No need to mock anyone for unintentional derailment.
But read the post suggesting this not be a race-based convo, read the title of the post, read @anon50609448 excellent reasoning on this sub-topic below & it is easy to see why someone might be mocked a bit for suggesting that the way forward is to take race out of the discussion.
edit nvrmind I see you did see all that
At 20:1 ratio of cop killings, 20 - Black, 1- white.
Now factor in population, which really shows what is up, Blacks are 12.7% of the population, Whites are 72%
If the number of ALL people being killed by cops were at the rate that cops kill white people, it is safe to say that no, not many people would be marching in the streets. The mostly local attention Geer got would be the status quo, and why not? If cops were shooting All people the way they shoot white people, these would be isolated, anomalous incidents of either unjustified or justified killings by police.
But @Medievalist raises a good point, addressing socio-economic barriers, income disparity & other social ills, most all of which are made more acute in visible minority communities by underlying racial tensions, which must be addressed, is the end game solution to these police shootings.
If something can be done in the meantime with cameras, training cops not to see criminals when they see black people, etc etc then, great, itāll contribute to solving the other problems by helping reverse the justified mistrust all people have of police, but more acutely in minority communities. And lives that matter will be saved.
Iām not surprised there were not nationwide marches about this person Geer who was murdered by police, because itās local crime. The media probably saw it the same way or similar.
Iām not sure I follow. Arenāt these all local crime?
Every time the discussion of is-this-about-race-or-not comes up it is always because someone comes into a thread like this and says āHow is this about race?ā I havenāt seen it once that someone made a comment like:
And seen someone else respond with āHey, you didnāt mention this was a racial problem, you are racist.ā If no one felt the need to try to shut down other peopleās discussions about actual oppression of black Americans by saying āthis isnāt about race, you knowā then weād never have these ridiculous discussions on the forums about whether or not it is about race.
Suppose you conducted a nationwide survey, asking people if they were concerned about racism in police forces and if they were concerned about police brutality. What do you think the correlation between those things would be?
If you think police brutality is a real problem in American then you are a natural ally of people who think police racism is a real problem in America, all you have to do is stop telling them they are wrong and youāll get along great. You probably donāt even think they are wrong. How are we even talking about this?
Yes, but one is endemic in propensity, frequency against a small portion of the population, the other vanishingly less so. To fail to distinguish how they are different requires a deliberate effort. Are you making an effort or making an effort not to?
The financial meltdown of 2008 impacted black families more than white families. The perpetrators of those crimes that led to it, were overwhelmingly white. No one has gone to jail, they all got fat bonuses instead. Itās not being treated as a racial issue, though. I think itās directly related to Fergason, and to Brame, and to Olin, and a bunch of other nasty encounters that we shouldnāt have to endure no matter what our skin color.
Trying to make this only about race, actually minimizes the problem. This is about a national movement toward fashism that will leverage race when it can, but wonāt stop there. No oneās skin color is going to shield them from this kind of thing.
A Modest Proposal:
Use cops to feed the poor.
A Less Modest-and-in-my-opinion-quite-reasonable-Proposal-that-will-almost-certainly-never-be-enacted:
Cops skip the grand jury process, for murder only. Every death by a cop, no matter how reasonable, open-and-shut it is, is automatically charged as murder, and bound to go to court in front of an actual jury. Even if the same biases let them off that charge (and they almost certainly will), at least all the evidence will be in the record, and they pay a bit of a penalty, and give them a reason to withhold lethal force unless that really is the only option.
Well, it is about race ā¦but itās also not. Itās really about a psychological concept called implicit bias. But that is another attention-getting exercise for another attention-getting day.
People come across as making this āonlyā about race only because they are trying to counter people who think that it is not at all about race. Iāll put down $100 that @marilove is fully aware that police are violent against queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, people who donāt speak English well, and even against straight, white, able-bodied, English speaking men who look like they donāt belong in the neighborhood.
