Open Thread for Tuesday, September 20, 2016
PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–NBC News/SurveyMonkey–Clinton 49, Trump 43
Zack Beaucamp at Vox on White Riot. A must read:
Donald Trump is not an accident.
It’s tempting to see Trump’s rise as something sui generis: something so bizarre, so linked to his own celebrity, that it could never be repeated. Yet it is being repeated: Throughout the Western world, far-right populists are rising in the polls.
In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian president, Viktor Orban, has started building a wall to keep out immigrants and holding migrants in detention camps where guards have been filmed flinging food at them as if they were zoo animals. In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League, led by a politician who has attacked the pope for calling for dialogue with Muslims, is polling at more than three times its 2013 level, making it the country’s third most popular party. And in Finland, the Finns Party — which wants to dramatically slash immigration numbers and keep out many non-Europeans — is part of the government. Its leader, Timo Soini, is the country’s foreign minister.
These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia: They despise immigrants, vowing to close the borders to refugees and economic migrants alike, and are open in their belief that Muslims are inherently dangerous.
These parties’ values are too similar, and their victories coming too quickly, for their success to be coincidental. Their platforms, a right-wing radicalism somewhere between traditional conservatism and the naked racism of the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan, have attracted widespread support in countries with wildly different cultures and histories.
The conventional wisdom is that the economic losses suffered by working-class people throughout the developed world explain the rise of this new right. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are estimated to have been lost due to free trade pacts in recent decades, with industries like manufacturing absorbing much of the pain.
That’s created an ocean of angry and frustrated people — primarily blue-collar and primarily white — who are susceptible to the appeal of a nationalist leader promising to bring back what they feel has been taken away.
This anger plays some small part, but it doesn’t tell most of the story. A vast universe of academic research suggests the real drivers are something very different: anger over immigration and a toxic mix of racial and religious intolerance. That conclusion is supported by an extraordinary amount of social science, from statistical analyses that examine data on how hundreds of thousands of Europeans look at immigrants to ground-level looks at how Muslim immigration affects municipal voting, and on to books on how, when, and why ethnic conflicts erupt.
This research finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the “losers of globalization” aren’t the ones voting for these parties. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.
Jeet Heer on the once and future Donald Trump:
To predict the future of Trumpism, it helps to understand why [Pat] Buchanan and his peculiar brand of right-wing nationalist conservatism (called paleoconservatism) emerged in the late 1980s. American conservatism started splintering at the moment of its greatest political success, after the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, when all but one state went Republican.
Dissatisfaction with Reagan’s triumph emerged by a peculiar combination of success abroad and stalemate at home. By the late 1980s, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Cold War was drawing to a close as Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policies deprived America of the foe of five decades. But while anti-communism succeeded beyond expectations, social conservatives like Buchanan couldn’t help but notice that on other fronts, America continued to be liberal: Democrats still controlled Congress and won the Senate in 1986, feminism and gay rights continued to advance, Martin Luther King’s birthday was made a national holiday, and mass immigration—both legal and undocumented—continued to dilute the demographic dominance of the white majority.
As the Wall Street Journal noted in a 1989 editorial, “anti-Communism has been the glue that held the conservative movement together.” Without the unifying threat of a supposedly global enemy, the right began to splinter. The division was first evident in the battle between the neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. The neoconservatives, many of them former Cold War liberals and as a group skewing Jewish, were internationalists: Even with the USSR on its deathbed, they wanted America to pursue global hegemony and push an agenda of democratization abroad. This internationalism went along with support for free trade and generous immigration policies. Although small in number, the neocons enjoyed ideological dominance thanks to their outsized role in publications like the Journal and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
The paleoconservatives emerged in reaction to the neocon ascendency. Found in small magazines like Chronicles, Southern Partisan, and The Rockwell-Rothbard Report, the paleocons were a motley group made up of anti-war libertarians (Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell), Catholic reactionaries (Buchanan, Joseph Sobran) and southern nostalgists for white supremacy (Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming). What united this sundry group was the belief that the “globalism” of the neocons had to be opposed by a new nationalism based on immigration restriction, trade protectionism, and a foreign policy that included withdrawing from many international alliances and agreements. Paleocons also believed that neocons were too deferential to liberal sensitivity on issues related to race, and were restricted by what Buchanan called “the limits of permissible dissent.” Or as Trump would put it, “We have to stop being so politically correct in this country.”
