In general, yes. But I think some public jobs kind of require (if one is to do them right) that one adopt the broadest, most inclusive perspective of identity.
Yes.
All people have multiple levels of identity. You are being disingenuous in pretending otherwise.
Must they also deny specific aspects of their identity at all times?
Because frankly doing so only serves them well if they’re in every way a member of the dominant culture. We straight white males are the default setting in American life, and so we can pretend that we don’t have an identity along any of these axes, because the default culture already supports us along all three. Demanding that people never acknowledge specific aspects of their identity perpetuates the current unjust situation.
White Christian Americans are the only kind of Americans who are not burdened by the expectation that they represent their group. When a white Christian American commits s bad act, other white Christian Americans are not expected to explain or apologize or denounce or suffer from generalizations. When white Christian Americans commit atrocities, the shadow of suspicion is not cast upon other white Christian Americans.
When someone says “real” or “ordinary” or “average” American, white Christian American all know that they are being included.
So stuff your sanctimonious word-parsing in a sock and sit back and enjoy the endless benefit of the doubt you enjoy.
Whenever I hear of an atrocity being committed, my first thought? “my god, I hope the perp’s not black.”
Specifically because I know that I will be expected to answer for his crimes, specifically because I share his skin color.
If a WCA commits an atrocity? “That’s an isolated incident.”
Fuck yes. My first thought is similar — " I sure ducking hope it’s a white guy because if it isn’t, I’m fucked again."
High on my concerns during some of our most tragic experiences—
When Oklahoma City happened — “I’m so fucking glad it was white guys.”
When 9/11 happened —“Fuck me, it was brown people.” And you can be ducking sure that people like me felt consequences, like the Sikh gas station owner who was murdered because ignorant fucking yokels didn’t know the difference between Arabs and Indians or Muslims and Sikhs.
When Hurricane Katrina happened — “Fuck, at least it wasn’t brown guys’ fault.” — Of course, a bunch of black folks got shot at anyway.
When the Boston Marathon bombing happened — folks are going to go around looking funny at brown people again— even though the Tsarnaev brothers are fucking lily white fucking Europeans, but they have Arab-sounding names and white people don’t fucking care to work out the differences.
When white guys are afraid for their lives to go out in public after Sandy Hook because they expect to be blamed for what another white guy did, then you can get preachy about how we use phrases like “my people.”
What are we trying to show? That Ferguson has some racist a-holes? I think that’s been proven at least enough to prosecute and I hope that they are.
If we’re trying to show that Ferguson’s arrest record is directly attributed to force-wide racism then I’m not sure we’ve done that. We have a conjecture: “racism”* led to “unfair arrest record for blacks” (from here on I will abbreviate it to just “arrest record”). When we have a correlation like this we expect that if we change the causation variable (“racism”) then the result would change (“arrest record”). But that doesn’t happen in the Gannett data; if one assumes that Ferguson, SF, and Atlanta have different levels of “racism” it doesn’t seem to affect the “arrest record” that we’d expect.
Maybe those cities are equally racist (or at least the police are). I find that hard to believe but it’s certainly possible. So what else we can do? If we had a city with a good “arrest record” we might be able to see if it correlates with their “racism”.
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- I’ve put these words in quotes to indicate that I’m taking about values of racism, sort of like variables in an equation.
You might be right but I don’t believe those stats prove it. Just like I don’t think the arrest rate of males (compared to females) proves that cops are sexist.
Here’s why I’m debating this: let’s say we decide that all police forces across the nation are racist. What then? We probably spend a lot of time, money, and effort to fix it (if possible). If, however, the problem is NOT the cops then we just wasted a lot of time fixing the wrong problem and we still have the tragedy of high incarceration rates for black males.
That’s why I’d like to know if there’s an example of a police force that made a special effort to solve racism in their ranks (however that might be) and what were the results. Did it work? If not then maybe we should focus on something else.
They’ll admit white people are racist if they call them bad names. Listening to right wing radio, they concede the frat boys singing about hanging niggers is racist…just as racist as black rappers. The ride never ends.
You’re saying if there is no example of a police force trying to reduce or solve racism that we shouldn’t focus on it?
I think it’s fairly well studied and shown that, at least for drug arrests, the USA as a whole applies both policing and court sentencing in a racist way whether or not it is intentional.
