This whole line of discussion seems to consist of some rich false equivalency being mediated by presuming the existence of equivalent opposing forces and then making them appear equal in size and threat by not talking about who they actually are.
They're the same racists on the left and the right extremes.
It's just, we had decades of wars and (justified) propaganda that thoroughly discredited fascism and their style of racism so it's easy to see how the right extremes is bad.
What the extreme left is doing on the other hand is a more modern variation of racism and totalitarianism. It's ostensibly driven by noble concepts like social justice but in reality devolves into racial discrimination, dogmatism and tribalism as is seen on far right, just with a different dogma and different racial preferences.
Maybe you find that particular dogma more agreeable, or maybe the ends justify the means for you, I dunno.
But if you genuinely look at the discussion on Twitter or Reddit and you don't see extreme left views upvoted as often as extreme right I don't really know what to tell you. I guess people on the far right don't recognize their own crowd as an extreme either, it's just normal and common sense to them too, dismissing any rough edges with the same excuses.
You want specific examples? Try being public about not fully supporting BLM. Not the literal slogan itself, but parts of everything else the movement and their leaders come with. See if anyone catches the nuance of your opinions as you're branded a racist for not falling in line. You don't even need to say anything racist, even a modicum of doubt in the dogma is seen as dogwhistling your obviously racist views.
Do you see a lot of sexism or racial slurs / offenses in what you personally read on the internet? I don't, but the parts that I frequent what I see are mostly leftist racism and sexism, blaming white people for what other white people did, generalizing straight white men as privileged, "sounds about white"... No, none of that rings a bell, or none of that sounds bad or important because <reasons>? Try switching white to black and see how that holds up. Feeling righteous and having noble reasons for racism and sexism doesn't make it right. That's how all racism is justified and never in history has it been the right way to go about treating people.
Ever try listening to NPR in recent years? It is really approaching the point of self parody. I would say that at least 80% of NPR "stories" have an explicitly stated racial angle and probably greater than 90% have a gender or race angle. It is literally almost the only thing NPR commentary and analysis segments talk about these days. Yes racism is bad. No it is not reasonable that every single segment is about how supposedly blacks, transgender blacks, illegal immigrants, etc, are victims. Even in coronavirus coverage it is all about race and a particular race at that. There is very little mention of anti-Asian hate crimes (often by blacks) almost no mention of interesting race facts, like the fact that Filipino American nurses were far more likely to die of Covid than other ethnic groups. Instead arcane stories, like African Americans in general are afraid of vaccines and that is okay because of the Tuskeegee experiments 50-60 years ago are aired.
Again racism is bad. But when CNN or NPR is spending a huge, gigantic amount of their airtime covering racial issues every single day it is a little perplexing. It would make sense if the goal was to manufacture racial tension as distraction from real issues. Maybe it is. If you constantly focus on the outrage of the day you can ignore the slow boiled frog of rising economic inequality over the past 20 years.
I am seriously interested in a study that quantified the number of NPR news analysis stories that contain explicit commentary on race in 2020. I bet it is over 80% meanwhile the black share of the population is around 12%. Seems to me it would make sense to have the number of stories more proportional to that.
Thank you for noting this, as I have found NPR to now be unbearable. I listened to it for over 30 years, and for the longest time it was one of my main sources. Now, like you say, they're like self-parody -- but not funny.
Clearly, they've chosen to see the world, and therefore report _every_ story, through a narrow set of prisms: race, ethnicity, gender [identity], sexual orientation, and class. I still tune in to them from time to time to check, and now I play a game: how long before I hear a reference to one of the above perspectives. In general, it's less than 2 minutes, and often less than 1. It's as though they're beating a drum, or like a mantra.
In the title. However, I am sure, having listened to NPR almost every day, that most of those stories contain an explicit "racial analysis" segment. It is also possible that the written content is less race obsessed than what airs on the radio. I know when I am listening to NPR driving to work I hear racially focused stories back to back every single day as if there was absolutely nothing else interesting to talk about.
If you had evidence you would have already presented it, i looked through a couple of articles and nothing about race. im not going to waste more time to confirm what i already know
While I also do not have time to do an analysis right now, and as I mentioned radio content may be different from web content, the number of upvotes my initial comment calling out NPR got suggests my opinion is not unusual.
Remember when NPR deliberately took a video out of context to portray peaceful protesters attacking a random car as if the driver was some sort of white supremacist who tried to hit them on purpose?
