Ongoing U.S Police Brutality and Corruption Discussion Thread

finally figured out why republican brass are so scared they're jumping on the black lives matter train. they're _really_ terrified of a race riot at their convention next week. predict they will revert to typical form after the convention is over.

dallas police locking down blocks again / calling in swat after some kind of threat + "masked man/men" sighted

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/headlines/20160709-masked-man-spotted-near-dallas-police-hq-after-threat-triggers-lockdown-there.ece

http://www.snopes.com/philando-castile-was-not-wanted-for-armed-robbery/

seems the (extremely academic, so far as i know them) police-abolitionists in my feed are keen on the uh less mainstream sentiment here

http://www.luchanofeik.club/2016/07/08/clarityofrupture/

― j., Saturday, 9 July 2016 05:06 (Yesterday) Permalink

people are going to criticize that as trying to be all things to all people, but I honestly think that's the role of the president, to a degree. It is empathetic, intelligent, and reasoned.

― akm, Saturday, 9 July 2016 05:40 (Yesterday) Permalink

lol

Deray McKesson was arrested last night in Baton Rouge. Clearly targeted by police. No news as to where he is, his last tweet was eight hours ago.

Treeship: "random criminals/shooters don't act in the name of the state."

I have a friend who likes to put this as "it's one thing for the quarterback to be sacked by the opposing team; quite another to be sacked by the referee." (Not a perfect analogy of course.)

i dont know how to read all the quite variable stats on race/police killings. one site even posted that there were more white deaths this year at the hands of the police than black deaths (though in proportion to respective populations, black men are more likely to be killed than white men).

im slightly disappointed though to see everywhere (well bbc radio news reports at least) reporting so enthusiastically that the gunman who killed police *wanted to kill white people*. plenty of police have posted questionable stuff but im not seeing that picked up on with the same relish.

this is obv not good news for BLM who will obv have their reputation muddied now, though ive not been keeping track of the story enough to really know whats been happening at the weekend.

i've seen several white people "clarifying" that "black lives matter actually means black lives matter TOO" which, while well intentioned, seems like another way of re-centering whites? maybe i'm being handwringy

no you are otm

imo

I think you're right, but I also think that many of these other people simply are not equipped to get it and need it spelled out for them.

idk, you could maybe see it as some acknowledgement at least. im not really into coming down hard on every single micro inanity. BLM's very name ruffles people, cos just saying 'black' anything seems to come with baggage. there was some piece doing the rounds of a group of anon law students complaining to their university about a lecturer wearing a BLM t shirt, saying something like it was 'alienating'.

Ahem, non-colored people deserve to be advanced on a national level TOO.

I'm being glib. I do think there's a pretty great extent to which we all need to be more understanding of where other people are starting from if we ever have any hope of bridging the divides in this country. I'd like to think most of the 'black lives matter TOO' people are starting from a place where it isn't even a question that black lives matter but maybe don't understand why that's a thing that needs to be stated outright.

sometimes i think BLM should had a different name. good for drawing attention, straight to the point directness, but also they know its not really going to endear many people to the cause that easily.

"The endearing Fuzzle Wuzzles, a group centred around opposing the increasingly visible and punishment-free murder of African-Americans..."

er... it seems to have endeared/energized/spoken to like, millions of people?

besides, it isn't like butthurt white folk wouldn't have found a problem with any myriad of other names.

lol

"er... it seems to have endeared/energized/spoken to like, millions of people?"

wasnt denying that. just that anything with black in the name will eventually get accused of the usual stuff.

kinda feel like if you're starting from a place of wanting to not upset the apple cart, you're kinda rendering your movement toothless from the onset....

why cater to the thickheaded dummies who weren't going to get it anyway?

