I think guidedbywire’s post is spot on and explains the interpretation problem well. When the BLM movement was mostly protest of police behavior, I was comfortable with the slogan. But when it turned ugly and people starting screaming profanities and threats, such as calling for the death of cops, and when stores were looted that weren’t even owned by white people, my response to the slogan changed. Not that I think it would be fair or right for any one white store owner to stand proxy for racists everywhere and have his store destroyed, but I did feel saddened that some poor shopkeeper of Asian heritage should suffer for America’s past. Apparently, HIS life and livelihood did not matter. So yes, a small group of people can discredit a movement pretty quickly.
Can another group that is part of the BLM movement, such as the ones that protected the stores from looting in Ferguson, “re-credit” a group or is it “one bad apple” and over?
Thankyou, MOST middle aged white Americans do NOT have that attitude. Unfortunately, some (and in certain areas perhaps even many) but certainly not most. Please don’t paint all of us the same way.
Classical mama: I agree, although having had many, many political arguments in my life there seem to be people that are just unwilling to listen to actual evidence or science that it makes no sense to continue to discuss an issue. The basic belief system is just different. That doesn’t mean there can’t be common ground, but not on some of these issues. Not talking about someone speaking in a derogatory way directly to another person, which of course all should be willing to stand up to, but comments on an article or discussions about social issues in general.
I haven’t seen it mentioned yet but Vanderbilt and Georgetown have had some protests and changes this week as well:
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/11/16/3722436/georgetown-buildings-renamed/
Thanks @guidedbywire for #1371
While this very much simplifies the discussion, of course, it is more complex than this.
While there are some whites who understand that the BLM movement was based on the implied “as much as any other lives”, even though they have not historically or in some cases recently been treated as such. There are also some whites who attempt to divert attention from this reality to minimize the movement - after all, racism does not die easily.
But there are also some Blacks who feel that the implied message is “more than other lives”, hence, they are reluctant to accept whites who want to participate in the BLM movement.
I remain hopeful for Yale, and other schools, as I doubt the situation there is nearly as tense as the news reports have made it - after all, the news reports are trying to sell controversy. That’s what sells papers, gets viewers, gets clicks, etc. Similarly, all the re-links from the Dartmouth Review drive traffic, and that is what they are concerned with if they can make a buck out of it.
The students are - most of the time - smarter than we give them credit for.
“You can speak for yourself, but not for everyone else. The facts are that a huge amount of money and effort has gone into the black community, particularly since the Civil Rights Era. The disintegration of the black family was first documented long ago, yet it continues to fall apart. The message “Black Lives Matter” is best used on the black community, because that’s where it needs to be heeded first.”
^^Aren’t we all only speaking for ourselves? That the black community is responsible for its problems ignores history and the complexity of social problems. It’s such an odd thing to say in 2015. Why do we blame blacks for social ills that plague the black community? Do we blame the rural/suburban white community, struggling with heroin and meth addiction of late, for their problems, and likewise, do we say whites are responsible for cleaning up their drug problem? The answer is no. After years of advocating tough penalties for druggies (when the scourge was limited to black urban areas), when it reaches the white community, we question whether penalties for drug addicts are too harsh. The New York Times recently reported on this issue in an article titled “In Heroin Crisis, White Families seek Gentler War on Drugs.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/heroin-war-on-drugs-parents.html
If we continue to ignore that social problems belong to all of us, we can’t fix them. If we only advocate for help on issues that directly touch our families/communities but blame others for their problems when it doesn’t touch us, we are hypocrites.
I hope you are not saying that police brutality is a made up issue that affects only black communities that are overzealous about protecting their precious snowflakes from the law. Here’s a story about Deven Guilford, a 17-year-old who was shot at a routine traffic stop earlier this year. He could have been anyone’s son. It just so happens that in this case of police brutality, the victim was white. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/teen-flashed-brights-dead-family-lawsuit_5620005ce4b028dd7ea73d53. Police misconduct victimizes black youth far more frequently, but it’s a widespread problem we should all be concerned about.