The implication was that npr was smearing this woman, rather than the editors being lazy. All in service to the argument that npr focuses on race, despite there being no evidence
So I can write an article about rapists, put a completely unrelated picture of your face with your full name on it, and that's not a smear? That's essentially what happened
> One person was hit by a car in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, early on June 17 as protesters held an anti-racism demonstration at Jefferson Square, police said.
The story might be unrelated, but they knew exactly where it came from.
> One person was hit by a car in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, early on June 17 as protesters held an anti-racism demonstration at Jefferson Square, police said.
> I am seriously interested in a study that quantified the number of NPR news analysis stories that contain explicit commentary on race in 2020. I bet it is over 80% meanwhile the black share of the population is around 12%. Seems to me it would make sense to have the number of stories more proportional to that.
What is the connection in your thinking between the proportion of stories that analyze race and the percent of black people in the US?
Almost all NPR stories that analyse race concern "black or brown" people. Why do you think that a disproportionate amount of content should be generated focusing on one issue? If my premise is correct, that more than 12% of NPR content contains racial analysis, I don't feel that the burden is on me to explain why I think this is an unjustified proportion. There are other interesting things to talk about in the world and time is limited. That's why. Why should one issue pre-empt others day in and day out?
Well sports news is entertainment. There are specialised sports reporters and sports segments. Sports fans don't usually burn down city blocks when their team loses. Maybe identity politics outrage news is also serving a market demand. However it should be clear if the news is not proactive and tethered to underlying reality, i.e. if police are not actually racist as portrayed by CNN then the net social effect of such fake news is clearly negative. I don't think there is a such thing as fake sports news. There is clearly fake business news. When the media promotes ideas like ubiquitous AI and self driving cars it leads to malinvestment.
Thinking it is an unjustified proportion seems exceedingly racist on your part. The equivalency between proportion of attention paid to harmed groups and size of the group, especially for groups as large as ~12%, is inherently quite an extreme racist stance to take.
I’m sure you wouldn’t agree, but that’s exactly the problem. As long as we’ve got people acting like NPR’s current amount of coverage including racial angles is somehow “unjustified” then we clearly need to terraform more and more racial angle of content into the discussion to educate that racist ignorance out of existence.
In a world where resources including time are scarce there is something to be gained from allocating time toward beneficial activities. I got to stop interacting with this thread now to practice what I preach.
You didn't really answer GP's question, can you be a little more specific about which groups and individuals you perceive as left-extremist?
I mean, people write a lot of crap on the Internet. It seems to me that you chose to perceive these people as leftist, rather than them proving it by participating in some kind of leftist organization or at least producing some left-leaning writing.
Come on, I even gave you specific examples of specific issues that are widely recognized to be leftist. Denying it is like denying that anti-black racism is a predominantly right wing extreme.
Yup. Try saying, with genuine honest neutrality, “all lives matter”, “it’s ok to be white”, or “capitalism doesn’t care about race/gender” and see what happens.
All three of these phrases are political slogans. They are inherently associated with a set of political views, because they exist specifically to oppose another set of views and slogans.
It’s unreasonable to echo a political slogan in public and then complain that people don’t assume your neutrality. You cannot say “it’s okay to be white” and expect others to consider it neutral, in much the same way that you can’t say “blood and soil”.
It's the other way around: these phrases are neutral observations and reasonable opinions, perhaps reasonable reactions to insanity of well-known political slogans - importantly, it's something a random person can come up independently, without reading the exact words first. But at some point, these phrases rapidly become politicized, and this catches a lot of people off guard.
You voice your thoughts, fully expecting the audience to consider it neutral, but it so happens that your words pattern-match to a phrase that became a political slogan somewhen in the last few months, and boom, your audience hates you. You just stepped on a political landmine[0].
It seems to me than in the past 5-10 years, social discourse became littered with such political landmines, and at this rate, it's very hard to keep up with the list of phrases that can blow up in your face.
That's only true in the sense that every phrase can be a "neutral observation" if you choose to ignore the context in which it is used and the associations it has.
It's the same concept as dogwhistling at its core. Like the terms "urban", or "big government", or "states' rights", or "law and order". Completely "neutral phrases" that are often used to communicate a hidden message with plausible deniability. I mean after all, who could disagree that "all lives matter" – it's obvious isn't it?