it is a super super powerful name imo. states forcefully and positively something that should be an obvious given, and in doing so points out that in so many situations and contexts it is not one. it asserts humanity in the face of terrible violence and injustices, righteously and unapologetically. it seems very dicey to start suggesting that if only the movement had adopted a more conciliatory, appealing/appeasing tone, then... etc etc. but i know you did couch your comment in a "sometimes i think" so i don't mean to pin all that on you.

but also the "they" here (the ones who ostensibly might have considered a different name) is unclear - it was a hashtag first, right? like, it became the name of the movement because it was popular; many many people who saw it felt it spoke to them, and adopted it too. or am i misremembering the sequence of events?

i'm a little fuzzy on how BLM evolved from a hashtag into an organized movement but i hadn't really considered that anyone really chose it as a "name"

xp

every successful civil rights movement had people telling them they were alienating potential allies with their rhetoric and would do better if they moderated their tone

"We Shall Overcome (with your permission, of course)"

but in all seriousness, there will always be factions of people that don't get it. these are the same assholes who, after Pulse shooting happened, said things like "I'm not putting a rainbow on my profile, I'm putting an American flag because it was 49 Americans who died, why the focus on the LGBT community (or the Latino community)?"

"if only the movement had adopted a more conciliatory, appealing/appeasing tone"

im not advocating they make the message or rhetoric moderate, just the name. but yeah, IIRC it just started as a hashtag.

can someone plz direct me to an accurate breakdown of people killed by US police this year? ive tried searching but cant seem to find one that i trust.

it's exactly the right name, the necessary name. that so many white people react negatively to it - a self-evident and utterly inoffensive truth - proves that.

ok. moving on.

in case no one has posted already -

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/08/dallas-murderers-killers-black-lives-matter

https://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-brown-v-ferguson this long article gives a good history of the development of black lives matter

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

guardian breakdown of those killed this year

i've seen several white people "clarifying" that "black lives matter actually means black lives matter TOO" which, while well intentioned, seems like another way of re-centering whites? maybe i'm being handwringy

― ejemplo (crüt), Monday, July 11, 2016 1:05 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've seen people saying "there's no *only* in front of Black Lives Matter", which is maybe a more elegant way of refuting this idea that BLM is somehow saying that non-black lives don't matter? idk, maybe engaging with "are you saying that white lives don't matter" criticisms at all is giving too much ground.

Yeah, you're walking straight into "Why doesn't it say 'All' then?".

White people aren't used to being excluded.

everybody's going to deal with this shit in their own way, and i'm inclined to cut folks a great deal of slack for anything short of actually going to trump rallies and beating up old white ladies (pace george saunders). also, we really need to have different people dealing with these things in different ways. opposition to police brutality is not a united front.

i'm a pretty critical person by nature, but i can't find much to criticize about the name "black lives matter". this is not a name it's reasonable for a non-racist to take offense to. as such, i find it to be a nearly perfect vehicle for revealing white people's hidden prejudices. this is a necessarily traumatic experience.

objections to the name "black lives matter" can be addressed in a thousand different ways, because those objections are necessarily illogical and absurd. from this week alone, i like the cartoon of the stick man with the fire hose putting out the house that's not on fire ("all houses matter").

The people claiming that BLM ignores the white people killed by the police are not dedicating their lives to a movement that would focus on everyone (and I'd suggest such a movement would end up focussing on the same issues as BLM anyway). These aren't people who have an overriding desire for justice in their hearts, they are just the usual right wing do-nothing's who are upset that something isn't about them. See: men's rights groups protesting about every anti domestic violence campaign.

Last time I checked, Black Lives Matter is ahead of StillAdvance in media attention and total political victories. Maybe we should stop second guessing a movement that has been enormously successful at getting their message out.

I posted on FB this week a link to some paintings an artist friend of mine is auctioning off, with proceeds to be split between BLM and Assist the Officer, which helps the families of slain police officers. My racist mother-in-law, of course, had to comment, "Sorry, I don't support Black Lives Matter. I think ALL Lives Matter." Since she's a fundagelical Christian, I took a tip from something I saw on Twitter last week and asked her, "If you had been at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus said 'Blessed are the poor in spirit,' would you have piped up and said 'Sorry, I think EVERYONE should be blessed?'"

