For me, it still goes back to whether I agree with their protest or not.
MLK Jr. was protesting a real injustice. BLM is not. Jim Crow was a real and systemic issue. Cops shooting black kids out of racism isn’t.
ISTM that playing the anthem is perfectly acceptable. So is kneeling in protest. So is firing or fining or otherwise sanctioning the players who kneel. So is boycotting the NFL because you don’t like the anthem being played.
If your employer tells you to stand during the national anthem, and you decline to do so, he is within his rights to fire you. You then need to rely, as MLK Jr. did, on the moral force of your argument/protest to prevail in the court of public opinion. If your argument doesn’t have the moral force to prevail, you aren’t going to be subject to the Victor’s Distinction.
Thanks for the link. AFAICT it is the opinion of one legal scholar at the ABA that, if they fired a player for refusing to stand, the owners may or may not prevail. Maybe Kaepernick’s collusion grievance will clarify.
Notice that to find an issue where you agree with the protesters, you go to an issue that’s been settled, for decades, in favor of the protesters. I can’t guarantee this is the Victor’s Distinction, but it sure conforms to what the Victor’s Distinction would predict you’d say.
50% of black people (and 3% of white people) report via polling that they, personally, have been mistreated by law enforcement. Unless one is inclined to believe that black people are more likely to inaccurately characterize the actions of police officers, then that fact alone should be enough to conclude that BLM is protesting significant injustice in law enforcement practices. And in case anyone wasn’t aware, BLM is about more than just shootings – it’s about mistreatment by law enforcement and the justice system in America in general.
You had to go and spoil it! Here I was, starting my day with the cheerful news from on high, that all this BLM stuff is fake news, and there is no problem! People like you are why we can’t have nice things!
If your employer is telling you to stand for the anthem or be fired, and he’s doing so because government agencies have paid him to do so for advertising purposes, that feels a lot like government-compelled speech.
I’m not convinced that employers should be able to compel their employees to participate in arbitrary political speech. Do you think there are any limits on the kinds of speech that employers can make a requirement of employment?
For what it’s worth, “Stand for the anthem or stay in the locker room” seems to me a reasonable compromise/accommodation. No one has to participate, but if you’re out there in front of the cameras, you’re on our time and here’s how you have to behave.
If a group is disproportionately likely to engage in the kind of street-level crime, and to live in areas where other people are committing street-level crime, and are taught to distrust the police, and have been lied to by political activists hungry for money and attention, then it is understandable that they, or a friend/cousin/son/homie, would report on a survey that the police mistreated them - even if the large majority of such cases would be something that a neutral observer would not class as mistreatment.
BLM started because of police shootings like Michael Brown and things like that. Which kind of undercuts your point - if we examine cases like Michael Brown and Jamar Clarke and Eric Garner and many others, we find that in the vast majority of cases, the shootings were entirely justified. Of the remaining cases, they have little to nothing to do with race, and the police tend to get sanctioned, up to and including termination of job and criminal prosecution (subject to the same standards as every other accused person - “innocent until proven guilty” and all that).
We obviously disagree on the “have been lied to…” part (and disagree about the reasons for the other assertions). Further, I don’t believe there’s any reason to conclude that black people, on average, are any less honest or accurate than “a neutral observer”, on this issue or any other.
We obviously disagree about how to characterize many of these cases (especially about the feasability of asserting with any kind of certainty that “they have little to nothing to do with race” and that police “tend to get sanctioned” when mistreating people of color). And since I see the polling statistic as a reasonably accurate way to evaluate how black people are treated by police (certainly more accurate than the incredibly sparse shooting statistics, and other extremely sparse race-based statistics that police departments usually are unwilling to track or share), then I think it’s very reasonable to suspect that many officers aren’t actually sanctioned in any way for mistreating black people. If, as I suspect, the culture of Bull Connor is still alive and well, if more subtle and less overt, in many American police departments and justice institutions, then the most accurate determiner of this possibility would be the reports of black people, since investigations and statistics conducted and released willingly by these systems would be inherently suspect.
Nice double whammy. Black people are not treated unjustly by the police, but believe that they are because they are lied to by unscrupulous SWJs. And, apparently, are too dumb to see what is directly in front of their faces.
But Shodan knows, better than they know. Guess that settles that, then.
I don’t get the “Further …” part. Shodan gave you several reasons why black people would be, on average, less accurate than a neutral observer. OK, so you simply disagree with those reasons, as you say in your first sentence. But that’s all. You’re not making a separate argument when you say “Further …”.
In brief, black people can assess how they were treated by police, just as white people can. What they don’t have any unique insight into is how white people are treated by police in similar circumstance, or any unique mind-reading ability altogether, which makes their assessments of police bias against them highly subject to the influences Shodan mentions (among other things).