Here is a 2009 article from the Stanford Law Review that includes a lot of statistics and some links to studies. It will still be argued, probably even by you, but I see so much evidence that points in one direction while many people argue small details to justify arguments against racism. The nitpicking at trivial details is never convincing to me given the numerous statistics and vast discrepancies in the way the law is applied. As the article states:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states
Why would you assume this? It is not the position of any liberal I know that the Ferguson police department is significantly more racist than the police departments of San Francisco and Atlanta. The general liberal feeling is that police are racist.
Before I respond I’d like to make clear that I’m not arguing against racism in general. The differences in outcomes between black and white Americans (especially black males) is so staggering that any cause (IMO) must include racism, even if only latent. My chiefest concern is: what’s the best way to combat it?
What I’m trying to say (probably poorly) is that before we decide that it’s the cops that are the problem we should try it on a small scale and see if the conclusion holds. I’m not sure it will.
I agree with you, in a way. Black males are arrested, tried, and convicted, even by black juries, at a higher rate than any other demographic. That seems to indicate that it’s not just the cops that are the problem. If we blame the cops are we leaving something else out?
If we don’t assume this then we should probably come to the conclusion that all the liberal policies of SF are completely worthless when it comes to combating racism and the arrest record of black males.
And why discount the possibility that the police department does not follow the liberal policies supported by the majority of people in San Francisco?
And what about the possibility that actual liberal people are less likely to seek careers in the police department, but that racist people are more likely to seek such careers, regardless of whether they live in San Francisco or elsewhere?
These assumptions you’re making seem to completely disregard that fact that two of the most “liberal” cities in the country—New York and Los Angeles—are places where liberal residents complaint the most about police.
I’m not a regular here, I just happened to come across this thread from a Google search. I have, however, just read the entire report, and I think there seem to be some things that people are missing…
- The DOJ report is quite damning about the poor recordkeeping of the Ferguson Police Department and the Municipal Court. There are many examples of this, including them being unable to obtain full use-of-force records, because in many cases they simply were not kept, or never reviewed. The DOJ reported finding a number of cases where a officer claimed workers compensation for a injury due to a use-of-force incident, and was approved, but there was no use-of-force report and the incident report did not describe a use of force.
- The DOJ report is quite damning about the poor level of oversight of officers, including direct statements in emails that city employees would attempt to dissuade citizens from filing complaints, a case where a complaint of unlawful detention was dismissed even though it was noted ‘it would be valid’ because the complainant did not return a phone call, cases where officer incident reports were not reviewed by supervisors for months, and months-long gaps in the use-of-force reports.
- The DOJ report also notes that the Ferguson Police Department has continued to employ officers who had provably lied in official statements.
Despite this, the DOJ report, in nearly all of the problems described, has based their statistics and conclusions purely on the records and statements of the FPD and the Municipal Court. If anything, this would imply that the ‘real’ situation is worse… people rarely lie or fail to keep records that would make them look good. There are also direct quotations of statements by officers in which they describe their ‘regular procedures’ that directly violate the Constitution, such as the statement by a officer that if the passenger in a vehicle refuses to provide identification when demanded, regardless of any probable cause, he will consider that to be ‘furtive and aggressive’ conduct, and either cite or ‘typically’ arrest them for “Failure to Comply”.
The report makes a compelling case that the Ferguson Police Department has been compromised by a City-driven focus on generating revenue from writing citations, that the Department has for years ‘graded’ officers on the volume of citations and arrests rather than on their compliance with the law, and that the Department has failed to train officers properly in methods of de-escalating situations rather than resorting to violence. The focus on citation and arrests has in fact apparently encouraged officers to act in a manner that escalates situations, so that they degrade to a level where an arrest or citation can be justified.
People should not nitpick specific quotes unless they have bothered to read the report, or at least the summary. It does not read at all as if it was biased toward finding negative conclusions… it’s actually quite clear that it was based on the FPD’s own incomplete records, and that if anything the ‘real’ situation is worse.
It is specifically noted in the report that only some emails were obtainable, as the officers themselves use a webmail system that does not retain messages after they are deleted. Also, that only six emails were cited in the report does not mean that those were the only examples found, only that they only cited those six specific examples.
The actual report itself notes that there are similar disturbing statistics for the rest of St. Louis County, and indeed the rest of the state of Missouri, but that they were outside the scope of their investigation.
Again, if you read the actual report, a specific point of (repeated) discussion is the statistical ‘level of significance’, and that the quoted disparities grossly exceed what would be considered possible due to random variation in the sampling.
That’s just the so-called “experts” at “statistics” employed by the DOJ. We have our own.