Yes, that’s exactly my point.
ironic, eh?
“I know you are but what am I?” is your most compelling argument why nobody should talk about racial bias in police violence? I am honestly a little disappointed.
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Not sure what’s the gist of the alternate position is. That some lives matter more than others? In which case, I’d love to see who’s on the deciding committee.
Or maybe the implication is that cops just need to dial back the murder of black citizens to a parity of all the other demographic groups and things will be just ducky?
As long as the issue is being addressed, I’d rather correct the root of the problem, not solve one immediate, terrible symptom of it.
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I’m sure black people at Mike Brown or Eric Garner protests would just LOVE to hear that during their protests.
Look, no one’s saying that some lives matter more than others. The problem occurs when white people interrupt, derail, and hijack this particularly black problem. They often do so with arguments about other problems, and with tactics that the black protesters generally disagree with.
It doesn’t make sense to you when you hear that such interruptions really do derail, dilute, and otherwise disrupt this particular movement and its particular aims?
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“Help! My leg is broken! Help me get to a hospital! Please!”
“Wouldn’t it really be better for me to devote the energy I’d spend driving you to the hospital to lobbying for a more comprehensive and effective healthcare system for all?”
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Maybe there would be more white allies\straight allies\female allies\male allies, if they could be allies without being told over and over again that they are helping, sure, why not, but not helping The Right Way.
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Yes, because it’s so much more important to let privileged people do things their way than it is to stop them from being, you know, counterproductive. Why, those subjugated people should just shut up and be grateful that people in dominant groups are even willing to help at all!
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That some lives currently need more attention than others?
Right now there are problems with police brutality and disproportionate targeting of black people. We know the former because white people do get killed, and we know the second because the ratio is different from the average population. It’s different enough to statistically say that most cases where black people are shot are in some way dependent on their race.
So no, trying to take that out of the equation is not focusing on the root concern, it’s only using one serious problem to neglect another.
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No.
Not at all.
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That’s a good point. It can be hard to shut the hell up when you really care; but sometimes it’s the best thing to do. More voices are not always better.
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Actually, from the firefighting perspective, there are situations where the cartoon is not the biting satire it intends to be. There are cases when a burning structure is a total writeoff and the resources are relegated to protection of the surrounding structures, until the unmanageable fire burns out.
This happens when a well-meaning cartoonist knows too little about fires.
That said, police racism is a problem, police militarization is a problem, black lives matter, all lives matter, these statements are not mutually exclusive. Can we stop kvetching that the others don’t do what (any relative) “we” want them to do and just attack the issues all at once? They are different tentacles but of the same squid.
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Oh FFS, RTFA!
Here it is again. You’re not getting it right, but you can do it, I know you can!!
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Stop the bloody infighting. Split the armies, flank the enemy.
There is no One True Way of solving One True Problem. There is a cluster of ways and a cluster of interrelated problems.
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I was going to post a comic where nobody could invent any situation to sidestep the point, but I couldn’t find any. It’s always like, shouldn’t they be more concerned how the penguin is talking? Is the tiger real or not? Why doesn’t anyone have a nose? So I figured I might simply trust people to take the obvious meaning. 
Anyway, of course these are all important problems. The concern is when one of them gets neglected by always shifting attention to the others; where one approach is inadvertently undermined by the rest. If your concern is all these problems, as it should be, you can see why it’s worth making sure that doesn’t happen.
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Sigh. in addition to what chenille just said, and since you seem unwilling to RTFA (or maybe just lack basic comprehension skills?), here’s part of what it says. Does this somehow not make sense to you?
Occupy had demands, as now does #Ferguson. It is not “a lack of clear motive” that dissipates these movements, but rather the degeneration of marginalized people’s grief into aimless white anger.
The deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner are not about class or cigarette taxes or whatever else we as white people think may have contributed to their murders. . . .
Our anger with the police is legitimate, but when white activists wrest control of protests against anti-black police violence from the hands of a still-grieving community, the message we send is clear: Civil unrest is a necessary formality for the white narrative to reassert itself over any and all political issues.
This movement can not come into the hands of desultory whites, who throw tantrums when their chants and tactics are eschewed, who will eventually grow fatigued and bored, lacking the actual stakes in this fight of the American black community.
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Its a trap!
The trap you are stumbling into is calling this dumb when its something else, its racist.
Wait! I’m going somewhere with this! I’m being a bit more clever than pedant, just bear with me 
Look, even though what you say is correct, you’re now glossing over the racism in an attempt to help black people.
How do you get to this? Being on the right side of the argument and still making the wrong one?
The problem, I believe, is not that you are an uncaring person, but that you attempt to sympathize with victims of racism as if they could rise above it.