I don't really accept it's all that hard to be aware of the implications of the language you use to communicate. I suppose you might theoretically step on a "landmine", but I'll tell you what – I am virtually certain that nobody who has said "it's okay to be white" to their audience has accidentally stumbled upon a neutral phrase with good intentions.
>Like the terms "urban", or "big government", or "states' rights", or "law and order". Completely "neutral phrases" that are often used to communicate a hidden message with plausible deniability.
These are terms used earnestly in neutral ways by academics, professionals and bureaucrats from all over the political spectrum. Does anyone seriously thing the NHTSA or some sociology professor is dog whistling when they use words like "urban environments" or "law and order"?
Yes, you can communicate a hidden message with them but you can communicate a hidden message with damn near any words in the english language if you want to.
The other side of this is that opponents always try to create negative associations for whatever they oppose.
So then someone whose politics favors authoritarianism and centralization will propose some federal power grab, opponents will make arguments favoring local control and the authoritarians will try to tar them with slavery and Jim Crow even if the subject is unrelated, e.g. whether the FDA should be overruling the states on whether or not to ban a thing in their state.
It's essentially an attempt to prevent anyone from taking the neutral position by making an accusation of guilt by association. Nazis are bad, Nazis built roads, therefore roads are bad.
What happened is that people heard the phrase "black lives matter", and were uncomfortable with the racial specificity. They wanted to _clarify_ it with the true fundamental principle.
Why do black lives matter? Because: All lives matter.
That is a non-racist perspective, and it was attacked viciously because it undercuts a propaganda effort.
> They wanted to _clarify_ it with the true fundamental principle.
I don't think that's an honest portrayal of the actual actions that took place or their motivations. In the context of disproportionate black deaths, mischaracterizing focusing on that specific issue:
1) does not inspire any positive change itself,
2) prevents positive change by demonizing those who are bringing awareness to and proposing solutions to the problem.
Rarely do you see the "all lives matter" crowd calling for increased police accountability; in fact, given their close association with Blue Lives Matter, I believe those who throw the slogan around tend to fight for quite the opposite.
It’s a restatement of the first and most widely-known principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association [1]. I think that is why it resonates with many people.
Those people are then caught off-guard when they use the phrase and find themselves labeled “racist.”
I just don’t see how the vilification of a specific phrasing of a common sentiment moves us forward. To me it feels like playing power games with words.
I think you are forgetting what it was like when the "black lives matter" slogan was first becoming popular. If hadn't already been exposed to it, it was very easy to respond "incorrectly".
For example, here's a case of a Democratic governor, running for president, getting caught by this:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Textually, that can be read as a fancied-up version of "all lives matter". Semantically at the time, it most certainly did not have an everyday lived reality that all people were equal.
At the time, women couldn't vote, Black people could be owned, and all people could be indentured servants, which significantly undermines the "Thomas Jefferson said 'All Lives Matter' almost 250 years ago" argument.
If OP’s point was that Thomas Jefferson said something close to “All Lives Matter” 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence, therefore it’s not a reaction to “Black Lives Matter” today, it seems most reasonable to examine the contemporaneous context of the original words.
There was no "all lives matter" until there was "black lives matter" and people wanted to say they don't like the message.
People wanted to say they don't like being left out of the message.
Nobody seriously opposed "black lives matter", but noticed that proponents of that phrase got vicious when faced with "all lives matter"; the latter is not a political slogan, but a litmus test for racism.
Political only insofar as they call out the disingenuous nature of their opponents' unopposable slogans. I absolutely can, and do, say "it's okay to be white" because there should be absolutely nothing inherently & politically wrong with my skin color - and the phrase was developed to bely the imputed virtue of those who reveal their true stance by freaking out over it.
Do black lives matter? absolutely, of course. Is it okay for me to be white? why is your response to berate me for saying so?
Because there is no "genuine honest neutrality" behind those phrases. They're shibboleths. They're commonly understood slogans, used to indicate what side you're on (or at least what side you're opposed to) while SOUNDING innocent. The people who know, will KNOW what you mean when you say them.
(And in the incredibly unlikely situation where you'd somehow been exposed to enough of the discourse to come up with these phrases on their own, but NOT so much that you hadn't heard them yet, they're still terrible concepts that have been roundly denounced on their own merits. For just one example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CAsrVFXD3Ju/?utm_source=ig_embed...)
