I see you edited your post from claiming that all police are racist. That is a racist comment to make. And if you dont think a white police officer would abuse a white subject then that would be wrong to.
I didn’t say “all police are racist.” I said “they are all racist,” meaning “all people.” We live in a racist society. We are born, grow up, and die bathed in racism. Everyone is racist. No one can claim that they are not racist. No one can claim that their actions, decisions, statements are uncontaminated by racism.
OK, I can agree with that.
[quote=“madsircool, post:101, topic:855365, full:true”]And if you dont think a white police officer would abuse a white subject then that would be wrong to.
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Yeah, it’s not worth discussing this with you. I’m done.
Lol. As if it never hapens.
It is? What race is being denigrated?
How sure are we that a centralized police force would be better?
What happens when we have one centralized national police force, and Bill Barr gets appointed Chief of Police?
I care about whether someone is a racist, and as I’ve said, making a false assumption about it only causes harm. But thanks so much for joining the long line of Dopers who imply something about what I think, with no evidence to back it up.
Of course it does, and I never said anything different.
I will ask myself whatever I please, in helping me to understand an issue. So, again, when someone (hell, every single person I’ve ever heard on MSNBC, for starters) assumes right from the start that the George Floyd killing was racist, with no evidence to back it up, it only exacerbates the problem. More people get pissed off, the arguments get more heated, and bad things happen as a result. It is of utmost importance when something like this happens, that we stick to the facts.
If you define “racist” as any time a person of one “race” gravely harms another, then fine, it was racist. If you define it as a person of one race looking down upon another simply because of the color of the other persons skin, there has been no evidence that I have seen that this was a racist act. Do you have any? Or maybe why not give me your definition of “racism”, so I know where you are coming from? As for your attempts to get into the mind of someone whom you’ve never met, well, quite frankly, I’d be embarrassed to say such a thing. Because I am no mind reader.
I lived in D.C. when it was the murder capital of the U.S. Parts of the city was bathed in murder. Does that make me a murderer? You can stretch the definition of “racism” all you want, but it seems to me that if you stretch it so much such that there can be no distinction between if one is a racist or not, the word loses all meaning. This is a problem. If any act can be defined as racist, based on whatever criteria one can dream up, then we will never have a reasoned discussion about the issue.
It’s not an abstract thing - there are a lot of ways our society is racist that are measurable.
For example, there is a disparity between black and white people getting pulled over by the cops - but this disparity is less at night when it’s tougher for a cop to see the driver’s race.
No, of course it’s not abstract, which is kinda what I was getting at in response to Acsenray. I don’t know what his non-abstract, definitive definition of “racism” is. And yes, undoubtedly, racism exists. We need to define it clearly and discuss what can be done about racist incidents by the police, instead of just assuming racism from the very start.
Racism is much, much more than a conscious, intentional will to be racist. That’s the point. Taking advantage of structural racism, perpetuating structural racism, and all manner of unintentional, unconscious racists acts make up the bulk of the racism problem today, and are the hardest to combat, especially when people keep focusing on the question of whether someone was intending to be racist. That’s the wrong place to focus. Very few people consider themselves racist and harbor explicitly racist motives. We need to look beyond them to actually tackle racism. All the people who think they’re not racist are the bigger problem.
If we take the question of racism out of these incidents does that make it any better? I don’t think so…“Well, we certainly have a problem with policing but at least they’re not racists!” That doesn’t seem any better to me, so I don’t see the harm in examining the role of racism in these events.
There are two overlapping problems we have to deal with here. One is that the police have too much authority with little or no real accountability. And the other is that certain communities are bearing more than their share of the horrible outcomes. And you can’t really separate the two in any meaningful way.
We can no longer look at these “controversial encounters” with the police one at a time. Whether or not racism was involved in any one of these situations is not relevant. Racism is involved in the overall problem and needs to be addressed for there to be a satisfactory solution.
I agree with what you said, except this, to the extent of what I’ve said previously. Of course racism is relevant when it applies to a specific incident. If that is one of the causes in such, we need to know it as a way to figure out what to do about it. But when an assumption is made right from the start that racism was involved, when there is no evidence, other than the phony evidence that the police was white and the victim was black, this causes harm when it turns out racism wasn’t involved. It takes away from what should be examined in such cases, and allows those investigating it to just blame racism, and ignore the actual causes.
You said everyone is racist, and I disagreed. I asked you to define what racism is to you. I still don’t know what that is, so I can’t attempt to refute your contention. I will say though that I do not accept your implicit charge against me. I am not a racist. As for the rest of what you wrote, we can certainly agree that we need to do everything possible to stamp out racism where it does exist. This of course goes without saying.