I try not offend anyone by practicing my brand of extreme apathy.
Do nothing, and you can do nothing wrong.
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âAnything you do can get you killed, including doing nothing.â â from Murphyâs laws of combat.
It applies to other endeavours too, usually in a milder way.
Edit: And some people get quite upset when you do not want to fight in their pet wars, and call you either a part of the problem (if it is some kind of activism) or a deserter (if it is your government).
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Awww, there there. Maybe this will help?
So are you suggesting that the cartoon isnât biting satire, because black lives are a âtotal writeoffâ and that resources should be relegated to protecting white people? Or was your comment pretty much irrelevant?
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Itâs one thing to be a derailing ass on the Internet, but Iâm horrified that there are people who are that full of it, that they turned up at a live protest of police violence against black people and tried to derail it.
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It wonât, sadly. Itâs merely a token to explain why left wing politics loses so many major battles. Instead of finding common ground and making alliances by compromising a little, we stand with our own little special interest group and accuse the others nearby of not agreeing in exactly the right way, so way too much energy is lost in in-fighting to get anywhere ⌠
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No. I am suggesting that firefighting often requires more hoses. If you are pooh-poohing some just because they donât point at the house you think is the only one that needs them, you donât understand the concept of thermal radiation.
I do not understand. Please explain?
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The fact is that there are a lot of us white people in this country, so thereâs at least part of this issue thatâs about us. Whether itâs as an ally or as a voter or as a federal investigator poking around in police unions and private corrections companies, thereâs still a role to play. Maybe not on the front line of the protest. Certainly not as wannabe anarchists.
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I think the one reason I would avoid criticism of white people pointing out that this is not just a problem for black people is that itâs a lot easier for white people to ignore if we think it canât happen to us.
If you say itâs really all about race, and only a problem for black people, itâs easy for white people to tune out. If instead you can convince them itâs a problem for everyone, then maybe it might be a little easier to get people to do something about it.
Because it IS a problem for everyone. Yes, black people bear the brunt of it by far, and thatâs fucked up. But Iâd blame the âus vs themâ mentality (of the police) caused by the war on drugs (which admittedly is pretty racist to begin with) and the structural disenfranchisement of black people for that more than I would the racism of individual cops.
As shitty as it is, at the end of the day, itâs gonna be really hard to get anything done about it unless you get enough white people to care about the issue to vote on it and apply pressure to change the system. To me, âweâre all in it togetherâ is a way better message than âwhite people suckâ, which is sadly what far too many white people hear when you try to convince them racism is still a problem. (And I donât disagree that a ton of white people suck!)
Iâm on the side of anybody that wants to get this problem solved - itâs angering and depressing and embarrassing that our country is still this fucked up. Trying to exclude people that clearly care about the issue because they focus on a different part of the problem than you seems counterproductive to solving it.
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Who decides if it is counterproductive? I wasnât aware that we had figured out the one true way to effect change in this country.
So - is this just a Berkley thing?
The author describes a bunch of white anarchists and activists lacking true skin in the game smashing bike shops and kicking police barricades as an agitating edge drowning out peaceful black protestors who are in it for the long haul.
This is presented as a threat to the national dialog about unchecked militarization of the police which is leading to rampant targeting of black people by police for not âfollowing orders, holding toy guns and swordsâ etc. Apparently the whole conversation will somehow become co-opted by a sort of Ouroboros of desultory whites (protestors, commuters, bloggers, media, etc) looking for some righteous indignation de jour.
Google âBerkeley Lootingâ and then Google âFerguson Lootingâ ⌠the crowds are totally different. I think itâs premature to rush to judgment about the national dialogue based on an extrapolation of the response at Berkeley.
Itâs not the professional protesters at Berkeley that #Ferguson needs to get on itâs side, itâs all of the red counties where people still nod their heads and donât understand why itâs wrong to shoot a kid in under two seconds who was brandishing a gun, or why itâs wrong to have 5 cops wrestle a man to the ground for not following instructions to move on, or who canât understand why people would turn a thief who was high into a hero. Itâs not the protestors at Berkeley that bother these folk, itâs the ones in Ferguson. Until the ârestâ of the US begins to see that there is a problem somewhere, nothing is going to change.