> They're commonly understood slogans, used to indicate what side you're on (or at least what side you're opposed to) while SOUNDING innocent.
This confusion was created the other side's choice of name, whether purposely or not.
You start off with a phrase like Black Lives Matter. This is clearly a political slogan designed to provoke opponents into taking the negation of it, i.e. into claiming that black lives don't matter.
The problem with it is that it's too clever by half, because it gives opponents the ability to claim the middle. All Lives Matter.
And it's a two party system so now both the center and the right are standing under the banner of the neutral slogan. Now BLM declares that ALM are really just a bunch of secret racists because otherwise they have to eat the rhetorical self-own.
But this is just an attempt to reassert the politically-motivated original framing, i.e. that anyone who disagrees with any BLM political position -- even if the disagreement comes from the center -- is saying they think black lives don't matter. Which is not necessarily the case.
“All lives matter” is not a neutral slogan when it is said in the context of the death penalty, nor is it neutral when spoken as a response to “Black lives matter”. It is only neutral when spoken out side of any political context.
If you define away neutrality, there is no neutrality, yes. But does everyone agree with your definition?
This seems more like a "you're with us or against us" trick.
"I care about protecting all children" is still neutral, right? But if someone popularized "ICAPBC", by your argument "ICAPAC" would innately become a shibboleth? Something doesn't seem right here, where neutral positions automatically get converted to dog-whistles without any proof.
What is neutrality in this scenario? BLM is about protesting anti-black racial injustice in the criminal justice system. Is neutral ground that there is no injustice? That it doesn't matter?
Yes, there was violence at a small fraction of protests, and it's fair to have pushback on that. That seems a separate issue than rejecting BLM on the face of it with an expression like ALM.
Neutral ground is that injustice is wrong, no matter who it happens to. It's wrong when it happens to blacks, it's wrong when it happens to Asians, it's wrong when it happens to Hispanics, and it's wrong when it happens to whites. That's neutral.
From there, you look around and you see that blacks and Hispanics seem to have injustice happening to them in ways that don't often happen to whites. (Not sure about Asians; but my perception is that they may experience injustice, but less of it than blacks.) And then, coming from a position that all injustice matters, when you seen injustice happening more to specific groups, you say "That injustice matters." Not that it's the only injustice that matters, or that other injustice doesn't, but that specific injustice seems to happen a lot, and it's not OK. We need to do something about it.
I see your example of a neutral stance, and it’s true, and racially neutral. It’s also not relevant to the conversation around BLM, which focuses on anti-black injustice. I take issue with that ALM is used to subvert BLM; why else would the phrase exist and popularize at this time and context? Therefore, ALM is not an assertion of the neutral stance you propose, but instead a rejection of the reality or importance of race-specific injustice.
"The lives of people to whom injustice happens due to extra-judicial murders by the police, who are predominantly black matter and should be considered" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
In contrast "Black Lives Matter" describes the issue exactly, succinctly and pithily. As a bonus it outs the people who want to remain willfully ignorant about it.
> they're still terrible concepts that have been roundly denounced on their own merits
Hol' up, "it is ok to be white," is a terrible concept denounced on its own merits? Lol ok
It's a good thing that under Critical Theory, since race is a social construction (that's why Black is supposed to be capitalized, because it refers to the construction, not the color) there's no reason besides being "roundly denounced" (which will happen eventually to you anyway if you're an untermensch White) that you can't be transracial.
I'm not White, I'm a light tan person. Get off my lawn with your racist Theory.
You are falling into the trap that was explicitly set up by trolls. If it was not well known to be explicitly set up by trolls, "it is ok to be white” would be a fine, boring statement.
But, it has been established that chan trolls came together to figure out a slogan that they could use to stir up heated arguments exactly like you are making. They settled on "it is ok to be white" and started using it to troll people into saying things that can be interpreted as hating white people. Then the arguments based on misunderstanding start and trolls laugh at you while they feed on your outrage and frustration.
the fact that it's so effective says more about society than the trolls though. if you squint hard enough, it's almost like the reactions provoked when you say "anti-white racism doesn't exist" without further explanation. it's true under the modern definition, but sometimes hard to take in good faith.
The phrase was set up by trolls explicitly to root out those who do not, after all, use corresponding phrases in good faith (and once rooted out, then played). It absolutely should be a fine, boring statement - and its brilliance is that it's not the trolls that make it a trap, but those who choose to fight it.
