A few related posts from Black Twitter over the last week:
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14 Likes
The way I see it, more white people should be pushing back at the police and their position of authority. If they are going to utilize their white privilege, it may as well be to push back against over zealous policing, especially when others can’t.
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Here’s hoping. I hope he sues and wins a fortune from both individuals and the HOA.
Put me on THAT fucking jury, pretty please!!
But context matters. Are you going to push back at police during a traffic stop? Please don’t. But going to their office and taking them to task when they stop someone for the color of their skin? Hell yes. Use that white privilege to make them uncomfortable. Use that white privilege bubble wrap to shield a POC from harm? You betcha.
6 Likes
Not all are bad. My house is in a community of 9 houses. We collectively pay for the pool maintenance ( we likely would not be able to afford a pool individually), water, electricity, Internet, arborist (hurricane trimming) and a few other things together. We are able to make much better deals on most expenses than we could individualy. For example, when our roofs had to be redone after 10 years we saved 2k per house by doing them all as 1 big project. When hurricane insurance shot through the roof ($15k per year) after the year Katrina hit us we decided to stop paying and pool our resources and self insure. We each put an extra $100 per month into a trust account that could only be used for storm damage repairs and now we pay nothing for insurance and are fully self insured. We all pay when someone’s home needs to be tented for termites and this softens the blow. This HOA, however is very different from the massive ones, which turn into little dens of despotism and fraud. I think ours works well because we are so small and we all know eachother.
4 Likes
I’m guessing he has a criminal case and a civil one for sure against the HOA and the idiots personally. If that guy was an officer or on the board then the corp that is the HOA will be liable for his actions. Unfortunately, the guy will not have to pay even if he is sued personally and looses as most boards have specific insurance for this or nobody would ever agree to be on a board. Here is hoping the criminal case gets him, though.
3 Likes
If the driver had been me:
No time for bullshit like this.
Aloof, I would have told the funny little speech impaired man I was leaving, then driven out using the easement.
And that would have been it. I would have never heard about it again.
I would never claim “white privilege” doesn’t exist. I have it.
Yet there is no such thing.
To not be harassed isn’t a privilege.
It is everybody’s privilege, natural right, denied to some.
It pisses me off, maybe almost as much as if it could happen to me.
I don’t appreciate being of the age, sex, genetic make up of the average Trumpist. It lessens me.
I despise these icky people, who are almost like me, so very much.
But then he’d be in the wrong for damaging property in the community. And they could get him for that. They’d just ring his boss and even though the boss would probably know what happened, he would have no choice.
4 Likes
He? Yes. I assume he is in a difficult situation.
Me? No, I would be Karen’s husband, a white delivery driver using the private road’s shoulder, which shouldn’t be considered damaged when showing signs of being used.
I would be using the easement from reasonable necessity caused by some other old white guy who forced me, without cause to make use of my nonpossessory right to use and/or enter onto the real property of another in order to continue delivering other peoples property to other peoples real properties.
I would demand to talk to the HOA’s managers.
Any other old white guy can see that.
They wouldn’t have stopped me anyways. They would have nodded back at me passing, maybe lifting some fingers off the wheel. Like always.
I’d be surprised. I assumed police departments had height requirements. That guy’s like 5’2" at a push. More likely just another small man (mentally and emotionally, not just physically) with a napoleon complex.
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Why should we be interested in what you as a white guy would do when if this black guy had done it, the results would very likely have been completely, horribly different?
11 Likes
I think most of these places have rules in place to allow service workers because if you think about it, these are the kinds of homeowners that have maids, delivery staff, gardeners, etc. They are not the kind of homeowners that will be okay with meeting the help every time they have to come in to get the dog walked or the pool cleaned.
5 Likes
Rephrase that third thought to “that’s tragic that it’s always been this way” and you hit the nail on the head.
3 Likes
Here’s the thing. It’s been over 200 years of us having to answer the stupid questions. Long enough that we want to assert our humanity by not answering when we legally do not have to. It probably would have been different if police or weapons were involved. Sometimes we have to STAND for our rights. Sometimes it’s all we have that makes us feel any of our lives are worth it. Black people are not stupid and I understand not wanting to be treated as such.
9 Likes
Not being treated as stupid, or not being treated as Black?
(insert whynotboth.gif here)
4 Likes
As a Black woman who’s spent her whole life surviving the hypocrisy of America, I have to tell you emphatically:
YES. IT IS.
If your point was that it shouldn’t be, thanks for pointing out the obvious; but we don’t live in that reality.
The reality that we live in is the one where “White makes right, always” and everyone else is just on their fucking own.
Your comment is, at best, a glib marginalization of the plight of POC in the US.
15 Likes
You really don’t grok what the word privilege actually means, do you? You can fight back with far less jeopardy to the safety of yourself and your family because you’re white. That doesn’t make you a badass; that protects you. That’s the damn privilege (private law) extended to you by the social structures you inhabit. It’s not a privilege because everyone does or doesn’t deserve it. It’s a privilege because you enjoy it and other people fucking don’t because they have darker skin or different plumbing or any other thing that shouldn’t disqualify them from what you enjoy.
And yeah, I’d have told these lickspittles where to shove it while insulting them. You know what I goddamn wouldn’t have done? I wouldn’t have gone online and boasted about the fact that that’s what I’d do because I know damn fucking well the victim of these racists couldn’t do it and be sure he wouldn’t be imprisoned or murdered.
12 Likes
It goes without saying that the driver COULDN’T have reacted the way you imagine you would in that situation without putting his life in even more danger than it already was.
You’re arguing that “white privilege” doesn’t exist because you don’t like the way the term is used.
Instead you should be arguing that “white privilege” SHOULD NOT exist.
People like you and me are not in a position to complain about the terminology used to describe systemic racism.
15 Likes
POC are killed by police and vigilantes all the time even when they DO go out of their way to appear non-threatening and compliant. I’m sure we could link to several such incidents from the last couple of weeks alone. “Just cooperate with the stupid people and you’ll be OK” is another form of victim-blaming.
15 Likes
Aye;
The only thing Black people could do that would “ensure” that we don’t get abused, killed or wrongfully imprisoned in a covertly White supremacist society would be to do the impossible - to stop being Black, at will.
Sadly, we have not yet evolved the ability to be like fucking chameleons…
16 Likes