I think it’s reasonable to assume that the cases which get nationwide publicity are the most egregious cases. And if even among those cases there’s such a predominance of cases where the allegations are either outright bogus or at least ambiguous, then it’s reasonable to assume that the cases which don’t get nationwide publicity are probably even more dubious.
We’ve covered that too. Victimization surveys report that blacks commit crimes at roughly the same rates as arrest records.
If you are saying that (for instance) the Michael Brown shooting wasn’t justified, then we have hit a basic disconnect that probably can’t be resolved. Because Michael Brown was not shot in the back, he was ten minutes off a strong-arm robbery, he was spotted walking in the middle of the street with the goods in his hand, and he attacked the police officer, punched him in the face, and tried to grab his gun. All of this is established by credible evidence.
Okay, feel free to read it without the “further”. I disagree with the accuracy of some of the reasons he gave, and for any that may be accurate, I don’t see how they would reasonably affect the honesty or accuracy of black people on this issue.
I don’t follow how your conclusion on this is reasonable at all. How would this result in more reasonable skepticism of the black responses to this polling than the white responses?
I’m not sure about the first sentence (I think media viability in terms of video footage and other media considerations are as influential as the “egregiousness” of the allegations), and I don’t subscribe to the assumptions in the second – I’m far from convinced that there is “such a predominance of cases where the allegations are outright bogus or at least ambiguous”. But we’re getting well into unprovable opinion territory here – I think the Ferguson report, for example, is highly damning and as close as we can reasonably get to proof that a police department has significant racial bias, but not everyone feels the same way.
Suppose the police treat 5% of all people they interact with unpleasantly and/or unfairly, and suppose that this applies equally to blacks and whites. (If you want to reflect reality even better, you need to suppose that another X% of people of all ethnicities will not be mistreated by police but will think they were based on ignorance of police SOP.) It would follow that the more interactions a given person would have with the police, the higher likelihood there is that they will be treated unpleasantly and/or unfairly by the police. A given person - of whatever ethnicity - living in a high crime neighborhood, is likely to have more interactions with the police than that same type of person who lives in a low crime neighborhood. Whether as suspect, victim, bystander, low-level-perp-who-gets-caught-because-of-increased-police-presense, friend or relative of any-of-the-above, whatever. Since blacks have a higher likelihood of living in high-crime areas, they would be more likely to be mistreated (or to think they mistreated) by police based on this fact alone.
And then you get to the assessment of whether it’s racially motivated or not. In many cases you need mind-reading ability to determine what other people are thinking of, and people will frequently make this judgment based on their assessment of how the other guy would have acted were they of a different ethnicity. But since they’re not of a different ethnicity they’re really guessing about that, and a guess can be wrong. Now it happens that there’s a widespread notion - with some basis in reality but greatly exaggerated in the media and progressive circles - of widespread police brutality and antipathy towards minorities, and this will tend to promote the interpretation of police motivation in a given interaction where it’s ambiguous, as it generally will be.
Further, the majority of police are themselves white (along with the majority of the country). This might lend itself to more opportunities for bias against black people, but the point here is that even if when doesn’t, it also lends itself to more opportunities for misinterpreting mistreatment as being motivated by racial antipathy.
In addition, suppose there’s widespread antipathy in the black community towards the police - whether justified or not - which, combined with a cultural tendency or need to act tough, leads some black people to take a hostile and confrontational attitude towards police when interacting with them, this would greatly exaggerate the above. (Chris Rock on: How not to get your ass kicked by the police)
That’s off the top of my head for now. There’s more. (FTR, none of this is about the relative “honesty” of black people, though you keep using that term.)
That’s true. But egregiousness is definitely a part of it as well. In addition, if you just look at the extent to which the documented cases are misrepresented as being far worse than they actually were, you can extrapolate to the accuracy of similar claims made in cases where less documentation is available.
I have no doubt that a hypothetical explanation can be imagined that explains why black people’s accuracy can’t be trusted as much as white people’s. It’s just as easy to come up with one that explains why the accuracy of black people on this would be far more accurate than white people. But without mind-reading, this is all little more than guessing. Maybe people who are more likely to distrust the police are also more likely to antagonize them; or maybe they’re far more likely to be extremely careful around them. Maybe that they’re more likely to interact with police is due to fundamental biases in the system. Maybe cops are just a tiny bit more likely to be nervous around black people, on average, which results in them being less relaxed and more on edge, and therefore more likely to make a choice that escalates rather than de-escalates. Or a million other things. It’s always been incredibly easy to find rhetoric to rationalize apparent/reported mistreatment. I have little doubt that there were very similar disagreements throughout American history – trying to justify or minimize the mistreatment of slaves, or lynchings/beatings during Jim Crow, or the mistreatment of Civil Rights protesters, or more. I think the “Victor’s Distinction” might go a long way towards explaining the widespread acceptance of past protests, but the widespread resistance towards present protests. In my understanding of American history, there was never a widespread protest movement by minorities that wasn’t based on a just cause.