Not in the sense that they can’t empathize with an even bigger societal plight, but that they could even do anything about helping others from a position of oppression. They can’t even help themselves.
Black people can’t get justice for themselves, not even if its recorded on video. And white people, (For whatever value of white you want to use) want to make this about justice for everybody? They’re leaving black people behind and asking them to go to a place they cannot go.
Its a trap. And anybody can fall in it by being too good and forgetting to be practical and limit the scope of the demand to something practical like: “Stop killing black people”.
I don’t like the article, its too long. If I were the editor, this would be all I would choose to publish:
As the Berkeley protesters swelled to fill the Shattuck/Channing intersection, the droning din of voices began to take shape—which is to say shapes; there was an “All Lives Matter” chant and a “Black Lives Matter” chant, in active confrontation with each other.
The point in the article, and the trap you fell into might just be that you either get behind the demands of the oppressed or you get in the way. Even when you’re right.
But that’s my take of course, I just hope it at least makes sense.
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It’s not exactly an abstract competition, since the two(three, if you are feeling granular) issues share a fairly simple, and fairly strong, relationship:
It is true that it’s pretty much impossible to be white enough to crack police impunity. If your next of kin are well lawyered up they’ll probably get a nicer civil settlement; but in the occasional instances where a SWAT team decides to do a drug raid or bust up a poker game in some upscale exurb they still get away with it.
However, the impact of police impunity depends very, very, strongly on frequency of police contact and odds of escalation during contact. This is where race really comes in. If driving while black, in a ‘stop and frisk’ jurisdiction, or living in a ‘hot spot’ targeted for ‘saturation’, you can reasonably expect to encounter the cops, as a presumed thug perp, a lot.
As a more upmarket white guy, ideally looks like he does something white collar and certainly doesn’t have a rap sheet, you just aren’t going to have nearly as many contacts, and they will, on average, go less badly.
If you reach the stage where you’ve been assaulted, railroaded, and/or gunned down, the degree to which privilege will cut through impunity is surprisingly minimal, effectively zero for most people; but some populations get to this point a lot more than others.
(Aside from blacks, of course, are those with enough psych issues to be homeless. That’s also a really good way to die violently during an encounter with the police).
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This. would. Be. Awesome.
When you’re fighting a squid at sea, as you often do, it can be tempting to go straight for the head and have it done with. This is not always advisable.
Or it might be, but once the fight starts, its probably not a good idea to see people fighting an arm and rush in only to leave them defenseless while you go and attack the head.
That’s where these discussions can be valuable, its OK to discuss these things here.
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Not all White Alliessssssssssss[THUD]
I’m not American, but I can see that there are lots of problems in America. One of the more obvious is the systemic racism (and more importantly, in some ways, racialism, which permeates every aspect of your society as far as I can tell, even the non-racist parts) that exists as a hangover from the slave-era. There is a separate problem with the lack of accountability, corruption and increasing militarisation of the police. The fact that these are two separate issues though doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to only focus effort on solving the former, or to complain about people who would like to help with both, but are themselves focusing on the latter.
There is also a problem with a lack of facts here. We know that darker skinned american citizens are more likely to be the victims of police brutality (among other things) than their more noticeably european descendent neighbours, but that fact alone doesn’t really tell us why that is. What percentage of the shooting deaths of black americans were as a result of overt racism, and what percentage the result of systemic racism? If it’s the former that makes up the majority then it might make more sense to spend all the effort on vocally tackling racism, if it’s the latter then you’re unlikely to make much headway with that strategy as overcoming systemic bias like that requires generational change.
It seems likely to me that the primary influence on the disproportinate death-by-cop rates amongst black americans is systemic racism mixed with the fact of non-racial police corruption and brutality (though I’m certainly not discounting overt racism as being a factor in many of the cases). I think everyone would agree that solving this rather immediate problem should trump any other larger, and harder to solve issues, saving lives is more important than political point scoring. Surely focusing on practical solutions to police corruption, pushing for state and federal laws for cops to carry body cameras, doing everything possible to reduce prosecutorial collusion (cf. grand jury indictment rates of police officers vs overall rates) (just a few examples off the top of my head, I’m sure people more involved in this could find plenty more) is more likely to achieve results than wasting time with pointless rhetorical discussions that are steeped in racialist thinking?
I don’t subscribe to racialism, it is a scientificially meaningless construct that allows for the survival of both systemic and overt racism. Anti-racist campaigns need to do away with their racialist framing if they are ever to solve problems of systemic prejudice (though this is easier said that done, such framing is informed by a lot of legitimate concerns), in the meantime a lot of practical good can be done by focusing on far more easy to achieve legislative change.
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