@njsue, very well said
@newHSmom (apologies to @prezbucky as I meant the first part of this reply to respond to her posting the college stats)
Since this post is originally about BLM and not affirmative action, let’s talk about the reality:
A well-dressed, middle-aged man stands outside of his upscale hotel looking at his iPhone as he waits for his uber. Suddenly out of nowhere someone jumps him, throws him on the ground, and twists his shoulder and arm in a painful position while demanding that the person resist what is almost an impossible natural reflex to struggle against severe pain and not move a muscle in reaction to the severe pain being caused. Fortunately, he was a former professional athlete in good shape and could stand the pain and hold his body completely and utterly still so as not to get himself shot and killed for not obeying the order not to move a muscle against the twisting pain that the officer was causing. He lived.
A professional woman is driving in the left lane of a two lane road when a police car suddenly zooms up behind her. Thinking she is in his way she immediately pulls into the right lane of the road so he can get by to wherever he seems to be in a hurry to go. Instead, the policeman immediately pulls her over. She is shocked and asks what she did wrong and is told she is being cited for “failure to signal” when she changed lanes to let him go by! Being a little annoyed, she tries to explain what happened but the policeman continues to be rude, which leads to her being rude and arguing back, which leads to him asking her to get out the car. She keeps asking him what she has done wrong, but he treats her as if she is a wanted criminal and as soon as she gets out he twists her arm back while telling her not to move a muscle against the pain. Not being a professional athlete, she writhes and screams in agony against the pain which allows the policeman to cause even more pain as he forces her not to move again. She is “resisting arrest”, so she is sent to jail where she mysteriously seems to get easy access to the means to commit suicide.
A young man visiting his dad’s apartment decides to go out one evening to buy some skittles. On his way home, he is talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone when he tells her there is a big scary guy who seems to be stalking him and he runs AWAY. The scary guy chases him and obviously catches up to him. The teenager is on a dark path, being chased by a strange big guy who turns out to have a gun. The teenager tries to protect himself from the big scary stranger with a gun chasing him by throwing a punch at him. Now if it had been a white man minding his own business suddenly being chased down a dark path by a very large man with a gun, everyone would understand why he might throw a punch to defend himself once the man with the gun caught up to him. They would not say “why would anyone throw a punch at a man with a gun chasing them down a dark lane? Obviously the man with the gun who chased him was right to shoot him dead.” They would not say “the big guy with the gun who chased this white man has told us that the man running away from him suddenly decided out of the blue to double back and “attack” him for absolutely no reason, so he deserved to be shot dead”. They would find that statement that a white man running away from a stranger with a gun chasing him would suddenly decide it was time to turn around and punch him for no reason to be completely absurd.
That is the reality. It’s not whether a college is justified in accepting a rich white kid with mediocre grades and mediocre test scores because his daddy made a big donation while dozens or hundreds of more qualified white students are turned down. It’s not whether that same college also admitted an African-American valedictorian with mediocre test scores. It’s not whether some white students decide they don’t mind if a less qualified overprivileged white kid gets their spot, but no African-American valedictorian with lower test scores better take it.
It’s about the fact that when unarmed Black citizens are killed for no good reason except not reacting in some “proper” way that is a standard that can be near impossible to meet, there are people who always say the fault is entirely with the victim.
It has nothing to do with making excuses for “personal failures”. It’s about those who make excuses for mistakes that lead to unarmed Black citizens being treated inappropriately and sometimes dying.
^^^^1,000 LIKES ^^^^
Others on this board will vociferously disagree, but this phenomenon is what is driving the recent growth in white supremacists organizations among other things. The Federalist had a good piece about this subject earlier.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/23/how-anti-white-rhetoric-is-fueling-white-nationalism/
Identifying with our “whiteness” is something that is organic – it does not take much effort, it comes naturally. What is being asked of us is to have some self awareness of the advantages that our “whiteness” has bestowed upon us – advantages that have historically given us more opportunity than others might have had in our society. The power structures in place have secured those advantages despite efforts to even the playing field through affirmative action and equal opportunity laws. That’s just our history why not acknowledge it?
I don’t understand why this acknowledgement is perceived by some as a “very bad idea.” I do not buy into the premise in the article linked in #152 that it will “breed resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.” That resentment will only breed in people (of all races) who are predisposed to seeing themselves as victims or looking to place blame on everything but themselves for their lot in life. Those people will exist in all societies – and they will be of every color. If you are competent and truly willing to compete in the marketplace for whatever it is you want, the color of your competitors skin is irrelevant.