The good apples of the BLM movement will be given credit on the same day that all the good, non-racist policemen and ordinary non-racist white citizens are given credit. “The white man has to…” rhetoric I heard spoken in Mizzou suggests today is not that day.
So all protesters must be on perfect behavior all across the nation before any of their concerns may be considered?
Well good luck with that. Some knucklehead is always going to spout off. That shouldn’t give us a free pass to dismiss the issues that are being raised if they have legitimacy.
I can only go by what I read in your posts. You didn’t understand where the “All Lives Matter” deflection came from, and why it suddenly popped up, and you don’t understand why it would be aggravating for people in the Black Lives Matter movement to deal with people accusing them of not caring about other people when that was not at all what the slogan “Black Lives Matter” means.
And so someone showed you the silliness of the “All Lives Matter” deflection in cartoon form, and you still didn’t get it.
And then when it got explained to you, you went off an a tangent essentially saying the protesters should shut up because their problems are of their own Black Communities’ making, society has done all it can.
I mean, read all your posts in this thread. Am I really misrepresenting your views? Please understand, I’m not calling you a racist, and I’m sure you aren’t one. This is more about being easily manipulated into a reaction against protesters and their issues, something we are all susceptible to. All it takes is a couple of anecdotes and a few social media posts, and comfortable people like you and me suddenly care more about the bogeyman of out of control SJWs than we did about black people getting shot in disproportionate numbers by law enforcement.
It’s not that we want black people to get shot, its not that we don’t care. But we are easily distracted and diverted to resenting those who bring up the hard and uncomfortable issues that we don’t want to deal with so much (and don’t have any easy answers for).
The first time I heard the term “All Lives Matter” was from Martin O’Malley. I did not know he was part of the conservative social media.
Part of the problem is that “Black Lives Matter” is a poorly worded slogan. It makes many non-blacks either think that blacks want special treatment, or they don’t care about anyone who is not black. The tenor of the demonstrators certainly reinforces those views. It was almost like the slogan was intentionally chosen to irritate non-blacks.
Just catching up, so I’m backtracking a little. Key and Peele do a lot of satire directed at the common man, much of it having to do with race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw
For those who don’t like to open links, the above makes fun of AA nonstandard names and/or teachers.
An AA substitute teacher taking roll in a white middle class classroom.
…“Belaquay? Where’s Belaquay?”
“Uh, my name’s Blake.”
“Are you out of your ****** mind? Blake? Do you want to go to war Belaquay? I’m for real, so you better check yourself. D-nice? Is there a D-nice? If one of you says some silly-*** name this whole class is going to feel my wrath!”
“Do you mean Denise?”…
Email just sent from Dean Holloway to Yale parents/guardians with forwarded letter from President Savoy
Hot off the website: http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/17/statement-president-salovey-toward-better-yale
With background links: http://news.yale.edu/inclusiveYale
That video is funny! Re post #1390. Those guys are pretty funny.
Thanks, @Sue22, for the excellent summary. Provided enough info to make it worth watching the clip! Classic!! That actually happened to me in HS. A sub pronounced my name as if it were a male name (that really wasn’t very close to the spelling of my name). So I answered in a very deep voice 
Part of that is due to a long historical undercurrent of the dominant White majority feeling any demands by Black individuals or community groups for equality or even decent treatment most Whites would take for granted tended to be regarded as “demands for special treatment” or in 19th/early-late 20th century parlance from Whites…particularly in the south…“being too uppity”.
One example of Black groups being regarded as “too uppity” or “demanding special treatment” by the dominant White majority historically was the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-'50s when Black individuals like Rosa Parks and Black groups launched around a year-long protest to demand the same rights to sit whereever they want and remain in their seats rather than be relegated to the back of the bus or be driven from their seats in deferential preference for White passengers under the threat of local criminal prosecution.
Some of those very long-standing attitudes are present to this very day as exhibited by some posters on this very thread.
