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If you're too lazy to go look up the numbers, then here they are: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s...c-pages/murder.Originally Posted by luckyman
And I'm not saying that isolated incidents are not unlawful killings (and in those cases the offending officer should be prosecuted) or lack of adequate police training, but I think the outcry over a "systemic" problem with the police is misplaced. Much larger problems in this country.
In general, people tend to get killed by people they know, and people in their own communities. In socially segregated countries like the US, you expect to see most black murder victims killed by black murderers.
You also see most white murder victims killed by white murderers. But you almost never hear anyone mention ''white on white'' crime.
Why is that, I wonder? Almost like ''black on black crime'' is a dogwhistle more than anything else.
Basketball.
Dae, I agree with much of what you have said, however what does being raised in a white supremacist society even mean? It seems like a catch all term to describe a whole plethora of unfortunate data surrounding the plight of African Americans in this country. I would preface all of what I will say by stating you can separate groups along any characteristic and find differences, differences between groups are the norm. Having said that there is no doubt that the struggle that African Americans have faced in this country contribute to the plight of African Americans today, but is only one variable you have to control for others. Slavery/Jim Crow contributes a substantial amount to that plight. However, it can’t possibly hope to explain the whole difference in crime rates/income/etc. I would also push back on the law being racist, while it was certainly the case for the majority of this countries history there were overt racist laws on the books, that isn’t the case anymore. If you are talking about disparate crime levels between different crime rates between blacks and white as to crime there are numerous variables that would account for that. I.E. Poverty, the facts that poor African Americans in this country live in the inner cities, and poor whites are more spread out, fatherless households (I know this one is controversial but the data seems pretty clear), etc. As to the actual data on police shootings and crime in general, while the data shows that African Americans and Latinos are treated differently up until the time they are detained, there have also been a few studies that show as to actual police shootings officers are more hesitant to use force on African American suspects. I will fully admit the data on that last point is scant and needs to be studied more however, they were reputable authors. Now there are obviously policies that have led to disparate outcomes in whites and blacks in recent years, but that doesn’t mean the policy its self is racist, especially if the intent behind it wasn’t. What I find so frustrating about the political left in this country is the actual reforms being discussed will have a minimal effect in closing the gap that exists, which needs to be addressed. Equality of opportunity is a long way from being realized here. Taking down statues and ending qualified immunity are fine, but they are also largely symbolic. The left is having no real discussion of ending the drug war by decriminalizing drugs and treating it as the health problem it is, there is no real conversation happening in reforming the social safety net so it actually does address these problems, there is no push for mandatory collective bargaining that would increase wages/benefits for everyone. Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders that is it, and if they can show solidarity, and have the political left still do their bidding they will. It stops us from having a serious discussion that could change the trajectory we are currently on, and lift all boats. Instead we are stuck with Robin Diangelo and her corporate grifting.
Again, missing the point. Blacks are 4 times more likely to be murdered than the national average. And like you said, those problems - that violence - arises from their own communities. But those systemic problems are a lot harder to tackle - which is why you don't hear the BLM movement utter a word about it. Much easier sound clips from LeBron et al. to say that police violence is the major issue the African American community has to deal with.
Officially done with you. Can't help stupid if you can't figure out how to navigate that page - which incidentally is for 2018, not 2017 (but unsurprisingly, the trend for murder offenders by race remains the same). Also says in the linked page that annual murders in 2018 were 16,214 (which I'm pretty sure is significantly more than 12,000).
It means what it says, it's not a riddle. The US, Canada, the UK, etc, are all nations which have their modern roots in colonialism, genocide, slaveholding, etc. Their initial starting points were ones of inherent and unquestioned white supremacy, and while there have been some improvements on this in terms of the day-to-day, there has never been a legitimate attempt to address and correct those historical imbalances, and so the impacts of those foundational traits continue.
Firstly, just because laws on the books are not literally racist in the text, does not mean that they are not racist in execution or application.
Secondly, because you mention drugs later on, please look up the origins of the war on drugs. You can find quote after quote from US officials where they talk about how they basically knew at the time that the war on drugs was nonsense, but it was an excuse to attack racial minorities. For example, John Erlichman, who was Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon, has been reported as saying the following:
As for your discussion about what the left wants or asks for, not only does it not really matter in terms of whether or not the law is racist, but it's also only true for given definitions of ''left''. For example, you mention that ''the left'' is not pushing for the decriminalisation of drugs and the subsequent handling of the drug crisis as a healthcare issue. This is only true if by ''the left'' you mean ''The Democratic Party''. The actual left, not just in the US but worldwide, has been in favour of the decriminalisation of drugs for a long time, and even a cursory Google search will show you that.“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I'll be stupid all day If I have to navigate a 1,000 words page to pick out what you say. Send a link and a direct quote to make it easier.
Regardless, you can attribute 20,000 estimated murders and nonnegligent homicides all to black people, and it still doesn't even register 1% of the black US adult population.
