That’s why I sound like a broken record (do millennials get that idiom?) saying stop the arbitrary playing of the national anthem at sporting events.
Ah, sorry, @PrimeMeridian – that makes sense to me.
On edit: But now that I think about it, that doesn’t really help us in the here and now, where it’s very common to play the anthem at sports events. Given that is the case, I’d argue that standing for it or sitting during it are both forms of political expression, and institutions trying to enforce either behavior are way out of bounds.
The armed services paid the NFL to have the players come out on the field and play the national anthem. Before this the players stayed in the locker room while the anthem was played.
“That’s why I sound like a broken record (do millennials get that idiom?)”
Well, vinyl is very hot these days. 
Note that your experience relates to the often-ignored point about Fryer’s study that police use of force other than shooting was more common with black subjects than white subjects (for similar conditions of the encounter). Since non-shooting use of force is far more common than shooting, it results in negative personal experience with police for a far greater number of people than shootings do, probably doing far more to create a high level of mistrust of police among black people than the shooting incidents do. Of course, it is even worse if police create more encounters with black people (the “driving while black” thing), or racist people who call the police call the police on “suspicious” (to them) black people more often. However, since the shooting incidents become news, they reveal the pent up anger at the situation.
A great use of tax dollars, I’m sure. Oof.
Regarding existing views on police, a newly released survey result shows that black people are much less likely than white people to have confidence in their local police overall and in aspects of their job like protecting people from crime, using the appropriate amount of force, treating racial and ethnic groups equally, and holding officers accountable when misconduct occurs. Not really a surprise, but the racial gap is quite large.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confidence-gap-in-police-performance/
“The larger question is whether it’s appropriate for students & teachers (employees) to be touting their political causes during official school events.”
Teachers may be less so, because teachers have to maintain at least the illusion that they are neutral towards their students, a teacher for example kneeling during the national anthem might give the impression to kids who see that as an affront to the country, flag, etc that he/she would be biased towards them. On the other hand, we teach in history class that the US was founded on the right to protest, even protests that are unpopular with a lot of people and might get them angry, what kind of lesson are we giving the kids when we proudly trumpet the right to protest and free speech then don’t allow them to express their protest, especially at a sports match (what the hell is sacred about a football game or a basketball game)…I don’t care if there are people there who find that offensive, I don’t care if some veterans think it is disrespectful to them or what they did (my dad would cheer them on), that isn’t the point, unless there is some reason, other than the “kneeling during the anthem is spitting on the Good old U S of A, God bless America” Crowd getting upset. Forcing kids to stand to ‘show respect’ to me is a milder cousing of the jackboot techniques used to make citizens in various totalitarian regimes ‘show respect’, my wife grew up in one of those. There is an old expression that holds here, if we want to teach kids the meaning of patriotism and love of country, the old 'do as I say, not as I do" doesn’t work, if we prattle on about the freedoms in this country then basically spit in the face of them by suppressing disssent as in this case, it tells the real truth, you have the right to freedom of protest as long as it doesn’t offend the wrong people.
As far as the arguments about what the protest is about, while it is off topic, I think it is important. The assumption this is totally about cops killing black people without cause is wrong, that is simply the tip of the iceberg IMO (and I am speaking as someone who hasn’t faced these kinds of issues, but have seen them happen to friends, heard about them from friends who aren’t white, law abiding, successful people). It isn’t just about killing, it is about getting pulled over on a bogus traffic stop (driving while black, especially when driving an expensive car and/or being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood, ask Skip Gates about that, trying to get into his own house and having a cop abuse him verbally, without even trying to find out if that was his house, assuming a black guy trying to get into the house must be a burglar and treating him as such). It is the cop who pulls over a young black driver (friend of mine) driving a BMW (his dad is a well known surgeon), then when he needed to justify pulling the kid over, smashed the tailight and wrote him a ticket for having it. It is my friend’s father walking into a high end clothing store, and having employees and security following him, assuming he was shoplifting. What they are protesting are automatic assumptions about blacks, that there is something inherent about them being black that makes them dangerous or up to no good, and that is what they are protesting.
It isn’t entirely racism in the sense most people assume, it isn’t just white cops vs blacks, black kids have been harassed and beaten up by hispanic and yep, black cops (for many cops, that is their group, Joseph Wambaugh in one of his books wrote about this racist beat cop, who one day realized his partner was black and was shook, because he liked the guy, especially that his partner hated as much as he did). A lot of what you see happening is fear, the guy pulls over a black person driving a car and is automatically assuming the worst, not being cautious, but afraid. Guy in the car goes to pull out his wallet, if he was white the cop would assume that, if black, must be a gun. Amadou Diallo ended up dead because a group of cops panicked, they were not in danger, they were protected by a cops car, someone freaked out when Dialo reached for his wallet, yelled “he’s got a gun”, and they opened fire, fired 47 shots by the time it was over.
