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linguoboy wrote:Police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against leftwing protesters than rightwing protesters, according to new data from US Crisis Monitor, a joint project of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Bridging Divides Initiative.
That's how insidious white supremacy is. When Black people protest in order to have their most fundamental civil rights respected, the police meet them with violence, escalating the conflict until they can call it a "riot", for which they lay all the blame on the protestors. Then uncritical supporters of state violence use this as justification to dismiss their concerns as invalid.
Then when White people attempt a coup against a lawfully-elected government, they are allowed to basically walk right in to the seat of national legislature (after doing their reconnaissance the day before with the aid of willing dupes or actual traitors) and then--and this is what I simply can't get over--walk right out again, even once reinforcements had been called, as if it were a Sunday outing. And when anyone to the right of Mitt Romney talks about just how alarming this is, those same uncritical supporters are like, "But BLM!" It's the absolute height of whataboutism and false equivalence.
You say you see the difference, but you don't. You're ignoring just about every detail which differentiates these incidents--most notably how they became violent--and then congratulating yourself on the clarity of your moral vision. But you don't even see the blinders you have on, or how you came to wear them.
Yasna wrote:if cops are behaving inappropriately
Yasna wrote:What are you on about? Look at the Pacific Northwest, where much of the police use of force occurred. The ACLED database indicates Portland had 83 "non-peaceful" protests last year and Seattle had 28. Have you seen the racial makeup of the far left in the Pacific Northwest? You know, the ones who made a sport out of antagonizing and assaulting cops. They are mostly white.
Yasna wrote:Let's look deeper into those statistics. 933 of the 1,101 violent incidents from May 24 to August 29 last summer involved BLM. A stunning 85%. Not to dismiss the real problem of the right-wing bent of the police as an institution, but do you think that statistic might have something to do with why the police show less leniency towards left-wing protesters?
Yasna wrote:And by the way, if cops are behaving inappropriately, the appropriate response isn't to assault officers and damage property. You document what you can, and take your case to the courts and/or media as you see fit.
Yasna wrote:Your understanding of how BLM protests turned violent appears to be vastly oversimplistic. You can't just wildly extrapolate based off a couple incidents where police were mostly to blame.
Yasna wrote:Oh, and it's a myth that the Trump mob was "allowed to basically walk right in" to the Capitol. Failed security preparation and response? Yes. Allowed to just walk in? No.
schnaz wrote:I feel obliged to respectfully point out that while we citizens of the United Stares debate about which side is the bigger asshole we are permitting "our" government to commit atrocities across the entire world as well as at home. Karma is indeed a bitch.
schnaz wrote:Did Iraqi lives matter?
linguoboy wrote:Yes...? White supremacy also pits white people against white people.
I feel like you didn't actually read the report because most of it is devoted to explaining why you see this correlation and how it's not tied to the behaviour exhibited by the protesters.
Have you ever been at a demonstration that turned violent?
[...]
Not even the media can successfully "take their case to the media".
I'm not. I'm basing it on empirical studies about the use of force by police and its consequences. Not just in the USA in 2020--we have all kinds of data now from protests worldwide going back over twenty years. The excessive militarised response we saw at various BLM protests is not much different to what we saw at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010. Hell, the pattern of police attacking peaceful protesters and then blaming them for the violence goes back all the way to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.
And they absolutely were allowed to walk back out again, which is a security failure of equal if not greater magnitude and something I couldn't have conceived of seeing happen after a violent invasion of a government building anywhere in this country, let alone a Federal building in Washington, DC. They'd summoned hundreds of reinforcements at that point so they can't claim they didn't have enough personnel.
A second unspeakable truth: “Structural racism” isn’t an explanation, it’s an empty category
The invocation of “structural racism” in political argument is both a bluff and a bludgeon. It is a bluff in the sense that it offers an “explanation” that is not an explanation at all and, in effect, dares the listener to come back. So, for example, if someone says, “There are too many blacks in prison in the US and that’s due to structural racism,” what you’re being dared to say is, “No. Blacks are so many among criminals, and that’s why there are so many in prison. It’s their fault, not the system’s fault.” And it is a bludgeon in the sense that use of the phrase is mainly a rhetorical move. Users don’t even pretend to offer evidence-based arguments beyond citing the fact of the racial disparity itself. The “structural racism” argument seldom goes into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes that are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called “structural racism,” abetted by an environment of “white privilege,” furthered by an ideology of “white supremacy” that purportedly characterizes our society. It explains everything. Confronted with any racial disparity, the cause is, “structural racism.”
History, I would argue, is rather more complicated than such “just so” stories would suggest. These racial disparities have multiple interwoven and interacting causes, from culture to politics to economics, to historical accident to environmental influence and, yes, also to the nefarious doings of particular actors who may or may not be “racists,” as well as systems of law and policy that disadvantage some groups without having been so intended. I want to know what they are talking about when they say “structural racism.” In effect, use of the term expresses a disposition. It calls me to solidarity. It asks for my fealty, for my affirmation of a system of belief. It’s a very mischievous way of talking, especially in a university, although I can certainly understand why it might work well on Twitter.
[...]
On the unspeakable infantilization of “black fragility”
I would add that there is an assumption of “black fragility,” or at least of black lack of resilience lurking behind these anti-racism arguments. Blacks are being treated like infants whom one dares not to touch. One dares not say the wrong word in front of us; to ask any question that might offend us; to demand anything from us, for fear that we will be so adversely impacted by that. The presumption is that black people cannot be disagreed with, criticized, called to account, or asked for anything[...]
When you take agency away from people, you remove the possibility of holding them to account and the capacity to maintain judgment and standards so that you can evaluate what they do. If a youngster who happens to be black has no choice about whether or not to join a gang, pick up a gun, and become a criminal, since society has failed him by not providing adequate housing, healthcare, income support, job opportunities, etc., then it becomes impossible to effectively discriminate between the black youngsters who do and do not pick up guns and become members of a gang in those conditions, and to maintain within African American society a judgment of our fellows’ behavior, and to affirm expectations of right-living. Since, don’t you know, we are all the victims of anti-black racism. The end result of all of this is that we are leveled down morally by a presumed lack of control over our lives and lack of accountability for what we do.
What is more, there is a deep irony in first declaring white America to be systemically racist, but then mounting a campaign to demand that whites recognize their own racism and deliver blacks from its consequences. I want to say to such advocates: “If, indeed, you are right that your oppressors are racists, why would you expect them to respond to your moral appeal? You are, in effect, putting yourself on the mercy of the court, while simultaneously decrying that the court is unrelentingly biased.” The logic of such advocacy escapes me.
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