This seems apropos somehow: Malcolm Xâs âLittle Blonde Coedâ
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Well, now I donât know if Iâm hypocritical, racist, both, or something worse?
I really donât care that a cop wrongfully killed a black man in Ferguson.
I really donât care that a cop wrongfully killed a black man in New York City.
I really am pissed off that a couple of cops wrongfully killed a man in Ferguson, and another man in New York City, and are completely getting away with it, with the only punishment being the discomfort of going out in public.
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There seem to be a number of intersecting issues here. Police unaccountability and violence is a major issue that affects a lot of people. Racism leading to disproportionate police unaccountability and violence is another. Both are serious issues that deserve to be addressed and protested against (and the recent deaths seem to be a combination of both), but a protest against racial violence by police should be allowed to continue without bringing out all of the other issues that are associated with the deaths, tangentially or otherwise. There is enough evidence that it isnât just police abuse of power; people doing similar things are treated differently and people with darker skin are considered more dangerous and treated with less lenience than white people are (#crimingwhilewhite and #alivewhileblack put some faces to these statistics). If all certain white people want to protest about is general police violence, maybe they should join a different protest.
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Are you aware of what the linked article being discussed here says? Or are you just diving ignorantly into this discussion with a completely irrelevant, drive-by comment?
Since I strongly suspect the latter, thatâs all Iâll say, since filling you in on the readibly available context that would answer your question isnât my job.
The black organizers of the protests have been rapidly racked with a two-front conflict; they crawl along reclaimed city streets to avoid being kettled in by a militarized police force as the ever-prying hands of jilted and restless white âactivistsâ try to wrest control of the space and spirit of this movement so they can smash bike shops and kick police barricades (as some were reportedly doing at last nightâs protest).
(Emphasis my own)
Of course it isnât the police or MSM that are making these claims, but how accurate are these reports anyway? There isnât a link to any of these reports, so I really canât tell. Whenever people protest, youâll get someone claiming that theyâre really just thugs who want to cause trouble, so Iâm not inclined to take this as fact either. Iâm not saying these claims arenât true, just that this article doesnât do enough to convince me that they are.
#BlackLivesKindaMatterButBestNotToDwellOnThat
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But you multiple injustices involved.
And you have invisibilized/normalized injustices involved. Such as ableism. And we canât just ignore that, because people are getting killed.
And we canât go and build completely separate movements, because often these deaths involve several intersecting injustices, and because it is harder for marginalized and/or disabled people to do this, and because it is harder for anyone to build movements against invisibilized injustices without raising awareness and without working with movements against other injustices.
Keeping white people from hijacking the movement is a good thing. Keeping relatively privileged people from hijacking any movement is a good thing, otherwise you get the equivalent of radical feminism kicking out sex workers and trans people in the seventies and eighties and nineties. But single-issue single-message-ism tends to be a way for relatively privileged people to hijack a movement.
I do think itâs deliciously ironic that the same writer has a article linked to this one:
I should point out that I was responding to someone who claimed not to be interested in the racial element, but that he was interested in the general police violence issue. I think itâs a very important issue, but I donât think anyone protesting should ignore the fact that police violence has strong correlation to race. I donât think those protesting the racial element are ignoring the police violence part of the issue at all.
I think you have a point though, it is an issue that has many facets (and disability is a factor that should be highlighted - Seattle Police Chief Jim Pugel suggested that some of the high police homicide rate could be attributed to lack of support for mentally disabled persons). There are ways to highlight related issues without derailing and different people will have different issues that they relate to most. My impression of derailing is that it is fundamentally opposed to the main message and is trying to drown it out or divert its energy. If people are derailing the protests by saying âall lives matterâ (and I havenât seen a lot of evidence that they are doing that on a large scale), it would seem to be dismissing the racial element by saying âactually, itâs about violence against white people (and also black people, of course)â. In many cases, derailing elements are not concerned with the thing theyâre talking about at all - actually, itâs about silencing minorities and refocusing on those unused to not being the centre of attention.
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This reminds me of the Toronto (and Ottawa) protest last month, where white (and other ânon-blackâ) protesters were asked to stand at the back of the protest. I didnât really have any skin in this argument (no pun intended, and not even sure if Iâm using the phrase right now that I think about it) as a SWM who had no intention of going to the protest in the first place, but I found the social media furor around it fascinating.