There are people on the left that assume that if you have white skin, then you must act a certain way, and that way of acting is wrong. This is based solely on the person's race, no individual characteristics need be considered.
If you disagree, then please explain what happened here with coke: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/366132 "Coca-Cola Asks Its Workers to Be 'Less White' to Fight Racism"
edit: Misread the article and grabbed the first name I saw. This edit fixes the reference:
"The seminar entitled 'Facing Racism' , given by Robin DiAngelo , was presented through LinkedIn Education publicly, although not free of charge. The company admitted that, in effect, it invited its workers to take the course, but they clarify that it was not mandator"
I would assume that Robin DiAngelo would be on the left.
Five minutes of digging and I found out that this news article is actually just reporting on a tweet[1] by #DrKarlynB[2] which I found out is an organizational psychologists who hates critical race theory. Of her retweets she primarily retweets republicans, and the comment section of her tweets often contains pro-trump rhetoric.
For all I know the slides she presents from Robin DiAngelo’s lecture were taken out of context. I think this is a pretty poor example. Can you do better?
The coco-cola incident made national news, I imagine there are better articles out there; I simply grabbed the first one on google - I should have sought out a better one to link to.
However, from the article, you can see several of the slides that are presented. I find it hard to believe that there's some other context than race being referred to in these slides. Do you have reason to believe that the "white" in the slides is referring to something other than race? And if not, could you provide a possible greater context that doesn't place these slides under the guise of making broad generalizations about a group of people based on their identity? I am trying to think of one myself; however, I am failing to do so.
Robin DiAngelo is talking about empathy. She asks people to put them self in the sues of a minority, knowing how boring it is, she puts the words “Try to be less white” on the slide in an attempt to humor.
Another possibility:
She has been working up the argument that whiteness is a social construct, and in this context, “being white” is the same as “being socially constructed to perceive your self as superior”. In that context asking people “to be less white” is not a judgement on the color of the skin.
It may be something entirely different though, point is it is not hard to come up with a context where these slides are not criticizing the color of people’s skin.
> It may be something entirely different though, point is it is not hard to come up with a context where these slides are not criticizing the color of people’s skin.
I agree that your above scenarios could change the context.
However, given that I perceived the slides in a different manner, and several others did as well (if no one perceived this to mean white people, then there would have been no news). Would you agree that using "white" to mean something other than the race in a seminar titled 'Facing Racism' is less likely than 'white' being used to refer to race? If not, would you agree that the Robin's usage of 'white' was poorly thought out, considering that people ended up with the conclusion that she was referring to race?
I do believe that Robin was referring to 'white' in terms of race; however, I'm willing to explore the possibility that this wasn't the case.
In the event that my assumption is correct - that Robin is referring to race - would you then agree that Robin is a member of the left who believes that white culture should be viewed negatively based on the content of the slides within the seminar?
Those Coke indoctrination slides say "Try to be less white." Not "Try not to be a white supremacist," but just ... being less white. The sign "It's OK to be white" ought to have zero reaction if what you said is true, but somehow it causes rather a lot of reaction.
The "privilege" concept is original sin, and you can't even be absolved of it.
Every white person has a white privilege and thus is racist and benefits from white supremacy. Same difference. The left doesn't hate white people, they just hate 90% of them.
Colorblindness (aka. not being racist by the old definition) is considered white supremacy.
"There's only one human race" is white supremacy.
"All Lives Matter" is white supremacy.
"Cultural appropriation" is white supremacy.
Being an "ally" is white supremacy.
Meritocracy is white supremacy.
Celebrating Columbus Day is white supremacy.
Being attracted to people of your own race is white supremacy.
Questioning the white privilege theory in the first place is white supremacy.
My mother could not be any less exposed to the “discourse,” and yet she has spoken variants of the first two phrases to me. I believe they may just be common sentiments in the Deep South.
This kind of reaction is what phrases like "it's okay to be white" and "all lives matter" are meant to elicit. It's exactly what trolls want you to do. The other 90% of the population is appalled. Is it not okay to be white? Do some lives not matter?
There are people explicitly saying that no, it's not OK to be white - that if you're white you are automatically racist, and automatically guilty for what happened in the past. White Fragility is an example.