There are lots of things that can get you a ticket to the ātargeted by policeā club. Dark skin is one of them, and until that is not true, this is about race.
The financial crisis is not a very good comparison because it is probably the case that it disproportionately affected black people only because systemic racism works to keep black people in poorer financial health than white people statistically. Iām not sure whether the financial crisis did have a racial component that went beyond other factors, but Iām sure youād need some very good stats to figure that out. But with police brutality itās jumping off the page and screaming at you.
To suggest, as people periodically do, that police brutality isnāt about race because white people get brutalized too is akin to suggesting that the financial crisis wasnāt about how rich you were because some rich people lost their money too.
I didnāt type that. You did. Here is what I typed:
If you cannot read the latter part of this thread and see instantly what Iām talking about, I donāt know if I can explain it any better. I can lead you to the water, but you have to want to drinkā¦ people have to be willing to set aside rage and combativeness for some tiny amount of time, just long enough to willingly try to see what other people are repeatedly trying to tell them.
One example, the one that triggered this entire derail: @strugglngwriter, apparently unfamiliar with the way bOINGbOING works lately, tried to make a point in which he unfortunately used the phrase āLetās take race out of itā. In context, this was a completely innocuous statement; it has to be taken out of context in order to offend. Itās a normal part of intellectual discourse to examine both the parts and the whole of any object of discussion. But thatās not OK, here - so he was chastised for not using the phrase dead black man in his post. He didnāt use the special, perfect wording to express his proposal that putting cameras on police will not stop them from killing black men with impunity. Thatās what he wanted to talk about - he wanted to point out problems with the proposition that cameras will help bring about social justice - but for others it became more important to belittle him than to address the idea that he was trying to share, it became far more important to be oppositional and confrontational than it was to communicate, because apparently he hadnāt used the special right words, he apparently hadnāt singled out the right minority for special recognition. And this is not even an egregious example - such behavior is commonplace on bOINGbOING these days.
Me, Iām absurdly over-educated, but Iām not a great writer or communicator. And I was raised to be post-racist - my parents were both born into deeply racist cultures, which they purposely and knowingly rejected, teaching my siblings and I from birth to judge people by the content of their character. But I do not live in a post-racist world. So itās inevitable that I am going to occasionally say things that depart from any expected norm. (Sometimes my daughter will roll her eyes and say āwhite peopleā exasperatedly when I phrase something particularly poorly, which always makes our non-white friends fall down laughing.) But people can choose to try to understand my point, which might be dead wrong or badly expressed, before starting ad hominem attacks. They could even choose to try to point out errors in my thinking or composition in ways that might lead me to greater understanding, or teach me to say things in better ways, instead of joyfully and intentionally misunderstanding me, with the obvious intention of designating me as an outlet for their own rage and discontent.
When we turned the nation around on marriage equality, we did not do it by rejecting and belittling the mainstream Christians. We took a dispassionate look at their value system and worked it to our advantage - we took the āstanding on the side of loveā campaign into their churches, and tore the scriptural ground out from under their preachers of hatred. In less than five years we did more than 20 years of confrontation could have done alone (confrontation is also important -we needed the Gay Pride parades too. But we needed more than just oppositional defiance. The Panthers and Weathermen needed MLK, just like he needed the Deacons.)
Sites that run on perpetuating the cycles of discrimination and confrontation are self-defeating; driving away people because they donāt conform to your perfect model of phrasing is just limiting the reach of your own voice.
Iām honestly sorry if I still havenāt written it well enough to get my point across to you. But I hope you understand that there are ideas here in my skull that I would like to share, and that attacking the way Iāve expressed them is not something to which I will respond positively.
Possibly a money saver too. (This observation is made to appeal to the demographic that will demonstrably hold dollars, tax dollars & tax payers in greater esteem than most anything else ever. They have to buy their snake oil somewhere, become their wholesale distributer!)