This goes on all the time. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Astrophysicist, talked about being at a convention, and there was a small sub group of minority physicists who got together. a member of this little group recounted how he got pulled over driving to the hotel where the convention was, and of the 7 or 8 people in the room at the time, something like 5 of them had recently been harassed the same way.
The racism is not the overt, bull connnor racism, it is in the assumption automatically that if someone is black, they are a threat. I often hear the citings on crime statistics (which are very true, about the numbers of violent crimes, etc, etc), but the irony is much of that crime is against blacks, not against whites, so who would have more reason to be wary of blacks, white people, who are not the primary victims of crime committed by blacks, or whites? Yet whites will cite those numbers to justify the unequal treatment blacks often receive, in effect saying “they deserve it”. That is no different than 150 years ago when employers had signs up that said “no Irish need apply”, because of course everyone knew that the Irish spent all their time drinking and were lazy and such and they could cite the ills among the (mostly poor) Irish immigrants of the time, violent behavior, drinking, crime, the same way, I doubt many reading that would think it was nothing more than discrimination. Cops especially are a problem with all this, they are supposed to be trained professionals protecting the community and when they let fear muddle their judgement, when they decide the people they are protecting are not worth it, you get what you see, fear and mistrust of the cops…and often it isn’t about white cops versus black citizens, it is all cops against black citizens.
The problem is not only racism among police officers, even though that is a significant problem (as evidenced by greater use of non-lethal force with respect to black subjects than white subjects). Remember that police respond to calls from citizens who report suspicious things that they see. If the people who call the police are racist and call the police on “suspicious” (to them) people because they are black, then, even if the police themselves are not racist, they may end up having more encounters with black people as potential suspects due to calls made by those who consider black people to be “suspicious”.
@musicprnt as usual you summed it up, perfectly. You are also right, Black cops are guilty as well. I wish the good cops would speak up, but then they are harassed and tormented.
@ucbalumnus You are also right, but even when a racist person calls, the police dont have to treat us like crap once we they get there. The spotlight tends to focus on black men, but trust me, we as women get profiled too.
I remember we decided to get my manager a Brooks Brothers gift card, and since I lived closest to the mall, I told the team I would pick it up. When I got to the register, I wrote a check, and the salesperson insisted that my check wasnt approved. I know it was bogus as I had plenty of money in my checking account. He insisted I come back with cash, and was shocked when I presented him with my Amex. Its things like that, getting followed in the store, ALWAYS being asked for an apartment number(that drives me crazy), that feeling of dread when a cop is driving behind you.
“Regarding existing views on police, a newly released survey result shows that black people are much less likely than white people to have confidence in their local police overall and in aspects of their job like protecting people from crime, using the appropriate amount of force, treating racial and ethnic groups equally, and holding officers accountable when misconduct occurs. Not really a surprise, but the racial gap is quite large.”
This has always been the case. I grew up in a middle class back neighborhood during the 70’s and we learned quickly to avoid the police at all cost. They only came to neighborhood to arrest people and they were feared. Contrast this with one of my white friends I went to college with him. Police were treated as friends. The came to the neighborhood and let the kids sit in the cars and turn on the sirens. They played with the kids and in the event a kid did something wrong they simply gave them a ride home and gave the parents a warning. He was shocked that my experience was totally different than his. I learned long ago that it is hard to understand another persons plight because you are not looking at the world thru their eyes. You only see it thru your own.
@ucbalumnus :
You are correct about racist neighbors calling, I am pretty sure with Skip Gates that a neighbor called saying a black guy was breaking into a house. However, that doesn’t absolve the cops, while they have a duty to check out when someone calls (for example, a black kid walking down the street, some old biddy staring out her window decides he must be a mugger, drug dealer or rapist and calls the cops), but they also are supposed to check it out honestly, not treat the person automatically like they are a criminal, with black folk it is often guilty until proven innocent, which often involves being treated like a hardened perp, thrown to the ground, talked to like a piece of street trash and the like.
