White people do get killed by cops, but to suggest because that happens, the situation for black people is āthe sameā is profoundly ignorant.
Thatās what some of the more idiotic memes Iāve seen shared today are suggesting.
In the US, you are eleven times more likely to be shot to death by cops if youāre born black instead of white.
You donāt have to be a genius to suss that out (my working out is below), but you do have to be some kind of moron to complain about protests under those circumstances.
And please note, while I am not calling anyone a racist, I would point out that most racists also tend to be morons.
This is all well and good, and absolutely correct. But i think a lot of people are missing the point as to what made this particular killing the straw that has broken the camelās back and unleashed such a wave of real fury and absolutely righteous anger around the world. It wasnāt just another black guy shot while being arrested in the US, people are used to that, it happens regularly. It was the circumstances of it. An unarmed black man, lying on the ground being slowly choked to death by a white policeman. For nine minutes, pleading for his life, saying he couldnāt breathe. And the cop increasing the pressure on his neck, for nine minutes until he expired. Whilst being filmed. For nine minutes. Looking into and smiling at the camera as he did it. It is what that symbolized, thatās what has opened the floodgates. āLook what i can do any time i likeā.
If it hadnāt been filmed none of us would have been any the wiser, just another death in custody to add to the statistics. A bit of anger from his family, calls for an inquiry then back to normal until the next one. Not this time.
No I donāt think so, I believe it to be more a knee-jerk reaction to not be seen to be ādoing nothingā. Will Sacha Baron-Cohen face the same deletion of content for Ali G, regardless of the fact his act was highlighting unfair treatment of black people? For me context needs to be taken into account rather than sweeping across everything with the same tarry brush.
I would add that Robert Downey Jrās blackface character in Tropic Thunder should be seen in some context, as the film itself brilliantly points out āThey had one good part for a black guy, and they gave it to a white dudeā, a great bit of satire and social commentary.
I donāt dispute the idea that racism exists among the American police, but itās worth pointing out that while black people are grotesquely over-represented in the statistics of police killings, they are also heavily over-represented in reported crime.
That at least partly explains the discrepancy, although obviously it doesnāt justify it.
Yeah, thatās what one of the right wing nutjobs that follows me on Facebook pointed out.
I would point out that the US have a system set up to profit from the incarcerated, akin to a form of modern slavery, and they manage to lock up a disproportionate amount of black folk to feed that system, often with people being on ten-stretches for three strikes.
I would also argue that if youāre eleven times likelier of getting shot to death, your chances of a jury trial to protest your innocence go down quite a bit.
Iām deeply uncomfortable with this position because absent the deeper dive into why, it just enables and emboldens racism.
That wiki piece seems pretty balanced to me, certainly not the ramblings of a right winger. What youāre really saying is what we all know deep down anyway, which is that America is pretty unsavoury on a whole slew of levels, with utterly poisonous politics, and market forces plus the profit motive prevailing in areas we wouldnāt tolerate here, like health and prisons, (I know we have private involvement in both, but in relatively small supplementary roles.) Itās quite valid to point out that black people are killed disproportionately by the police, but they knock off plenty of whites too. Personally, Iād prefer their police refrained from killing anyone irrespective of their skin colour, but in a nation that holds gun ownership at the core of their values and culture thatās always going to be a monumental ask.