"It's OK to be white" isn't just a dogwhistle. (It may be that, but it isn't just that.) It's an explicit rejection of that kind of "all whites are guilty racists" baloney.
That's what makes it such an effective troll. If it was simply obviously bad from all conceivable contexts it wouldn't work. But, you are still being trolled. And, you are playing right into their game. They are getting you to sing their slogan and laughing at you the whole time.
Yes, there are some people out there in social media who have taken to hating white people for being white. That's not OK. Call it out. But, don't dance for the trolls in the process.
There's the group of anti-white haters who need to be called out. There's the vast majority of people who don't want any form of racial hatred. And, then there's the white supremacist trolls (and just plain trolls) who want to trick the vast majority of people into fighting themselves and in the process make it look like anti-white hatred is much, much more common than it really is.
"It's OK to be white" is a troll campaign that is actively being used to bait people into fighting each other and to have both sides come out thinking the other is far more racist than they really are.
I grew up reasonably familiar with devout Christian culture, and one of the things they were absolutely convinced of is that society was filled with anti-Christian shibboleths. When someone said "let's build a tolerant society" or "climate change is an important problem", those might sound like neutral descriptors, but they knew not to be deceived. Obviously, in their view, nobody actually cares about tolerance or climate change - those phrases are just slogans people use to signal their allegiance to the anti-Christian agenda.
I'm sure you can see the problem there, and I would encourage you to think about whether you've fallen down a similar hole.
Siege mentality is real. I'm not sure I see the connection in this case to the racial issues. "All Lives Matter" is clearly a reaction to "Black Lives Matter."
Respectfully, it seems clear because you're living under a siege mentality. "All Lives Matter" is a short phrase composed of common English words - some people do use it as a slogan to oppose the BLM movement, but others use it as a compact expression of the idea that every human's life has value. When Jennifer Lopez tweeted "#AllLivesMatter #LoveMakeTheWorldGoRound" over a picture of herself holding hands with Lin-Manuel Miranda and rainbow flags waving in the foreground, is it really plausible that she was declaring her allegiance to anti-BLM groups?
No. Again, it seems impossible to believe that JLo (and Hilary Clinton, and Fetty Wap, and...) said All Lives Matter as a covert signal they don't like the BLM movement. I'm sure some people somewhere have said it to troll, but I think the concern over the phrase is mostly a moral panic.
Shibboleths? Those phrases are intended to identify unifying intent vs deception intending division. I agree "black lives matter"; can you agree "all lives matter" and "it's OK to be white" and thus support us working together for mutual betterment? or will you viciously attack the phrases, belying your intent to divide us?
Is a phrase a "shibboleth" when intended to promote peace, unity, and mutual aid?
"All lives matter" is a totally meaningless phrase outside the context of "black lives matter".
The only reason to say "all lives matter" is to trivialize the phrase "black lives matter". It may appeal to neutrality, but the context is far from neutral.
Has any rigorous study shown that blacks are more likely to die in police encounters after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place?
If so please provide a cite or link.
Although out of thousands of cops in the USA I am sure there are some genuine racists the notion that in 2020 cops would be killing blacks intentionally at a higher rate seems ridiculous. 99.999% of cops want to have an easy shift, get a donut or two, write a couple tickets, watch the years go by, retire early and collect a pension. Plenty of poor and middle class whites have been killed by abusive individual cops over the years and yet the reaction is not tribalism, rioting or generalising the actions of few bad cops to the police force as a whole. I agree America has massive problem with overly militarised police but this is not a racial issue. It stems from the drug war and the ease with which criminals can get high powered weapons in America. See North Hollywood Shootout.
The reason we just had the largest civil rights protests in American history this summer has as much or more to do with the everyday experience with the police as it does the extraordinary events such as deaths. Deaths were the spark, not the fuel.
The grinding oppression of every day life in terms of policing has been shown in study after study. It is disproportionately felt by black people, mostly men, but it has been steadily expanding to all demographics for decades now.
| Plenty of poor and middle class whites
Yeah and a lot of poor and middle class white people were out supporting the protests because of their own experiences too.
Daniel Shaver's death is not argument against BLM's goals, it's an argument in favor of them.
So what would be the problem with changing the name of the movement to ALM all lives matter and making the focus against police militarisation rather than some divisive narrative of racism?