Former President George H.W. Bush is bucking his party’s presidential nominee and plans to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, Politico reports.
“President Obama is approaching the final weeks of the presidential campaign with an intense sense of urgency and concern amid a growing realization that the election could be determined by the narrowest of margins,” the Washington Post reports.
“Earlier this year, Obama seemed to regard the defeat of GOP nominee Donald Trump as a near inevitability, but in recent days the president has changed his tone.”
This is why athletes are protesting during the anthem. This is why an organization like Black Lives Matter exists. Because police are murdering unarmed black men for no reason. To criticize either the protest or the BLM, it means two things: 1) you are not an American, and 2) you are in favor of unjustified murder. Simple as that.
The Tulsa, Oklahoma police department released new video footage yesterday of the shooting death of Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old black man, on Friday. The footage from a cruiser’s dashboard camera and a helicopter overhead appears to contradict the police officers’ version of the incident and has sparked outrage nation-wide.
Crutcher was on his way home from a music appreciation class at a local community college in Tulsa, Oklahoma when his SUV stalled around 7:40 p.m. The footage shows Crutcher standing in the middle of the road with his hands in the air, and slowly walking toward the car and leaning against it at the direction of police. What happens next is obscured by the officers and the vehicle, but a shot is fired and Crutcher falls to the ground. Police say he was Tasered by Officer Tyler Turnbough, then shot once by Officer Betty Shelby.
Officers then waited nearly two minutes before offering him any kind of assistance. Crutcher died later at the hospital. Police say he was unarmed and had no weapons in the car.
Donald Trump “is saying ‘yes’ to Fox News almost every day but saying ‘no’ to most other major networks and news organizations — a highly unusual strategy for a presidential nominee,” CNN reports. It’s mostly because he is a coward who hates critics and questions.
“Rousing the base instead of reaching out to undecided voters may ultimately pay off for Trump. If nothing else, it limits the candidate’s exposure to hard-hitting questions — while fueling frustration among journalists.”
This image says it all. Let's end the politically correct agenda that doesn't put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016
Hey @DonaldJTrumpJr, this is one of the millions of children you compared to a poisoned Skittle today: https://t.co/SDSGw0eUIP pic.twitter.com/HuhY9RGvWW
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 20, 2016
Richard Cohen at The Washington Post compares Trump’s mentality to Hitler’s:
I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is. […]
Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.
At Foreign Policy, Max Boot explains why Donald Trump is the dream candidate of ISIS:
The core of his approach is to keep saying the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism,” something that he (wrongly) claims Clinton never does. […] But there’s a good reason why both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have been reluctant to speak of “Islamic terrorism,” and it’s not because Obama is a closet Muslim, as Trump has insinuated in the past. It’s because they realize that in the battle against terrorism, the United States cannot win unless it can get the support of most of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. By seeming to insult Islam and Muslims as Trump does, he plays into Islamic State and al Qaeda propaganda, which posits that there is a battle between Islam and the West.
But Trump doesn’t care about winning Muslim hearts and minds. He seems to think he can keep Americans safe by keeping all terrorists out of the country, as if it weren’t the case that many of our post-9/11 attackers — such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, and Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter — were homegrown.
Greg Sargent’s take on the RNC’s defense of Trump:
So it’s come to this: The institutional position of the Republican Party in the great birther controversy roiling the 2016 campaign — a consequential chapter in our political history — is now essentially that Donald Trump did the nation a service by forcing the first African American president to finally show his papers. […] The Trump campaign’s effort to whitewash his birther history — in which he fed racist conspiracy theories for years — is being widely called out as dishonest. And that’s good. But Trump’s new narrative is actually a lot worse than the rendering of it we’ve seen in most media accounts suggests, and now the party has institutionally joined in promoting it. […]
It is likely that many Republicans and conservatives — such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio — see it as a blot on the history of the modern GOP that the party nominated someone who launched a years-long racist campaign to delegitimize the first African American president in the explicit belief that it would appeal to the racist tendencies of many GOP primary voters. Those Republicans might even say so right now if asked. But Trump has compelled the RNC not merely to participate in helping him push lies designed to muddy the waters around his birther history, but also — and this is the really important part — to institutionally defend that history. Indeed, while many Republicans previously repudiated this history, the RNC is now helping Trump validate it.
