11-19-2019, 10:03 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-19-2019, 10:37 AM by RiverNotch.)
.....it has statistical validity, though. Acting shady does not justify a stop, nor does it justify getting shot. And one of the studies I caught wind of -- I'm not even sure anymore if it's linked above -- show that black people are less likely to be stopped during the night, when they can't be profiled for the color of their skin. I link again:
https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf...The+Appeal&utm_campaign=3a050d7014-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_09_04_14_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72df992d84-3a050d7014-58394763
It's never about the police. Police are entitled to defend their own lives when a crime is being committed; police are also, by a much greater degree, responsible for safeguarding a community, and to not break trust with said community. Police, and in fact everyone, are supposed to react in proportion to the circumstances they encounter. When a teenager holding a toy is shot down on the street, or an autistic man is suffocated to death by a cop, or an off-duty cop shoots a man in his own apartment just because she mistook his apartment for her own, then what? This is why I would not necessarily say that black lives being lost is in and of itself the racist issue -- more that black lives (and latino lives, although that particular category confounds color) are profiled as criminals more often than others, which in turn puts more of them in the crosshairs of a generally all-too-violent police force.
Western culture has *always* plead for punishing individuals for the sins of their forefathers, or it hasn't -- there is a certain multiplicity to it. But, aside from God's curses in the Pentateuch reaching down to one's sons and the sons of one's sons, there is also the matter that ancient "sins" have always been used by the West when justifying their own vices, such as greed -- only recently has the norm of black people being, say, the sons of Ham been dispelled.
I do not, and I trust a lot of the people who protest injustice, call for group responsibility only for a certain group. When a systematic injustice begins to befall white people in a community for the color of their skin, then the white people there are free to fight for their own rights. In fact, I have no stake in this, other than sympathy and a pursuit of truth. One can only fight for so much.
But there is no real implication of group guilt here that does not indict *everyone*. Black people are as much responsible for their own fates as white people, and so on. What is being indicted here is a system, propagated consciously or subconsciously by both races, that, in effect, renders black lives more worthless than white, simply as a holdover of the past -- not that an entire race is itself *currently* responsible for the horrors of today, but *everyone* reckons for the sins of the past. Not that any one race must be punished, but that all must work to combat an injustice held over from the past -- otherwise one encounters the real absurdity of encouraging white people be themselves enslaved, or, conversely, the harmful satire of "Blue Lives Matter", when, in this context, there is no such thing as blue lives, and it is spoken as a response to the very real lives of *black* people.
An I do agree with rowens, to a point. No lives matter, as every life matters, and we are all responsible for our own fates. *We* are all responsible for *our* own fates: it is not a matter of just ourselves being responsible for our own personal fates, or groups being responsible over groups, it is both, and an interdependence that is dauntingly infinite in scope. That is the measure of justice. That is what Les Miserables teaches us, and what makes Shylock's comeuppance in The Merchant of Venice feel so wrong, even if it was the hypocrisy of a potential murderer confounded.
https://5harad.com/papers/100M-stops.pdf...The+Appeal&utm_campaign=3a050d7014-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_09_04_14_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72df992d84-3a050d7014-58394763
It's never about the police. Police are entitled to defend their own lives when a crime is being committed; police are also, by a much greater degree, responsible for safeguarding a community, and to not break trust with said community. Police, and in fact everyone, are supposed to react in proportion to the circumstances they encounter. When a teenager holding a toy is shot down on the street, or an autistic man is suffocated to death by a cop, or an off-duty cop shoots a man in his own apartment just because she mistook his apartment for her own, then what? This is why I would not necessarily say that black lives being lost is in and of itself the racist issue -- more that black lives (and latino lives, although that particular category confounds color) are profiled as criminals more often than others, which in turn puts more of them in the crosshairs of a generally all-too-violent police force.
Western culture has *always* plead for punishing individuals for the sins of their forefathers, or it hasn't -- there is a certain multiplicity to it. But, aside from God's curses in the Pentateuch reaching down to one's sons and the sons of one's sons, there is also the matter that ancient "sins" have always been used by the West when justifying their own vices, such as greed -- only recently has the norm of black people being, say, the sons of Ham been dispelled.
I do not, and I trust a lot of the people who protest injustice, call for group responsibility only for a certain group. When a systematic injustice begins to befall white people in a community for the color of their skin, then the white people there are free to fight for their own rights. In fact, I have no stake in this, other than sympathy and a pursuit of truth. One can only fight for so much.
But there is no real implication of group guilt here that does not indict *everyone*. Black people are as much responsible for their own fates as white people, and so on. What is being indicted here is a system, propagated consciously or subconsciously by both races, that, in effect, renders black lives more worthless than white, simply as a holdover of the past -- not that an entire race is itself *currently* responsible for the horrors of today, but *everyone* reckons for the sins of the past. Not that any one race must be punished, but that all must work to combat an injustice held over from the past -- otherwise one encounters the real absurdity of encouraging white people be themselves enslaved, or, conversely, the harmful satire of "Blue Lives Matter", when, in this context, there is no such thing as blue lives, and it is spoken as a response to the very real lives of *black* people.
An I do agree with rowens, to a point. No lives matter, as every life matters, and we are all responsible for our own fates. *We* are all responsible for *our* own fates: it is not a matter of just ourselves being responsible for our own personal fates, or groups being responsible over groups, it is both, and an interdependence that is dauntingly infinite in scope. That is the measure of justice. That is what Les Miserables teaches us, and what makes Shylock's comeuppance in The Merchant of Venice feel so wrong, even if it was the hypocrisy of a potential murderer confounded.