Saying āLetās take race out of it,ā is not failing to use the right, special words, itās active expressing a rotten idea. @Bearpaw did not respond to say that @strugglngwriter should have used the phrase ādead black manā, they responded to say the comment went out of its way to start his comment by putting the dead black man out of the picture. This isnāt about magic words, this is about the ideas people are actually expressing. The fact that people who donāt have to deal with racism every day*** donāt understand that saying āletās just ignore the racial aspect of itā is problematic for people who do have to deal with racism every day is part of what people who have to deal with racism every day have to deal with every day.
I feel like things are working exactly the opposite way that you see them working here. People are criticizing the idea that we can or should take race out of the picture when talking about police brutality, and they are the ones being criticized for their manner of expression (too caustic). I doubt this is the first time the @marilove or @anon15383236 have been told that they need to calm down and express themselves more rationally to expand their audience. And, like it or not, when this kind of ābe more calm and more people will listen to youā advice comes up, it is almost always men giving that advice to women, so that advice itself has taken on a sexist undertone. And again, thatās not because the words chosen are the wrong ones (although itās amazing how often youāll see the same words and phrases again and again) itās because the idea is problematic.
Every time I see advice like this - āmore people will listen to you if you stop yellingā - I feel itās ironic. Doesnāt the person giving that advice realize that no one has ever listened to them when they gave it? Who have you ever known to calm down when told to ācalm down?ā Telling other people to be calm about things that are important and emotional for them makes them angrier, so I donāt see how anyone who would do that is in a position to give advice about how to get a message across to people.
Iāve had discussions with you before on this forum and I donāt think you are a terrible, racist, sexist asshole. But I do think you tend to see other people disagreeing with you as being more about your inability to properly express yourself rather than about other people understanding you completely and thinking you are wrong. Thatās another thing that really drives people whose voices have been traditionally silenced up the wall, when someone tells them (implicitly) that theyād agree if only they understood.
This really is about the idea that itās okay to tell people who are talking about racist police brutality that they shouldnāt be talking about race. If anyone had a scheme to eliminate police brutality in America for everyone, then the people who are mad about dead black men would rejoice. While we are looking at reality and how police brutality can be addressed, somehow getting it through peopleās heads that young black men are not disposable would take a huge chunk out of police brutality because cops wouldnāt be able to get away with killing them.
*** I donāt mean to suggest that a person who would say āletās take race out of itā necessarily doesnāt have personal experiences with being targeted by racism. Itās also frustrating that I feel like I have to make this note.
Policemen drop nuclear bomb on homeless encampment. Act declared legal by grand jury.
Does it really have to be race riots? Do we have to go back to the 1960ās before the powers that be actually do anything worthwhile?
I really hope not, but Iām starting to think that may be how it will play out.
And the problem with that is that itās not āputting the dead black man out of the pictureā. Itās putting the black out of the pictureā¦ and then continuing on to say itās still a problem.
Interpreting that as ignoring the dead person, or that it in some way makes it less of a problem if the race of the dead person is black, is something thatās entirely on the reader.
The police too often kill black people. The police also too often kill disabled people. Eric Garner was both. Now as a disabled white person, I might be more aware of the other issues, and less aware of racism, and I donāt want to ignore racism, but I think there are other problems too.
Yeah, thatās pretty much what I was trying to say. Of course there is racism, and of course african americans are target much more and worse than whites and of course our ājustice systemā is way worse for them.
However, in addition to that I donāt want it to be lost that there is another issue here, which is police brutality.
Iām really beginning to think some people should go back and read @GideonTJonesā comments on these types of threads, if they really think weāre focusing too much on racism and not enough on police brutality.
In case this is directed towards me. Iām not saying weāre focusing too much on racism. Just saying there is ALSO police brutality in general. In my initial comment I tried to say this thing is bad and in addition to that this other thing is also bad.
We give too much indifference to the way our police are allowed to beat the crap out of/kill citizens and ALSO this seems to happen disproportionately to non-whites.
Derailing this argument for a momentā¦