All presidential elections in my lifetime have been won by the person who gets their base to the polls. There are no “undecided voters” only wishy-washy people holding back to make sure they vote for the eventual “winner.”
I’ve stopped wondering why Democrats don’t see that.
Exactly. I heard Liz Warren on tee vee last night and her 15 second clip roused and motivated me more than everything Clinton has said this year.
“These politicians share Trump’s populist contempt for the traditional political elite. They share his authoritarian views on crime and justice. But most importantly, they share his xenophobia”
This is more that “deplorable”; it sounds like the runup to our 20th century wars.
The makers of Skittles respond: Skittles are candy. Refugees are people.”
Terence Crutcher was left to bleed in the street for three minutes or more while officers consoled Betty Shelby and generally did nothing else. One then approached and checked Crutcher’s pockets and waistband. Then there was some perfunctory attempt to render medical aid. I am not anti-police, but this type of activity needs to stop.
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
No, he was killed by police. There is a large difference. I know you meant the emotional impact, but I am not willing to put the blame on the entire society when it belongs with the police who are being trained — often by outside elements — to put their own safety as their top priority.
@Another Mike: “I am not anti-police, but this type of activity needs to stop.”
Yet in their hysterical world view, the police would maintain that that statement is anti-police.
I’m not anti-union, but I think police unions should be outlawed.
I am willing. Hence, the description. The police do exactly what we allow them to do. The police do what we ask them to do.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/the-near-certainty-of-anti-police-violence/490541/
“That something has very little to do with the officer on the beat and everything to do with ourselves. There’s a sense that the police departments of America have somehow gone rogue. In fact, the police are one of the most trusted institutions in the country. This is not a paradox. The policies which the police carry out are not the edicts of a dictatorship but the work, as Biden put it, of “the greatest democracy in the history of the world.” Avoiding this fact is central to the current conversation around “police reform” which focuses solely on the actions of police officers and omits everything that precedes these actions. But analyzing the present crisis in law enforcement solely from the contested street, is like analyzing the Iraq War solely from the perspective of Abu Ghraib. And much like the Iraq War, there is a strong temptation to focus on the problems of “implementation,” as opposed to building the kind of equitable society in which police force is used as sparingly as possible.”
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
I disagree. Most people are unaware of what the police do. Videos like the one filmed BY the police in Tulsa shock white America because white America is not aware of it. Forcing white America to watch this is the key to getting it to pressure for change.
I agree with Coates, but not when he says “the current conversation around “police reform” … focuses solely on the actions of police officers and omits everything that precedes these actions.” I cited above one of the things that precedes these actions: Police unions bring in “trainers” who specifically work to heighten officers’ fear for their personal safety. But then, I don’t know who he considers as being involved in “the conversation.” His construction there substitutes his perception for reality.
I refuse to choose between taking immediate steps and taking long-term action. Too often a preference for the latter turns into the reason for inaction on the former.
Meanwhile, calling it a “lynching” might satisfy some need of yours; I fail to see how it helps otherwise. I think it’s counter-productive. Casting blame on people who don’t realize their role in it makes them disagree with you as a matter of course.
So you go for your emotional or metaphorical truth. I prefer the factual truth: An unarmed, unthreatening man with his hands in the air was shot to death by police for no reason. Again.
ok, what should i do to not be guilty of lynching? you know, besides not actually lynching somebody. or not encouraging somebody to lynch somebody. or not voting for people who sometimes seem to like the idea of lynching somebody. maybe i could rush in front of a cop and take a bullet aimed at an unarmed black man. would you do that? didn’t think so.
You’re certainly entitled to your erroneous interpretation.
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
ex-anon = White fragility at it’s finest.
It’s not about YOU. That is what you are doing wrong. You’re taking the murder of an innocent man by racist cops, and making about your plight on how to react.
ben: nope, i’m just responding to a comment that suggested (not viciously) that i am somehow complicit in lynching. i realize cops shooting unarmed black people is so awful that some people feel the need to exaggerate/mischaracterize what’s happening in order to make an emotional point. i just think it’s important to speak clearly and rationally to solve such problems. exaggerate too much and people who who might be enlisted on your side will just stop listening. and you didn’t answer the questions i raised in the first post.
