freethinker44
Well-Known Member
Yeah, it's truly a sad day when a person is forced to apologize for saying "all lives matter".
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Black Lives Matter TOO
- Thread starter Kilgore Trout
- Start date
I might go with other races matter too. All encompassing.
Politesse
Amor Vincit Omnia
Do you honestly believe he would have had to apologize had he said the same three words in another context, one wherein he did not give the impression of trying to dismiss the concerns of his constituents? Do you think that if O'Malley had said at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, not in reference to the #BLM campaign, but just off the cuff, "I believe that all lives matter! Young, old, male, female, black, white, Arab, all lives matter! End military interventions abroad and fix our broken police system!" that the crowd would have shouted them down?
Because no, they wouldn't have. His remark was not offensive because of its literal content. It was offensive due to when, and why, he said it.
https://storify.com/the_author_/why-all-lives-matter-is-an-inappropriate-response
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Politesse
Amor Vincit Omnia
I also disagree that O'Malley "apologized". He said that saying "those other two phrases" was a "mistake", which is more like a stating an obvious political fact than actually apologizing for what he said. My mom always said you can put as many words into an apology, as long as five of them are "I'm sorry. I was wrong." He only got two out of the five.
It always seemed pretty unambiguous to me, in context.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Unfortunately, you're not their only audience.
dust1n
Zindīq
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
We don't want to upset anyone by implying that human lives aren't the most important. After all, god put us in charge.
dust1n
Zindīq
We're in charge of them. That's why they matter. Made in the image of our creator, we need to be in charge of something, or else we get bored and fussy.
This must be because you believe everyone important shares your preconceptions and assumptions.
I don't.
I believe that the biggest danger to Black Lives is black people and black culture. Black Lives Matter is mainly about shifting the focus from the real problems to white racism, which isn't really as important as it was 50 years ago and continues to ebb.
Tom
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
However, apparently, the point does not.
So all I say is that the statement is clear to me, and you spin that into a personal attack?
Okay then.
I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. It was not my intention. I also think that my true intention was pretty clear in the part of my post you ignored.
The militarization of the police is a problem for everyone. The main problems black people have are mostly unrelated to that. So the euphemism Black Lives Matter is both ambiguous to those of us who don't share the preconceptions and assumptions and I believe it is positively disingenuous.
Tom
How can it be said that the main problems black people have are mostly unrelated to police militarization, when it's a statistical fact that black people are massively over-represented in prison systems?
Policies like the war on drugs, minimum sentencing laws, privatization of various law enforcement activities, dis-proportionally affect impoverished people and minorities, especially black Americans. And then there's the issue of conscious or subconscious racism.
Because nobody has shown a connection between the two things.
White people live in the same world. If there is a connection between black people in prison and the militarization of the police it is the violence in the black community I used some basic statistics to illustrate.
They were immediately misrepresented.
Black people commit murder at far higher rates than white people. The folks sent in to reduce crime by confronting criminals kill black people at a larger rate than white people.
Instead of drawing the conclusion that black culture is more violent than white culture, most of the posters assumed that this was proof that cops are racist.
As a past member of the board of the local NAACP, I don't think so.
Tom
I agree that these are bad policies. For everyone, black or white or something else. But there are other, worse, problems for the poor and that includes black people.
So I think it better to work on those, instead of making a 285# 6'4" criminal thug into a martyr or taking over the stage at Bernie Sanders' rally.
I want to see things actually improved instead of ill-informed fame seekers get what they want.
Tom
There is another issue. Rational Racism.
If the young black men in the area you police are 20X more likely to be violent than the rest of the people it is quite rational to treat them differently than the others. Even the ones who have never done anything the least bit violent, because you don't know which are which at first.
Innocent young black men are commonly the victims of their more violent counterparts because the cops must make snap judgement calls. It is part of the job.
Tom
No reasonable person argues that murderers should not be imprisoned for a long time. But, focusing on murder and the argument that black culture is more violent, misses the primary reason for incarceration and police contact by a long shot.
The exact statistics depend on the year the data is shown, but as one statistic, only 13% of federal prisoners are in there for a violent crime, and only a subset of that group are there for murder. The rest are in there for a nonviolent offense, with two thirds of the nonviolent offenders in there for drug crimes. In addition, black people serve more time (average 57 months) than white people (average 37 months) for drug crimes. In addition, the length of time served for drug offenses has grown faster for black people than white people (73% vs 28%).
Source: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_federalprisonpop.pdf
In addition, black people are over-represented in prison by about a factor of 3. And the U.S. has the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate of any major country by far.
To assume that police, on average, are not racist, is to assume that they are less racist than the general population. A study showed, for example, that if you send out identical resumes with one group having culturally white names and the other group having culturally black names, the black name resumes get significantly fewer call backs. Literally the only difference is the name. Other studies have shown that, in video simulations, people are more likely to press "shoot", and assume a person is armed, if they are black, in an experiment where other variables are all controlled.