I’ll give you an idea. They analyzed the stop and frisk in NYC, and of like 800,000 such stops, I think there were like 10,000 or 15,000 arrests. More importantly, though, most of the arrests were for stupid things, like possesion of pot in small quantities and similar minor offenses. The last thing I read also did some analysis, and many of those arrests normally get someone a bench ticket, specifically if they were white, while with the blacks picked up like this they went through the whole shebang. When I read stuff like this it bothers me, because what it shows is the cops out there don’t have a clue what is going on in their area, they have people there who don’t know the people, the territory and the like, because for example an old fashioned beat cop knew who the trouble makers were, knew who to roust and where and when, rather than simply grabbing huge groups of black and hispanic kids and hoping to find something. One of the more common things is often when people in those communities call for the cops for help, the responding cops often treat them more like criminals than victims, and this applies even to middle class folks. I don’t know how many times in NYC there have been cases where the cop find some young black kid, end up beating the crap out of him, claiming he matched the description of a suspect in a rape or a murder (always nice to pull that one out of their butt), and then we find out later the description of the rapist was a black guy in his 30’s who was 5’ 8, and the kid they beat up was in his 20’s, 6’3…and before someone accuses me of being anti cop, I am not, I also know what cops go through, especially those who work in areas that are economically depressed and where there are a lot of problems, my first sympathy is with them. However, that doesn’t extent to the thin blue line concept, I respect good cops (and there are plenty of them, who do good work and don’t get accused of harassment or worse, have never used their weapon, yet have done great work), but I despise stupid cops and dumb police work.
Not saying that it absolves the police, which it does not. However, even if the police were perfect in behavior and perfectly non-racist, it must be annoying to be a frequent target of racist people calling to police on you as a “suspicious” person (and, in real life, each encounter is another chance for you or the officer to make some kind of mistake that could lead to a bad result).
Yes, a lot of police departments have problems with racism (and other issues) that they need to fix. But even if they did fix those problems, the problem goes far beyond the police departments. According to http://reason.com/poll/2014/10/14/poll-70-of-americans-oppose-racial-profi , 25% of people approve of racial profiling by police, so if they themselves practice racial profiling when calling the police about “suspicious” persons, that means that even the best police departments will get “used” in a racist manner.
Man, [some people really are oversensitive](Betboo Bahis Sitesi - Giriş ve Kayıt Bilgileri).
Their constitutional right to protest isn’t at issue. It’s the where & when.
Should students be allowed to spontaneous chant pro-gun ownership slogans in the middle of an algebra lecture?
Students and teachers are welcome to tout their political agendas on their own time.
@PrimeMeridian :
You are comparing apples and oranges. The reason in classrooms they don’t allow, for example, political t shirts or teachers and students protesting in the classroom or in school is because it is disruptive to the learning experience there. However, courts have upheld the right of students to protest for example on school grounds outside the context of classrooms, students protesting, for example, administrative decisions the school made, and during the vietnam era student protests (talking high school here, not college) were found to be a first amendment issue as long as it was not done during class time or inside the school itself, the grounds were okay.
I’ll also add that we do allow politics in the classroom, the pledge is ultimately a political statement and it is why students have the right not to stand for it or say it (you don’t need to belong to a religious group like the Jehovah Witnesses to refuse to say it).
A football game while it is under the auspices of the school is not a classroom, it is not about learning, it is a sporting event that happens on school property, and under pior court citings that is a lot harder a place to clamp down on political expression. Not to mention how far do we go at the football game, do we in certain quarters of the country clamp down on playing music over the PA system,. like “God Bless the good ole USA” or when the Iraq war was at its peak school bands playing patriotic music or playing music supporting the war over the PA system, the rah rah red white and blue gonna kick butt songs? Do we tell people attending the games wearing American flag t shirts or wearing political t shirts to turn them around? And the real question is what would the reason be for limiting political speech at a football game, claiming it ‘isn’t appropriate’ isn’t enough, what is the justification?
What courts have held about the first amendment is even in schools, there has to be a purpose to limiting those freedoms, it isn’t “politics doesn’t belong in school”, for both teachers and students it has to be justified that doing so maintains an orderly learning environment, and for teachers, it is about presenting the image of being neutral to the students, it is the very reason that teachers are supposed to be very, very careful when talking about their religious beliefs in the classroom, not just because of potential proslytizing, but because those views could make that classroom unfriendly towards kids of other beliefs or backgrounds. A more neutral position would be to forbid at any school event any political statement, but that would likely raise questions people don’t want raised, like playing 'God bless america" at a school football game (yes, viriginia, they do such things even today) or patriotic songs, or even something like the pledge or anthem (I realize, @PrimeMeridian ,that your position is more along these lines, for example playing the anthem at football games or doing the pledge there or in school, I respect your position because that is consistent, it isn’t the “no political speech unless it is mine”, usually pro america, rah rah crap IME). A total ban on politics would work, but it would need to be applied unilaterally, you cannot have a pledge of allegiance or allow patriotic songs by the marching band or displays of “support our troops” or blaring songs meant to drum up support for a war are banned, if we stop the pledge and the national anthem at school events, then yes, it would be legal…