Anon
“So you go for your emotional or metaphorical truth. I prefer the factual truth: An unarmed, unthreatening man with his hands in the air was shot to death by police for no reason. Again”
Yes there was a reason. There is always the same reason.
The cop is a racist. Maybe they aren’t in the Klan, maybe they think they have black friends. But this …person… was so threatened by a black man in a car, she thought her life was in danger… because of his race.
Because she is a racist.
People who are too afraid to call racists out are complicit in these lynchings… where an innocent person is murdered because of their skin color. THAT is the reason.
” i realize cops shooting unarmed black people is so awful that some people feel the need to exaggerate/mischaracterize what’s happening in order to make an emotional point.”
OK right there…. you’re belittling the anger.
There is no mischaracterization.
The cop who murdered this man for “no reason” decided a black guy had to die. Whether the motivation is “he looked at mah daughter dag-flambit”
or “he’s comin’ right for me”
or “well, blacks in Philly killed cops, so he’s probably gonna kill me.” … the outcome is still the same. NO trial, no investigation, no charge. straight to an execution… then a cover up and a lie. If you arent driven to rage over this, you are part of the fucking problem.
It’s neither mischaracterization nor hyperbole. Read the Coates. Moreover, I write it without being overly emotional. It’s a matter of fact stated matter-of-factly. If I ‘feel’ anything about it it’s resignation.
If you think describing this as a lynching means you, ex-anonymous, are individually and specifically complicit you’re unfortunately very confused about what I mean. It’s collective.
Hopefully this absolves you of whatever acute personal guilt or bad feelings you have. I thought it was sort of assumed that you didn’t pull the trigger.
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
White fragility.
ben, all your responses are emotional. “belittling the anger” indeed. i feel like you’re going to break down crying any minute. not useful for anybody’s movement.
dorian, i know what collective guilt means, and i know it implies everybody is guilty, including me, including you (or maybe you really would take that bullet), including even ben. i didn’t want to tell ben this because i was afraid he’d start sobbing.
what do you think collective guilt is if you don’t think it involves individuals in the aggregate? maybe it’s a meaningless, self-defeating term, except for cheerleading purposes.
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday. Or a black man was murdered by a cop in Tulsa. Or both. Terence Crutcher was gunned down by police with his hands up, and his race played a part in it.
Ex anon backs half-assedly into a legit question. What next?
Sadly, you’re still struggling here. It’s not guilt, first of all. It’s responsibility. To whatever extent we equivocate or excuse or ignore or use empty language like “not all police” or “a few bad apples” or “he wasn’t following commands” or “it’s about better training”… etc., etc. we fail.
Speaking of exaggeration, taking responsibility does not, does not, mean you need to take the bullet. It simply means clear thinking and clear writing and good argument.
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
“i feel like you’re going to break down crying any minute.”
Ok, Mr Spock.
Of course it’s emotional. I am beyond angry that racist cops keep murdering black people and “Jedi-Enlightened” people like you think emotions should be kept out of it. I feel like I want to cry when i see this happening day after day (not ashamed, btw i feel bad for men who feel like they aren’t supposed to have emotions)
The fact that you aren’t angry doesn’t mean you have a better intellectual handle on it, it means your white privilege has insulated oyu from having to feel upset about this. You are part of the problem.
So sick of the POS white trash class rationalizing the murder of black men. All these POS conservatives and their beloved talk radio mentality are sociopaths. Never seen such a large group of angry white losers lacking any empathy for their fellow man. If some white guy was gunned down like that they would be going nuts.
says mouse, mr. shallow.
i’m no happier about tulsa than the rest of you. jason is right (though my ass is intact). the question is what is the best way to respond. clear language and clear thinking help. that’s why i didn’t think the “lynching” idea was helpful.
sorry, mouse. i don’t like being lumped with those people just because i don’t accept all the progressive tropes. i was for bernie! (but i’d never vote for jill stein because, you know, self-defeating).
The investor who called the last housing crash (and made a ton of money on it) tells bankers to stop being whiney about regulations.
Ex anon backs half-assedly into a legit question. What next?
I’m not a fan of the lynching metaphor. This wasn’t mob-fueled violence.
But it is (until proven otherwise) a state-sanctioned execution. The law gives that officer a gun in order to defend himself or us. The current rule of law is engineered to sanction the application of that violence to people of color as long as the officer is “afraid”. The executions continue because we collectively don’t do much to make the law responsive to justice.