The government once studied why there were riots before. A presidentially appointed panel of 8 white men and 2 black. Here is what they concluded.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smith...ned-180968318/
So until you address the cause as noted above, you can take your effect stats and shove them back into the hole they came from.“White society,” the presidentially appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The nation, the Kerner Commission warned, was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies—one black, one white.
Last edited by luckyman; 08-27-2020 at 02:47 AM.
Well, technically a racist dog whistle is more generic like "taking our country back." Talking about "black on black" crime is more of an evasion or straw man argument. It's accurate in so far as it goes, but doesn't really prove anything. My point was more that, whoever is doing the killing, the level of day-in-day-out violence in America poses an exponentially greater risk to minorities (and everyone else) than does police violence. But the level and intensity of the current protests suggests the opposite. If police killings of unarmed suspects was on the rise that might be warranted, but if anything the number of shootings of unarmed suspects has edged down in recent years. What we do have now is video of these horrible incidents and the images have fueled a belief that we suddenly have an epidemic of racist police killings, which the data simply doesn't support. I'm all for police reform. It's long overdue. But police killings of unarmed suspects remains a rare occurrence--meaning each and every one of these incidents can and should be throughly investigated. The taking of anyone's life is a terrible and permanent thing and should only occur as a last resort to prevent eminent deadly harm to the shooter or innocent bystanders. That should be a standard everyone can support.
Dae, you could make a supremacy argument whether it be religious or ethnic for any country in the world that was founded before the 16th century. The fact is countries were founded along those lines. I agree generally with your statements as to the founding, but it was also much more than that. It was also an attempt at self government, and by todays standards it wasn’t much of one, but at the time it was unique for the era. As to your legitimate attempts at correcting it, maybe by your standards, but I would not call the civil rights movement, suffrage movement, great society, etc as illegitimate. There is still work to do.
As to the laws on the books in this country. I wouldn’t say that laws are racist in application or execution, i.e. mandatory minimums, drug laws, stop and frisk, etc., their application/execution of those laws does lead to different outcomes, but that doesn’t mean its actually racist. The intent behind those measures was well meaning but it was certainly misguided. We would find agreement on those laws being curtailed/abolished. I am well aware of the history of the criminalization of drugs in this country and their impacts on a swath of ethnic minority groups. I was sloppy with my language, I should have said the democratic party, but they are the supposed standard bearers of the left here. The neo-liberals/establishment also have a lions share of the power that extends to the corporate media apparatus. Just look at the ticket.
Last edited by bogiesfedora; 08-27-2020 at 03:02 AM.
We also have a broad swath of anti-discrimination laws that are getting stronger by the day. Just look to the Supreme Court opinion in Bostock with the opinion holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBT employees. This was by a conservative court mind you.
Not only could I make that argument, but I generally would. China is built on Han supremacy, for example. India has a caste system to this day. So on, so forth.
I just want to clarify that things like the Civil Rights movement are exactly what I mean when I say that there have been improvements: the issue is that these are only forward improvements. For example, the Civil Rights movement leads to the end of segregation and allows black people equal rights: great, but the communities are already in a state of extreme imbalance because of the long period of time prior to this when overtly racist laws were on the books and enforced. What hasn't happened, are actions that repair that initial imbalance. Reparations, for example.
The fact that the Dems are considered left in the US is a condemnation of the entire system to be honest. Not your fault obviously, not blaming you or anything, it just sucks.
I am not claiming that it doesn’t contribute and fully agree with you that slavery/Jim Crow is a main causal factor in the statistics we see today. My main argument would be that dealing with the economic variables that contribute to that would do far more to achieve the ends of a more egalitarian society than would focusing on statues and what have you. Police reform should also be one of the first things addressed. I think our disagreement is the framing, I would argue class discrimination is far more at play than actual racial discrimination. As to the reparations conversation I prefer a more whole sail approach, something along the lines of UBI. Reading our conversation back, I think our main disagreement would probably be a conversation around critical race theory, but think we want the same ends, and generally agree with the problems.
This isn’t meant to minimize the struggle African Americans, and there is no doubt they have struggled more, however, the history of Appalachia is riddled with class discrimination. It no doubt contributes significantly to the rates of poverty we see there today. We could also do it for any ethnic group in this country. That is why I favor something more along the lines of UBI as opposed to reparations. Now if reparations was something other than cash then that is one thing, but I think for most (including legislators) when they hear reparations they think cash.
I'm in favour of an intersectional framework. Class and race intersect, as do class and gender, or race and gender, or race and sexuality, etc. While I would never dismiss the class aspect (I really wouldn't) the race factor is still present and still contributes towards the treatment black people receive from the society in which they live.
As for statues and whatnot, I think it has to be a dual approach. Yes, there does have to be actual (what I would call) structural change, and that should be the priority. But the statues can also come down; you can, and should, do both.
My views on UBI are entirely dependent on the exact version being installed, but this isn't the place for that conversation
As for what reparations might actually be, that's not my place to say. I'm not from the US, I don't live in majority black American communities, I don't talk to the people who suffer these injustices on a daily basis: it's for the people who suffer from these social downsides to decide what support they need. Listen to them. Most of the authors I've read on the subject reject the inflation adjusted 40 acres and a mule; they primarily want structural adjustment.
