I made excuses for them, well all of them except Trayvon. I went off on that, but that wasn’t police. I always looked at it as it has nothing to do with me. I got caught up in the dirty details of the victims lives.
Mind if I ask, are you African American, descendant of slaves or a more recent immigrant from West Africa or the Caribbean?
My brother was some minor muckety muck in the county Republican Party in California. All the Black Republicans he knew were either Nigerian/Jamaican/Cabo Verdan/etc. immigrant or children of immigrants.
Descendant of slaves, but know a little bit of the history of the family back to the the 1890’s. My grandfather was born in 1919 and lived to 1999 so I heard some history of his father.
What should they have done, shot and killed the person?
I think this may be the wrong thread but, no that’s not what I’m saying.
Anyone that got in to the capital building was open to being shot though. They should have never been allowed to get in in the first place. We know LE can deal with crowds like what we saw that day. They mobilized way more force for the BLM protests than the did for this, so we know they can do it.
What we are seeing now is no response, people that would have been killed if they were black are walking away scot free. The US is saying its ok to storm the US capitol, if you are white.
That’s the message and it is being received loud and clear. There is, without question, two systems of justice here.
I never really noticed it until now, and that is my failure.
You did not get that message from the Bundy brood’s stunt a couple of years ago?
I think Kyle Rittenhouse made that pretty clear.
Now, now, @split_p_j just got woke, don’t expect him to have actually been paying attention the world he’s lived in for all that time before!
I’m not woke
(piggybacking on Little_Nemo)
Nope, and I’m not sure the Glasgow Scale even has a number for you.
I never defended him, but yes I thought the protesters were going about things the wrong way. I agreed with the message about the police brutality and thought we could build off that. I thought BLM got hijacked by some, well I guess communists.
I was worng
How about we don’t dogpile the guy? Some people choose not to follow the news.
Heck right now I’m not sure the conviction of Timothy McVeigh would be a slam dunk these days.
No, I’m black. I’m not a hostage in the white world, I made my own way.
As someone who has IIRC argued with you on these issues before, I sympathize. I still feel very embarrassed that even for me, a lifelong self-identified liberal, it wasn’t till the shooting of Philando Castile in 2016 that it actually hit me “wow, black people in the US have serious cause to worry about being arbitrarily SHOT STONE DEAD BY POLICE OFFICERS, to a far greater extent than people like me have ever had to worry about it”.
Duh, right?
While I respect and honor the people who didn’t take as long as I did to get hit upside the head with that clue stick, I don’t think the slower people like you and me should feel personally ashamed about our naïvete. Naïvete among people of good faith and good intentions is a huge part of what systemic racism is meant to create.
Systemic racism is constantly deluging us with the messages “this is normal, this was an isolated incident, the individual victim should have behaved differently, few bad apples”, and so on and so forth. We are always being told, on multiple different levels, that denying the problem means that we’re actually overcoming the problem, putting it behind us, getting closer to the goal of colorblindness. And that recognizing the problem, on the other hand, is actually creating the problem, conjuring up racism where none really existed.
That’s why so many people who’ve internalized the messages get so angry on hearing that systemic racism is still a problem. They think that they’re the ones actually moving forward, and the “woke” people are trying to hold them back.
The opposite of “woke” is not “unconscious”: the opposite of “woke” is “dreaming”.
Thank you for that. I won’t lie, my whole worldview has been broken after the events of last year.
I’m kind of old, but I think I can move on in the new reality.
Don’t give up on this yet. It’s true they weren’t shot down, but it looks like some of them may end up serving time. That they weren’t arrested on the spot may have been a logistical issue (or maybe not) but federal authorities are out there looking for them and making arrests. The percentage of arrests will almost certainly be small, but we can hope some of the most prominent and destructive will suffer for their crimes.
Don’t discount being woke, it just means you’re not asleep any more and your eyes are open. Sounds like you have moved in that direction recently. By the way, 49 isn’t even remotely old.
We have just had someone straight out say on these boards that they were wrong, not just about a matter of detail, but about an entire underlying worldview.
That’s rare enough that I don’t think we should be jumping on the person who did so. Such behavior – both the changing of minds based on further evidence, and the admitting to it – should be encouraged, not discouraged.