Her response? "Everyone IS blessed, whether they know it or not." Way to miss the point, racist mother-in-law.

The only response I say that shut someone up was when a friend said to a skeptic on FB, "Saying 'let's focus on breast cancer research' is not to say, 'We're going to ignore every other form of cancer.'"

one of my friends posted a link to a wsj thing where you can see "blue facebook" and "red facebook" side by side, and i thought it was super interesting. because me being, basically, on "blue facebook", i tend to think that the difference between us is that i have logic and facts on my side. but looking at red facebook, you know, they think the same thing. so that's not the actual difference, that we're right and they're wrong. it's also not that they're angry and hateful, because blue facebook can be angry and hateful about a lot of things too.

the difference is, i hate to say it, that blue facebook uses glurge-language, and red facebook doesn't. now, i fucking hate glurge, have for decades, but looking at it side by side i came to the conclusion that the presence of glurge is the _one redeeming feature_ of blue facebook. blue facebook has the desire for uplift. they want and need to be touched, to be moved. red facebook doesn't.

and this difference, i think, a difference which i would roughly define as "openness to emotional experience", colors and limits the interaction between the two camps.

i've seen several white people "clarifying" that "black lives matter actually means black lives matter TOO" which, while well intentioned, seems like another way of re-centering whites?

How? It seems like you're saying that stating the problem implicitly centers white people and distracts from what we should be focusing on, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

White people aren't used to being excluded.

Black Lives Matter is not an exclusionary statement; it is a statement of focus.

1 im not saying 'what about other lives?!'
2 im not mad at the campaign or the cause
3 i said that SOMETIMES i wonder if some might find a different name less combative (though yes, this is a problem for others to deal with, and yes, i know its not necessarily the name, but what it 'brings up' for other people)

wtf are you talking about rushomancy, red-staters love the glurge

Yeah I always associated glurge with red state people. They want to be inspired too for the most part -- the whole mass of red america isn't made up of paranoid anti-government breitbart readers whose lack emotions outside of bile and fear. That is just a contingent

The "all lives matter" people are ridiculous and I don't know why we are still talking about them. I think they are mostly made up of white grandmas who don't want to face the possibility that the police aren't the good guys and well.... Ok. BLM won't be stopped by clueless people like that. The barriers to police reform are republican politicians and the police themselves.

In the meantime the typically classless timing on the part of these racist fucksticks:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/11/confederate-flag-flies-once-again-for-a-few-hours-at-the-south-carolina-statehouse/?hpid=hp_rhp-morning-mix_mm-story-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

...tempts one to lean toward "why cater to the thickheaded dummies who weren't going to get it anyway?" side.

Not all white people were on board with the civil rights movement and that was ok. You don't want racists or crypto racists on the side of an anti-racist movement anyway; the struggle is not to be inclusive toward them. The point is to change society.

I think the most charitable reading you can give of an "All Lives Matter" person is that s/he is one of those people who doesn't want to admit race is ever an issue. And even that head-in-sand mentality has a tendency to accompany racism, but often there is more direct racism behind "All Lives Matter." Giuliani said that "Black Lives Matter" is an "inherently racist" idea. He also said not too long ago that most black people are killed by blacks or something to that effect, and you often see the same people posting these two sentiments, plus also "asking questions" about what the shooting victim must have done wrong. The subtext is obvious -- black people are largely thugs, the ones who get shot by police definitely are, and I either don't believe that a black person could possibly be wrongfully killed by police as a result, or else I care so little for them that I don't care if it happens on occasion toward the greater purpose of cleaning up the streets or whatever. There are probably people out there who are worth explaining the problems with "All Lives Matter" to, and there are also a lot who I would not waste my time with.