It has the stink of racism about it, but it’s still wrong no matter who the couple was. So racism doesn’t have to be the focus of the discussion. If an argument is hinged upon racism it tends to become the only factor considered, and racists won’t even attempt to engage in any rational discussion. So as much as I find racism disgusting and downright stupid it may be more productive to bring forth the underlying failures of morality and rights as they apply to everyone.
Anyway, that’s the theory I’m attempting to work from for a while to see what happens. It may be futile, but I’m trying to give it a shot. I just failed myself in my first post in this thread.
I think there may be more widespread disagreement about what, exactly, “justice” means in a given situation. Legality tends to be more firmly and objectively defined.
But let’s imagine a person who prizes justice over legality.
In this thread, why wouldn’t such a person continue to valorize justice? Why would he (or she) suddenly switch to support of the law?
Most of the discussion from the “pro-rights side” has invoked both philosophical arguments and legal ones. And that’s mainly because philosophical and legal ones have been invoked from the other side.
If you’re asking why people haven’t completely eschewed talking about the law in favor of “valorizing” justice, well, that’s a no brainer. Because most of us understand that the law serves an important purpose and has value. But we also understand that it has its limitations when it comes to making determinations about morality and ethics. This sensitivity is what allows us to identify a law that is bad and requires fixing.
But I think this principle has been honored more in the breech than in the observance. Discussing how to fix a law that’s bad is a laudable approach – but arguing (even implicitly) that the law should be ignored, or the “fixed” law applied retroactively to reach prior bad-but-not-criminal conduct – is not so laudable.
Speaking solely for myself, there’s a difference in what I prioritize when I’m talking about what the law SHOULD be vs when I’m talking about how the law should be applied to a real life situation.
In the infinite voter ID thread, I’m not arguing “I don’t care what the law is, everyone should just ignore it and do what they want”. There are extreme situations where that is appropriate (civil disobedience in the 60’s, for instance), but in general part of living in a civilized society is respecting the law, even when you disagree with it. Rather, I’m claiming that I’m more interested in whether the law is ethical and right than in fiddly details about exactly how it should be applied.
So in the current situation, the discussion about whether a temporary detention after a Terry stop was legal in this particular situation is interesting, and it’s very important that laws be fairly and precisely applied regardless of the race (or level of celebrity) of the parties involved. However, it’s also something I’m not hugely passionate about. If the law worked slightly differently, the way you initially thought it did, and the way CNN’s legal analysts described it – so that the officer’s detention of the woman was in fact legal – that wouldn’t strike me as an unjust intrusion of jack-booted-tyranny, yada yada yada.
How does this story play into that trend? Clearly the white person and the black person were treated differently based on their own personal choices, and the decision by police to overstep their authority, but I’m not seeing how the police treated either person differently based upon race.
To play devil’s advocate, I could turn this around and say “It’s reasonable to approach this story as part of a trend in which the police are often treated differently by black people and white people.” The police officer, in response to the act of showing up at the scene of a complaint, gets a tongue lashing from one person and “here’s my ID” from the other.
Oh come on… those shorts the actress was wearing are too long and too tight around her legs. She would’ve either had to have pulled them all the way down, ass out, or taken them off completely.
To do that in broad daylight, outside of her place of work? I don’t see that, even if she does seem a little on the spacey side.
It’s nearly impossible to prove that any individual instance is driven by bias – we have to look at the statistics (and listen to the stories of those affected) to see that black people and white people are often treated differently by police due to their race. When we find out that the police acted improperly/unlawfully, as they did here by detaining Watts, then while we criticize that detainment we can also bring up that improper action by police towards a black person is distressingly common.
I don’t think this is reasonable – authority figures like police can and should be judged differently than civilians. They should be commended for choosing to enter a difficult and sometimes dangerous career, and they should be scrutinized to avoid continuing such unfortunate trends as systemic discrimination.