DM me if you want to hear my many, many, many passionate views on social and cultural politics and Appalachia. I doubt you will, but they are very strong opinions.
Last edited by Pelicanidae; 08-27-2020 at 03:21 AM.
There is still a wealth gap between poor whites and poor blacks. There are still disparate outcomes for rich blacks vs poor whites. So class will always be an issue, but race is still an even bigger issue.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/20...-class-debate/
And of course, cash reparations are the obvious and most direct solution. The movement for that seems to be gaining steam in the US and is long overdue. As I stated earlier, there was a 40 year period in the US where government aided white families to move out of the city into homes in the suburbs, while blacks were left to fend for themselves with "contract buyers" in the inner city. That misuse of government power alone is worth billions in lost wealth for black families across the nation, if not trillions.“Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.”
Most families in the US gain wealth by owning a home that increases in value over time.
Last edited by luckyman; 08-27-2020 at 03:33 AM.
My main issue with intersectionality is it places group identity above the individual. Individual experience varies greatly and can’t possibly be properly understood along the lines of a mathematical equation, along those lines I would also argue that a black male and white male who are on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder have more shared experience than the white male and black male at the upper ends of the socioeconomic ladder. It would also ignore the intersection of whiteness and oppression, which my Appalachia example was meant to highlight. As someone who professes to be secular I also find the language around privilege to be weird in that it is treated as an original sin. When I truly believe that the privilege within ethnic groups varies just as much as privilege when comparing ethnic groups.
Luckyman, the research was interesting, I read the study that was linked, however it doesn’t say there is a wealth gap between poor blacks and poor whites. I am paraphrasing but the main gist was that black men grossly underperform white men within a similar socioeconomic status. They also discussed multiple variables that tend to lessen the gap.
I recommend going and reading the writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality. She addresses pretty much all of these issues. Nobody expects anyone to do any mathematical modelling of oppression, they just expect you to understand that there are various axes of subjugation and that they can compound upon each other in different ways.
In fact it's the opposite of placing group identity above the individual. It says that any individual is more than any one identity trait, and that their life experience will be impacted by a confluence of experiences based on different aspects of who they are. For example, while a black man and a black woman are both black, their blackness does not make their experience identical, because her individual circumstances mean that she is also required to deal with not only the specific difficulties of women, but also the unique difficulties of black women, which are not identical to the difficulties faced by white women.
Nobody denies that white people can have it tough. This is obviously true, and nobody who is being honest with you will ever pretend that every white person lives the high life. There are plenty of difficulties white people can have, with regards to gender, sexuality, disability, class, etc. Nobody is ignoring the fact that white people can be oppressed. What white people cannot be, however, is oppressed in precisely the same ways that black people can be.
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They are alienating what fan base? Why do all of you write as if every fan is clueless as to what this is all about and disagrees with it?
Are you just saying most fans are white and so by default, most fans could care less? They just need to enjoy their luxurious lifestyles and shut up?
Did we forget an actual NBA player for the Bucks just had a very dangerous and unsavory encounter with police in which he got tazed? Did his luxurious life help him then?
Dear lord. This is why we get nowhere. We can’t even discuss this like adults. First of all, I wasn’t tagging everyone as the same. Second of all, I never said it was right of the fans that think that way. Third of all, you are truly ignorant if you don’t believe there are a large portion of fans that do think that way. The ratings of the NBA are really down for a reason.
If the season (playoffs) continues, what was the effect? A night off?
Essentially yes. Professional athletes will have a hard time convincing paying fans to stay on board with their cause. That and I do think some players genuinely just want to play basketball. I don’t think it was a cohesive movement to begin with.
I didn't say anything about your personal opinion on the matter.
I said you think most fans disagree with all of this. Which, according to what you just typed, you DID say? Did you not?
So what do you have to prove the protests are the main reason for viewership being down? Half the time I forget a game is going on at 2 pm in the afternoon, something the NBA hasn't done since the early 90s. The bubble atmosphere is also just not as appealing as a packed arena with 20,000 fans.Third of all, you are truly ignorant if you don’t believe there are a large portion of fans that do think that way.
So while some schlubs might hate the "protests" and "billboards" on the players, I'm not going to sit here and think most fans dislike it. Everybody I know still watches when they can.
So try and "dear lord" without the herrings. Thanks.
And I think Sterling Brown and Masai Ujiri proved it doesn't matter how "luxurious" your lifestyle is.
Last edited by luckyman; 08-27-2020 at 05:24 PM.
The ratings bit is fair. As for the bottom bit, you are neglecting that not everyone does their research, has empathy towards these athletes and views them as more than just entertainment. People aren’t heavily invested in context or their backgrounds. They only see the rich athlete part.
Do some of these professional athletes...the ones with multimillion dollar endorsement deals with clothing manufacturers who utilize overseas sweatshops (often involving child laborers working in abhorrent working conditions)....ever look for other social causes to lend their names to? Just asking.
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