Imagine you are at a dinner party and haven't eaten for a couple days. The guests don't realize this and are delaying dinner to chat, play games, what have you. Then finally someone says "hey morpehos137 is starving" and a large group of the guests dismiss this and say "We are all hungry" and continue to go about their business.
After 10 years of a movement that culminated in protests in 2000 cities in all 50 states and 5 territories that had supermajority support in polls, the people who are still ignorant enough, feigned or otherwise, to say BLM means Black Lives Only Matter are numerically and politically insignificant.
No movement has ever changed anything by seeking to get 100% of everyone on board, least of all those most uninformed, hostile, and acting in bad faith.
Mhm. December 10, 2017. Two days after the video was released.
#BLM Activists Call Attention To Graphic Video Of Daniel Shaver's Death At The Hands Of Arizona Police
Black Lives Matter is against police brutality of all forms and against all people.
Shaver isn't the only non-Black victim of police violence that BLM has been involved in supporting either. While their focus has always been Black people, they have never operated in an exclusive way at all.
> after adjusting for income level and crime rate of where the encounter takes place
Please stop with this racist skewing of statistics. There are thousands of factors involved. A bad faith person will always be able to stack them up in a way that favors their cause. Experts in criminology pretty much agree that racial justice is a problem in urban and sub urban USA, including police violence. The only reason to disagree and to skew the statistics in your favor is to entertain racist believes.
> Please stop with this racist skewing of statistics. There are thousands of factors involved.
But that's the whole point. If black people are disproportionately shot by police because police are racist, that's a problem with police. If it's because "thousands of factors" cause black people to have disproportionately more encounters with police, but the police themselves are acting with neutrality, then it's a problem somewhere else and you can't fix it through police reform.
The answer is fundamental if you actually want to solve the problem. But not evaluating it is convenient if you just want to keep using it as a political bludgeon forever, because by not even looking in the right places for a solution, the problem is never solved and you can run for office on it over and over.
I am not an expert on criminology. I only have a layman understanding of psychology from university so I can not tell you how the experts have reached a consensus on racial justice in urban USA is skewed against black people (but I bet there are other people on HN that can; if they are willing to spend the effort; which I doubt, since I am almost over this already).
But my layman understanding of psychology is enough to recognize how experts deal with large number factors in social models. You don’t just pick and choose (in fact that is what I’m accusing racists of doing). There is a large body of literature that experts consults. In an average social psychology study you find something like citations to 30-60 different works to back up something as trivial as a study on the stress relation effects of living in proximity to high noise pollution. It is anything but convenient. To the contrary, it is a ton of work. I’m sure expert criminologists have spent years doing nothing but familiarizing them self with the literature so they can best judge how do deal with different factors in their models. And if they do mess up (which I’m sure they do) the self correcting nature of the scientific method will make sure that the worlds knows how their models were erroneous, and subsequent models will take this extra knowledge into effect.
So morpheos137 asks for statistics, you provide none, but accuse him/her of racist skewing of statistics. Um... pretty sure you're the one with the agenda here.
>Experts in criminology pretty much agree that racial justice is a problem in urban and sub urban USA, including police violence.
Because if they don't they are racist. Right?
To me racial justice means that you are not treated differently simply because of your race. In 2021 in America there is no evidence that people are treated differently just because of their race. There is plenty of evidence that people living in high crime areas, engaging in suspicious activities like passing counterfeit money while high on meth and fentanyl are treated differently from your average joe regardless of skin colour.
A quick search of 'Marion Gerald Hood Emory University rejection letter' will show how even in 1959, blacks were treated like scum.
There are ways to get an idea of the reality of black people. For those who are ok with videos, here are some good but enjoyable ones. You may use 'NewPipe' from fdroid or the youtube-dl command line utility to download them:
[8] Also the 1965 Baldwin and Buckley debate on the theme "Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?" > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxLUbKebYvc
If you move this comment one level up it sounds like a clear distinction from the racist right. Making it clear that GP was engaging in a false equivalence. One might say: In a different context this comment is accidentally leftist.
You see the context in which you say things matter. If you should “all lives matter” in response to the death penalty, I bet you’d be met with a ton of leftist support. However if you say it in response to “black lives matter” it is pretty clear that you disagree.
You clearly know they are dogwhistles. Just like saying sieg heil doesnt inherently mean anything racist, but everyone knows what you mean when you say it.