Jason asked, “What next?” This: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/us/charlotte-police-shooting/
Let’s follow the familiar script. Police were looking for another man. Came across Mr. Scott, said he was carrying a gun, but his family said he was in his car reading a book. He would not follow commands, so he had to die. After all, the officer is entitled to go home to his family.
Unfortunately, I can’t see any end to this.
Now that Crutcher and Scott’s bodies have been murdered, the rush is on to murder their characters in press. It is a sick, sad modius strip of fucked up.
“It is a sick, sad modius strip of fucked up.”
Yes, it is. It’s disturbing how I’ve come to completely discount whatever initial story the police put forth about these killings. The constant lying is despicable – and predictable. It’s no coincidence that black men are the victims of this. Like the saying goes: It’s a feature, not a bug.
We (and that means all of us) have to do something to stop this. Distancing ourselves from these killings does make us complicit.
Seems a bit pedantic to make this a sematic discussion about what constitutes “a mob.” But if you are so inclined…. it’s a fair enough point.
Also, I’m sure others needs to weigh the political ramifications of labeling these extrajudicial public executions. I don’t and I won’t.
A(nother) Man Was Lynched Yesterday
“Seems a bit pedantic to make this a sematic discussion about what constitutes “a mob.””
I saw 4 cops in the Crutcher video plus at least one more in the helicopter, and presumably more off-camera. How many does it take to constitute a mob? The narration from the helicopter was straight-up lynch mob: “Looks like a bad guy… probably on something.”
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with using the term lynching. I see and hear the mob daily at Trump rallies and on online comment sections. The mob exists – maybe not at the scene of the crime, but there is a mob. More importantly, to me, is the way these officers get away with these shootings/killings. State sanctioned killings – given how rarely (if ever) police are held accountable. That’s the point that has me okay with using the term lynching. That’s what allowed lynchings to happen.
Black men are being killed. Debating semantics takes away from that fact. And comments like this…
“i’m just responding to a comment that suggested (not viciously) that i am somehow complicit in lynching. i realize cops shooting unarmed black people is so awful that some people feel the need to exaggerate/mischaracterize what’s happening in order to make an emotional point. i just think it’s important to speak clearly and rationally to solve such problems. exaggerate too much and people who who might be enlisted on your side will just stop listening. and you didn’t answer the questions i raised in the first post.”
… are part of the problem. I’m not sure why being an ally on this is contingent upon how you are treated. It sounds like you are saying that if you aren’t spoken to “correctly” then you’ll walk away from what’s going on?
“It’s neither mischaracterization nor hyperbole. Read the Coates.”
I did read the Coates. The world “lynch” appears nowhere in the text, nor is that his point.
Since you’re going to insist on this, to what end I cannot comprehend, let me disabuse you of your self-righteousness.
Lynching, unlike execution by the police, is carried out by civilians as an extra-legal method of both execution of an imagined wrongdoer and intimidation of the wider community. It is witnessed by design by the entire community, not carried out in secret.
Execution by police is legal — virtually every police shooter is exonerated — and was carried out more or less in secret until the cell phone videos
Furthermore, your notion (and others’) that such cops are just “racist” clearly fails to describe the situation accurately. Lots of cops are racist but don’t shoot unarmed black men; we have no real evidence (no studies have been done on police shooters specifically) to support the theory that they are just racist. In short, it’s a kneejerk explanation that won’t help identify or solve the problem.
I realize you are trying to explain to white society that we all are culpable since the police act in our name. But until these videos started appearing, the police went to great lengths to cover up this behavior — they know that much of the public will NOT accept this behavior. The hysterical response by police to BLM indicates this knowledge.
Those who lynched blacks did not try to cover up their crimes — they did the opposite.
I accept the metaphorical accuracy of your statement. It does serve to intimidate the black community. But beyond that I think the metaphor is shaky, and it does nothing to help understand or address the situation.
Pedantic? Yes. File it under “words have meanings.”
Your argument is unpersuasive. That fact that you think my argument has something to do with self-righteousness is odd.
The police are now doing what’s no longer acceptable for the mob to do. The mob tacitly approves. Which is why the police are nearly always exonerated, just like the mobs of history were. The mob has transfered the work of murder & terror. But the mob remains. Don’t be fooled.
The mobs & the cops always worked together. You should read the about Forsyth Co., GA in 1912. Cops & mob collaborated.