I have no issue with acknowledging the advantages I have historically had by virtue of my “whiteness.” Nor do I have any issue with a system that opens the playing field and welcomes engagement with people who otherwise might not have had as much opportunity to participate. What are we afraid of?
The stats I posted is relevant to the comment about “systemic racism”, is that simple
Do police have race based quota for crimes traffic violations like it is in education? if they do, that is systemic racism, on the bad side. If they don’t, sorry, I only see the advantages side for minorities.
I have written this before, but people are powerfully wired to believe anecdotal information. This can lead to incorrect conclusions.
Our distant ancestors, when they saw a friend being eaten by lions, didn’t commission a statistical study on the dangers of lions. Instead they told everyone to run whenever they saw lions, and those that followed this advice had a better chance of living long enough to reproduce. Until a few hundred years ago, most people in the world lived in rural areas and got their important information directly spoken to them by family and friends. In a very real way, we have been naturally selected to give importance to anecdotes.
What humans are not wired to do is properly analyze anecdotes from a country of 300M+ people, where modern technology means that a newsworthy incident, anywhere in the country, will be seen by much of the population within 24 hours. Compounding the problem is that people automatically tend to assume that news is representative, when in fact what is newsworthy is subject to both fads and business needs. Once a topic becomes newsworthy, you will see many other stories about it, because it gathers ratings (and therefore $) until the fad ends. Note that none of this implies any bias or ulterior motive by the news organizations.
If we look back at the Michael Brown shooting, the prevailing narrative was “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, which then led to the riots. It didn’t matter that the narrative was later found to be false; the riots were newsworthy, and any incident which fit this pattern of unarmed blacks being shot by police was immediately newsworthy. And in a country of 300M+ people, you will always find incidents that fit whatever newsworthy pattern you seek. It is a self-reinforcing cycle. And yes, some of them will absolutely be heart-wrenching and true stories of innocent unarmed black people being shot by police.
But I ask you one thing. Where were all the videos of other races being shot by police? We have **data/b that people of other races were shot by police more often than blacks were. If the news was representative, you would expect to see a greater proportion of non-blacks being shot by police than blacks being shot by police. Anybody see that? And if you had, would you have drawn a different conclusion?
@doschicos Thank you for sharing. Sums it up rather nicely.
“We have data (as opposed to anecdotes) that people of other races were shot by police more often than blacks were.”
Saying “people of other races were shot by police more often” tells you nothing about the circumstances of why they were shot, whether it was a lethal raining of multiple bullets, and the reaction after it. If there have been lots of white people minding their own business who suddenly are involved in an interaction that leads to them being hurt or dead, and the immediate reaction is to blame the white person for some action that he took that made him entirely responsible for his own death, then perhaps you can cite some of them.
You don’t see BLM protesting every shooting of every African-American person shot by the police. The protests are about the interactions with people committing no crimes who somehow end up dead. And then events twisted so that the person is entirely responsible for his or her own death because of something he or she should have done differently. I have no doubt that this may happen with people of all races - but is the immediate response with other races to talk about how “scary” the person looked? Is the immediate response an attempt to say it is all the fault of the person for not doing whatever he was supposed to be doing to convince someone else he was not dangerous?
Even though I quoted that part, my focus is not on the blame (I believe non-threatening unarmed people are blameless by default). Instead I am pointing out that BLM’s focus on blacks being shot disproportionately doesn’t stand up to analysis, and therefore the whole movement can be discredited by people unwilling to see that racism is real.
If that is truly the scope of BLM, it may be protesting an almost non-existent problem. If you go by the WaPo database, there have been 15 unarmed or armed only with a toy gun, not fleeing the scene, not mentally ill people killed by police this year. Of those 15, 4 were black. One of those four, one was killed by a stun gun, which are almost never fatal, in otherwise healthy individuals. There are approximately 42 million black alone people in the US. If you included mixed race, you would get even higher numbers. Extrapolating to the end of the year, the expected odds might be 1 in 8 million.
So what happened to moderators keeping these threads out of politics? Seems ya all have jumped the shark!
Are you saying the media is intentionally ignoring these supposedly far more widespread stories of unarmed (but scary looking) white people minding their own business who are shot and killed by police officers instead of just publicly blaming them for their own deaths as they do when the victim is African-American?
The woman in Minneapolis who was shot comes to mind.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Yeah. While I’ve deleted some posts, this thread has really devolved into a debate and will take too much time to clean up. Closing.