no im not trying to kill this thread, so sorry
"This is the best essay I've read on this subject in quite some time. I can't excerpt without doing the piece a disservice, so read it all:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/black-lives-and-the-police/"
unlike the person in the quote, ill will be happy to excerpt it
see the always relevant but especially in this thread:
"The camera has accelerated the decriminalization of the black image in American culture. The black men about to lose their lives in these videos don’t seem like threats or members of a criminal class; and we have been looking at and listening to President Obama every day. The Willie Horton ad isn’t coming back and those who try to use the old racist slanders as political weapons only make themselves into caricatures. The racist is an unattractive figure in American culture, which is why people go to such lengths to achieve racist goals by stealth."
Or so we thought until 2016, and the real opportunity for white supremacists embodied in donald trump's campaign.
it can be understood why some people are easily able to quickly forget history. The source of this 'skill' is actually their privilege, accessed through the historical processes that consisted in the victimization of the people whose problems their perspective minimizes. their privilege is to be situated in some mystical 'now' where racism is, at the minimum, invisible to them. This leads them to assert that racism does not exist. This further allows them to seriously assert that, just as racism isn't a problem now, it really wasn't a real problem
before either. It wasn't actually a problem 'then', where 'then' is whatever time or place is close enough that if they acknowledged racism there it would make them uncomfortable. They take up the historical narrative of innocence by denying all racism in their past and present environment and relegating racism to something that is 'over there'.
Aldaron did this very very accidentally, with his comments that implied that the actuality/history of american police is separable from the reality of racism, when these things are actually existentially bound in material practices and processes that continue to this day and these historical facts are not really up for debate, every legal scholar, or at least judge, knows as such. we will continue to be reminded of the ways in which this situation, the existential bonds between police and racism, persists in new court cases as they emerge. just read them. each new case becomes a new avenue of rhetoric for a lawyer to try to play up in court.
if you just knew how much neo-cons admitted you wouldn't find this all so shocking wrt police. just read crazy things neo-cons have admitted to getting up to
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/09/edward-luttwak-machiavelli-of-maryland (very long, scary, and off topic but just read until you get bored and then search 'bush') i could also link you to absolutely crazy things said by elected israeli neo-cons about their plans for an apartheid regime. crazy shit gets pulled out here.
the reason cops dont ever get convicted is really obvious: precedent. it sounds really basic, there it is: every time a cop doesnt get convicted/charged/investigated it makes it more likely to happen again... habit, momentum <-these are we are dealing with in this situation, if you want to grapple with concepts.
and what about the model of white/male privilege as addiction? white/male people literally go around high on their privilege, thinking all sorts of crazy toxic shit like you would not believe, especially children, trust me i seen it.
so while some are so sure that what im asking for is too sudden, it is actually by people being so obnoxious about these (more than me even) things that gradual replacement would happen anyway. progress is made of tears, sweat, blood, anxiety, insomnia, and anger.
and so as you all can see my pride is still a massive character flaw, but what about other people's flaws, flaws they inherit through uncritical appropriation of historical practices?
i feel like i must be one of the young old people in the new nazi germany, who was abhorred but not too surprised by the rise of a genocidal regime. they accepted their powerlessness in a certain sense.
so while walrein says that cops arent intentionally 'hunting down' black people, i would argue that the intention of the institution of police in america's existence
is to 'hunt down' black people. hence why i made sure to be clear at the beginning that the police don't protect us from crazy people with guns, they are the crazy people with guns. they are out of touch with reality. and even literate libertarians know this to be the case and often worry about the problem of policing with this understanding.
tl;dr if you really love democracy you know that implies a distrust of bureaucracy and a hatred for anything that sticks around too long without being critiqued
more of my thoughts, you know i have so many