The US Department of Justice was originally created to tackle white supremacy

[thomdunn]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/06/the-us-department-of-justice-w.html

…

[Doctor_Faustus]

Well, isn’t that ironic.

[KingGhidorah]

Not only that, but they eradicated the Klan. The KKK were gone, a non-entity.

Then some rebooting cosplayers decided to bring it back based on “good old days” values and a racist movie. And THEN it stuck, and it’s been around for 100 years now.

[spetrovits]

And people give me funny looks when I say paraphrase John Hodgman’s observation that nostalgia is the most toxic human impulse.

Edited for attribution, which I actually do when I talk to people. Good callout.

[lava]

the truth is always so inconvenient for liars

[Doctor_Faustus]

Probably mostly because you’re quoting John Hodgman without attribution.

[jandrese]

By the time the KKK reformed the DoJ was much more sympathetic to their cause.

The original DoJ worked because unlike traditional law enforcement agencies there was no existing racist hierarchy. It took several years for racists to infiltrate it like they had so many of the regional police departments around the country.

This is the crux of the Defund the Police argument. That existing departments are too corrupt to fix, the corrupting influence crushes anybody who tries. So the only solution is to burn it all down and start an entirely new service with the same mandate but inherent organizational structure that prevents corruption from becoming the norm. Strong whistleblower protections, independent review, public accountability, no roadblocks to removing bad actors, a culture of putting the community before the department.

[Brainspore]

@jandrese

This is the crux of the Defund the Police argument. That existing departments are too corrupt to fix, the corrupting influence crushes anybody who tries. So the only solution is to burn it all down and start an entirely new service with the same mandate

I’m with you up to the “same mandate” part.

We don’t need a single service that does all the things the police currently do. Nor would we be best served by any combination of services that have a mandate to feed millions of American citizens through our prison system.

[jandrese]

Yeah, I guess I should say the original mandate. To uphold the law, serve and protect.

[Brainspore]

I hate to continue nitpicking but that’s really still just a romanticized idea of what these organizations’ “original mandate” was, even in a best-case scenario where the laws are just (spoiler: they usually aren’t).

[jandrese]

All mission statements are aspirational to a degree.

Ultimately you need a neutral third party to call when someone else is being a dick and/or won’t abide by the rules. Vigilante justice is no justice at all. Without a check on assholes society cannot survive at scale.

[Pensketch]

[cannibalpeas]

@thomdunn

In 1870, the United States was still working to bind up the nation’s wounds torn open by the Civil War.

The wounds weren’t “torn open by the civil war”, they were triaged by it. The “wounds” of slavery and indigenous genocide were geysers of blood. The war of southern treason was one of thousands of necessary steps to true liberation and equality. Enough with this romanticism and both sides bullshit, Smithsonian.

[Wanderfound]

@KingGhidorah

some rebooting cosplayers decided to bring it back

“Some rebooting cosplayers” AKA Woodrow Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson (pt.1) | Historians Who Changed History

Woodrow Wilson (pt.2) | Historians Who Changed History

Who also set the stage for 20th C American imperialism.

[Wanderfound]

@thomdunn

the FBI (which … has certainly not been historically concerned with Black equality)

American Protective League

A few months after the Armistice, the League officially disbanded, even as its members insisted they could serve as they had earlier in wartime against America’s post-war enemies, “these bomb fiends, Bolsheviki, IWW’s and other fiends.”[24] The publication of the organization’s story as The Web: A Revelation of Patriotism was an attempt to revive its fortunes as well. That volume by Emerson Hough, an author of Western novels, called for a program of “selective immigration, deportation of un-Americans, and denaturalization of ‘disloyal’ citizens and anarchists.” It said: “We must purify the source of America’s population and keep it pure.”[25]On June 3, 1919, the Washington Post called for the revival of the APL to fight anarchists.[26]

The APL survived as a series of local organizations under other names, such as the Patriotic American League (Chicago) and the Loyalty League (Cleveland).[27] New Jersey members served as investigators for New York’s Lusk Committee investigation of radicals and political dissenters.[28] APL members continued to provide information and manpower to the Department of Justice, notably during the Palmer raids of January 1920. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan recruited members from the Southern branches of the APL.[29] For years following the war, J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Unit in the Justice Department drew on the APL for information about radicals.[30]

FBI = Pinkertons plus Klan.