I’m not shallow and now you’ve hurt my feelings and a shallow guy wouldn’t react like this.
No.
Mobs weren’t brought to justice because the law enforcement apparatus looked away as did the legislative apparatus.
Old time lynching was personal. Many in the mob (that would include law enforcement many times) would know the victim and would have participated in the creation of the narrative that tried to justify that person’s death. Lynching was also torture. Abusing victims as they died, often for the entertainment of (and with the participation of) the mob. These people were mostly specifically hunted down, kidnapped, abused, tortured, murdered.
The executions of black people by the police are motivated by their own fears and racial baggage. These officers are being paid by us to protect us and they are able to use that job description as a way to justify the executions. They get joined by white people who want you to know that if you are following the law and doing what the officer says, you’ll be fine. Because those are the rules they pretty successfully operate under. Those rules don’t apply to people of color that consistently. It is the blindness to this bit of the New Black Codes that gives the police some of their current sanction.
Not using the right label for these actions does a couple of things — one, it lets people get into an argument as to what they are responsible for and what they are not. And it lets people avoid the discussion of justice. Two, it lets people argue about labels and avoid the discussion of justice. All of which is evident in this discussion. Calling these killings a lynching might be emotionally satisfying, but it does nothing to tip the scales of justice here.
It might not persuade you, but it will persuade others who understand what I’m trying to say (I’m not claiming that what I’m saying is clear enough; the problem here might be me.)
In order to rectify the situation, we must accurately understand the situation. I was particularly struck by one of the more recent police shootings (can’t remember which or when, but it was a couple of months ago) in which the victim said to the cop right after the shot, “Why did you shoot me?” and the cop answered, “I don’t know.”
This is not simple racism. IMO, based on what reading I’ve done, it’s a combination of latent racism and this training that hypes up cops to think everyone out there has a gun and wants to do them in. One-third of police shootings of civilians are by minority cops — do you really think it’s racism that pulls the trigger there?
In training, computers simulate the situations cops find themselves in — a person with a hard-to-identify object in hand turns to face the cop, who must quickly determine whether or not to shoot. Cops of all ethnicities are more likely to shoot when the civilian is black. Deeply embedded racism? No doubt. But saying we have to address the problem only at its root cause condemns generations of innocent people to more of the same, because we’re not going to erase American racism in our lifetimes.
This was Jim Baker’s attitude toward violence in Wilmington — it was inevitable because it was baked into the society. It had the effect of allowing him to do nothing to deal with the problem.
In short, your failure to understand my point isn’t going to stop me from making it, because the failure there is yours.
Further, your notion that “the mobs of history” were “exonerated” shows nothing but ignorance of what lynching was, how it worked and how civilized society reacted to it.
I maintain — and you have done nothing to counter — that most white Americans do NOT realize, or did not until recently, that blacks were telling the truth about brutality. This fight not only is not over, it has not properly begun. We are still in the education stage.
Oh, and as to the notion that you’re not being self-righteous: What then is the point of your statement? You still have not given any defense of your hyperbole other than to repeat it. I don’t know how you intend it, but it comes off as just another dose of liberal moral preening.
To Cassandra’s point: White America must be made to realize that if you’re black, there is no “right way” to behave around the police. You can do everything right and still be shot to death.
I have tried to emphasize (for white people) the fact that no matter your ethnicity, if a cop decides to dehumanize you, you’re in mortal peril. Whites think it can’t happen to them because of white privilege, and in truth they are in less danger than blacks. Until they start to identify with the catch-22 blacks face every day, I despair of them ever confronting the truth, which is that most police forces are out of civilian control.
100% agree.
“most police forces are out of civilian control.”
That statement has the feeling of being morally correct, but police forces are still responsive to sanctions from the courts or Congress. It’s not like police are defying civilian authority. We just aren’t passing or applying the sanctions. The courts and prosecutors are even more out of control than the police.
“It might not persuade you, but it will persuade others who understand what I’m trying to say ”
@A I think you stated the issue very well. I don’t know how police are trained to deal with civilians who are non-compliant to authority and how race is factored into the equation so I went looking for data and found the following. I have not yet completely read the studies, so I won’t comment on the conclusions.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/213004.pdf
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf
This article links to the NBER study: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?_r=0
Police chiefs and Mayors must be held accountable