Can we please, try to stay in the 21st century for a change?
Yo, peeps! impatiently curious to know what people think of the Salovey response, in a lot of ways the culminating document of this thread’s starting point…I’ll post the link again since we’re now on a new page and people might miss it: http://news.yale.edu/inclusiveYale
Yes. Why, it is almost as though someone could seize upon that ambiguity, create a non-existent “All Lives Matter” movement as a counter point, and rile up white people into thinking that blacks are demanding special treatment, thereby discrediting their legitimate concerns.
Oh wait, that’s Exactly What Did Happen. Exactly.
The tenor of the demonstrators in large part reflects the frustration they feel at how easily and effectively that deflection was done. Who can say they are against All Lives Mattering? No one, of course. Not even Martin O’Malley. Why are those black people upset about it? They must not care about anyone who isn’t black. They couldn’t possibly be upset about how their motivations were so easily disparaged and their concerns cast aside as mere social justice warrioring.
(please note, the last part was intended to be sarcastic)
The problem with the arguments about BLM or any variant is that it only works and I mean ONLY WORKS when it is directly focused on the issue of police interactions. That’s it.
That of course is not what is happening. The garbage at Dartmouth - meaning the actions not the people, of course - isn’t about that but about some utterly useless mouthing off about white people and the power structure, etc. We never seem to learn that talking about a specific issue works - whether a facet in race relations or women’s rights or some religious rights or anything else - and that it only fails and, even worse, alienates people when it becomes about broader issues and feelings. MLK knew this: he specifically fought for the rights that black Americans were already supposed to have under the Constitution and he saw those specific steps - as did the others in the larger Movement - as leading toward a better world for black Americans (and thus all Americans). I remember the arguments well - and frankly the movie The Butler does a great job of portraying them - as many people turned toward variants of doing more, from outright violence to forms of Black Power, etc. In fact, the word “black” only became popular then, something I consider an awful mistake because it was chosen to be in opposition to “white”, a word that is equally non-descriptive of actual human appearance and which easily devolves issues stupidly into “white versus black” when they actually aren’t. BTW, I distinguish earlier separatism/violence as involving less mainstream movements (like the Nation of Islam) though one can argue with my distinctions of course.
As a Jewish person, I know what it is like to be angry. Did any of you Christians have to look at pictures of your relatives who were murdered? I have photos of beautiful young girls and every single one was murdered. I vividly remember talking to a young German in the 1970’s - same age almost as me - and as he complained about how the US was responsible for all the evil in the world (because of the Cold War) I couldn’t help myself and asked why exactly Germany was allowed to exist at all, since they were directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. I told him, you want to know what WWIII would look like: just like WWII except faster. Ever have people next to you start talking about those “dirty Jews”? Or worse, when they know you and they say, “we don’t mean you” and there’s nothing to do except ignore it because otherwise you’re alone. One of my friends was at his girlfriend’s house and could hear her relatives say “you going to let your daughter marry that f*****g Jew?” Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, you name it, every group has tons of axes to grind, tons of reasons to be extremely angry. Black Americans have more reasons than pretty much any group - no one rational would dispute that - but expressing anger isn’t a way to get anything changed for the good.
I have a terrific example. In the 1970’s, because of anger from the black community, schools were often handed over to “local control”. It was a disaster. One can point at a lot of reasons: the power structure lost interest in local schools as they lost political control - meaning a “white” failure - and the black leaders in control were unrelentingly awful and very often more corrupt than the old power structure. One of the best summations of this came from black candidates to run the schools in Detroit in the 90’s: there is a difference between black representation and effective black representation. For many years, the people who took control were the worst possible representatives. I don’t even have to talk about the Marion Berry’s of this world. A much better result would have occurred, IMHO, if the existing power structure worked more closely with the local community to deliver schools that worked. That was not possible because of the anger directed at the existing white power structure.
People have a need to express anger. But anger in general does not create good things.