response of the police and the school was sensible?
I’ll try to explain the actions of the guy that called the police better.
I think that his response was sensible because it make sense independently of racism.
Imagine a similar situation where a person that is aware that he has implicit racist bias against black people sees a black guy with a what he thinks is a gun. He believes with a certain probability that the guy will start shooting, because he is aware of his racist bias he lowers the probability, but because school shootings are weirdly common in the US he increases the probability again. He calls the police because this probability is above some threshold. Same result.
The problem here is that some Americans’ risk assessment is flawed and working against the situation. You increase the probability of violence given a person’s race (racism), but also increase the probability of certain types of violence by too much. So people are very afraid of things like Muslim terrorism and school shootings (even if the last one is more common in the US than anywhere else, it is still not that common), when they should be a lot more afraid of getting killed by a teen driving a car while texting.
I think most people would simply observe the body language of the person with the glue gun and the people around him for signs of agression or distress. It would only take seconds to make such an assessment and probably took longer than that to make the call. This does raise questions about the caller and what their motivations really were.
IT WAS A FLIPPIN’ GLUE GUN!!!
Forgive me, I lost my composure.
But SHEEZUS PLEEZUS - it wasn’t even a toy gun that looked like a real gun. Did no one stop to take a good look? That’s just idiotic. I don’t give a damn about the current cultural climate.
Colgate white, my ass.
MFP has a whole new meaning for me now…
There is no way to make it a “sensible” response that doesn’t include racism.
Fact is, white dudes shoot up schools, not black or brown dudes.
most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White
So without racial bias they’d see a man with a glue gun.
With racial bias they see a black man with a gun.
I appreciate your attempt at devils advocating here, and I’m sure to the caller they were being very reasonable and rational too. But the facts do not support your thesis, sorry.
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