All three of these are reasonable statements if you remove all contemporary social context. Nobody does that, and the people who use these slogans know that. They're using the difference between abstract context-free understanding and contextual understanding as a gaslighting technique, making obviously political statements and then pretending there is no context and hiding behind "but that's a reasonable statement!"
Consider, alternately, these three statements:
"The social contract applies equally to all instances of human life."
"We should eliminate shame in connection with anyone's race, heritage, or other aspects of their origin over which they have no control."
"There is nothing inherent in markets that perpetuates racial prejudice."
These mean about the same thing but are formulated in a way that avoids this kind of gaslighting doublespeak. It's not hard to do. I doubt those statements would offend anyone.
I assume anyone saying "all lives matter" is racist precisely because it is so damn easy to say the same thing neutrally.
> "The social contract applies equally to all instances of human life."
Clearly you're making an argument against abortion.
> "We should eliminate shame in connection with anyone's race, heritage, or other aspects of their origin over which they have no control."
Pedophiles make this argument to justify their urges.
> "There is nothing inherent in markets that perpetuates racial prejudice."
This one might as well be All Lives Matter. It's the common retort against claims of algorithmic racial bias and was used historically in the South to oppose government-mandated desegregation.
These are the claims you're using as examples of neutrality, until somebody puts them in a frame where they're not.
You can do that with everything because even an actually neutral claim is an opposition to a non-neutral claim by someone else, and therefore has political implications.
Wow! A few sentences later I link to a leftist accusing a Maoist leftist for being reactionary and discriminatory. I even mention the fact that Maoists and National Bolsheviks (which are very much racists while leftists) exist in the very first sentence of the paragraph.
However, these are not the norm. They are a very small minority and most leftist groups will not tolerate them.
What!? I say that? Are you pointing to the fact that I refer to sibling comments in how the equivalence is wrong? And that is somehow me implying that “discrimination against white people somehow better”?
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and when a flamewar degenerates into a tedious, petty spat like this, the thread stopped being interesting a long time ago.
We ban accounts that do personal attacks, so please don't do that either.
I say this as someone who doesn't identify with the right or really care about any of these politics at all.
Go google of a picture of the Minneapolis police department engulfed in flames shooting out 50 feet over the top. That was certainly a strongly predominantly left driven action.
There are about 500 people in those pictures. The fact that a right wing person got arrested means nothing. The George Floyd protests weren't right wing.
Boogaloos are far-right only in the sense that they're libertarians afaik.
> Video shot that night shows a person later identified as Hunter firing 13 rounds from a semiautomatic assault-style rifle on the 3rd precinct police station while people believed to be looters were inside. He then high-fived another person and shouted, “Justice for Floyd!” according to the complaint.
Doesn't seem like a person who you picture when you think about a "right-wing extremist".
It's a similar problem to the whole anti-fa thing. Both have groups organizing around a common idea. Opposition to fascism for anti-fascists and trying to bring about a second civil war for the Boogaloo Bois. Neither are a strict group that exists with a coherent ideology you can point to. Instead they are a name given to lots of groups.
With trying to incite a second civil war comes a lot of baggage associated with white supremacy and their dreams of the same thing along racial lines. So whilst not all groups are out and out racist a lot of them are just due to the people attracted to the idea. In particular when looking at people who are trying to incite a civil war upping the ante by shooting guns and setting buildings on fire we should be suspicious that the slogans they yell might not be in the interests of the cause but in inciting the government to respond and escalate things.
> It's a similar problem to the whole anti-fa thing. Both have groups organizing around a common idea. [...] Neither are a strict group that exists with a coherent ideology you can point to. Instead they are a name given to lots of groups.
And the same goes for the loosely defined 'fascists', I guess?
Yes of course. Fascist is a name given to lots of groups that subscribe to a broadly fascist ideology. Same as Marxist or conservative or liberal. This isn’t rocket science.
No one person was responsible for that fire or those riots. Even your source doesn't claim so, it only accuses him of "helping to set the fire".
> “I set fire to that precinct with the Black community,” and, “My mom would call the FBI if she knew.”
> “I’ve burned police stations with Black Panthers in Minneapolis,” he claimed in one message, and in another, “The BLM protesters in Minneapolis loved me.”
Which groups, existent groups, are they?
This whole line of discussion seems to consist of some rich false equivalency being mediated by presuming the existence of equivalent opposing forces and then making them appear equal in size and threat by not talking about who they actually are.