My definition of woke

In My Humble Opinion
181

I am not sure that is a good way. A lot of important things happen that don’t make it into media. Additionally, the question was not ‘when did the social justice movement become popular?’ it was “When did this Social Justice movement start?”

Once again, do you have cite for that?

Say what now? I will agree with the second part. OTTOMH There was a case a few years back of a man yelling, behaving in a threatening manner and weilding a chair at 30th street station. After trying nothing to calm him or defuse the situation, a cop fatally shot the man. He was, again, armed only with a chair.

I see somebody else has already asked for a cite on that.

I would have to go back and read the post (since you didn’t quote the relevant portion or provide a link), but I believe I stated that most teens in the area were in fact engaged in underage drinking. This was not ‘I see teens. Let us go an hassle them’.

182

There’s an incident in the Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread #2 thread where an armed, melanin deficient, man was taken into custody one sunny afternoon without a single shot fired . . . well, that’s not counting all the shots he fired at the police all that morning of course.

And, of course, noticing how often armed White folks are taken into custody without violence and how often unarmed Black folks are taken to the morgue with dozens of bullets in them is just me being ‘woke’.

183

The other reason I wonder if you looked at my cite (besides what I said above) is that you say “the media” gives a misleading impression, but the cite did not utilize data from “the media” – the researchers compared data from the US National Vital Statistics System to that of three non-governmental open source databases, all of which have their data collection protocols described on their respective websites. If you want to argue bias in my cite, you should argue based on the data in the cite, and not on “the media.”

184

Those sure do appear to be cherry picked as those are the same two that often show up in crap put out by police-fellating groups like the Manhattan Institute. Want to share how you happened across those two particular links without being exposed to the massive number of studies that show the opposite to be true?

The first study was picked apart for flawed methodology and the journal issued a correction in which the authors acknowledged flaws in the study but stood by their central argument. They have since stated that they are retracting the article completely. Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media – Retraction Watch

The second one states in the summary:

Using population, police-citizen interactions, or total arrests as a benchmark, we observe that black citizens appear more likely than white citizens to be fatally shot by police officers in both years

They apparently go on to explain why population data is not the correct benchmark, but since the text is hiding behind a paywall, I’m not going to do your work for you.

I will also note that two of the three authors of your second link were also part of a study with the following summary:

We analyzed 990 police fatal shootings using data compiled by The Washington Post
in 2015. After first providing a basic descriptive analysis of these shootings, we then
examined the data for evidence of implicit bias by using multivariate regression models
that predict two indicators of threat perception failure: (1) whether the civilian was not
attacking the officer(s) or other civilians just before being fatally shot and (2) whether
the civilian was unarmed when fatally shot. The results indicated civilians from “other”
minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking
the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely
as White civilians to have been unarmed.

They also state:

We implore the U.S. government to move forward with its publication of a national
police use-of-force database, including as much information about the officers involved as possible. We further suggest police departments use training programs and community
activities to minimize implicit bias among their officers.

Now, how about some other links:

Link 1

Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a new study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Link 2

The rate of fatal police shootings in the United States shows large differences based on ethnicity. Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and November 2024 stood at 6.2 per million of the population per year, while for white Americans, the rate stood at 2.4 fatal police shootings per million of the population per year.

Link 3

Black people continue to be disproportionately impacted by police violence, the data shows. Black people account for 27 percent of those killed by police in 2021 (of those whose race is known), despite making up 13 percent of the U.S. population.

They are being killed at similar rates to previous years, the data shows, despite a national reckoning sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and other Black people.

Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police, yet 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed compared to white people, according to MPV.

The organization’s data also shows that most police killings began with traffic stops, mental health checks, disturbances, non-violent offenses and instances where no crime was alleged.

If you’ve done any looking at all, you know that I could go all day with such links. I’ll happily provide more if you aren’t able to find additional data on your own.

You want to know why BLM exists? See above.

185

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15614263.2023.2235056

https://online.ucpress.edu/fsr/article-abstract/33/1-2/83/115494/Explaining-the-Recent-Homicide-Spikes-in-U-S

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Carjacking-and-homicide-in-Minneapolis-after-the-of-Lind-Larson/7f14f0a7fb475a3a2e9ab6f24e4489d62298bfe2

186

Let’s quote Du Bois, from Darkwater:
“The discovery of a personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction”

Generally, it’s nowadays considered a late colonialism/post-colonial thing, not quite as time-constrained as Du Bois originally had it, but the principle is the same:

187

Because you said this:

188

Based on the nature of your previous links, I’m not paying to read those articles and the only one not behind a paywall discussed Minneapolis murders, which have an average of around 80ish a year and certainly doesn’t seem to support your claim.

So, do you want to give us the actual source of your claim or just toss around paywalled links all day?

189

Hey, 80 is a good start on 15,000 . . . if ya squint so hard your tears turn into diamonds.

190

This is an interesting method, but I see some problems with it. Which words did you use? If they are “institutional racism”, “intersectionality”, and “white privilege”, then you are begging the question. Remember that what I was questioning was your assumption of a singular Social Justice movement, not whether any particular terms are part of popular discourse.

Do you see that that’s a fundamentally different thing than what you described in your first post? (I agree with what you said here, btw – but it’s not what you said in your first post!)

Going back to the frequency of words in the media, your time frame coincides with the rise of social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter, which was a pretty serious change in “media” as we think of it. And most current social media spaces aren’t very organic places for conversation at the moment – the existence of bots and algorithmically driven exposure is a factor that should be taken into consideration.

Are you sure that what is annoying you is the way “woke” stuff genuinely operates and not just social media algorithms throwing annoying stuff in your face so you’ll interact with it?

I also used to read anti-religious and feminist blogs back in the 2000s, by the way. I miss the time when that was the way people mostly interacted online – I think it worked a lot better!

191

I wonder if the answer has actually changed over time, or is it tailored to fit an audience?

192

I am honestly and sincerely not sure what point you are trying to make here. I objected to the first part

Yes, I heartily agree that police need more and better training. Alternatively we could do the ‘defund the police’ thing and have them just call in people who are trained in mental health to deal with people who might be a danger to others and seem to have mental health problems.

But “. . . the result of heavily armed citizenry. . .”? Say what? Even a white guy who grew up in the suburbs knows your chances of being harrased by the cops for no reason, your chances of being threatened by the cops, and your chance of being shot by the cops all go up just because you are black. Does anybody dispute that?

Yeah occasionally, a case on the news mentions that person shot by the cops was in fact armed. The overwhelming majority of the time, it’s ‘cops decide black man is acting suspiciously and end up shooting him’.

193

Or, they thought he was armed, so they were frightened and had to shoot him, but it turned out the item in his hand was a cell phone.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read that about some innocent man killed by the police. Always a Black man.

194

The solution is rather obvious: Stop carrying wallets, cell phones, notepads, drivers licenses etc. that are in the shape of automatic or semi-automatic rifles.

195

They can’t look like knives, either.

196

Oh, and also, don’t make the mistake if driving while Black. That’s just careless and asking for trouble.

197

Two items from the second cite,

The thesis of this article is that the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a “Minneapolis Effect,” similar to the earlier “Ferguson Effect.” Specifically, law enforcement agencies have been forced to divert resources from normal policing to patrolling demonstrations.

Hey, here’s an idea. Maybe, just maybe, the solution to the diverting resources from normal policing to patrolling demonstrations might be for the police to not shoot unarmed Black people?

And even as the antipolice protests have abated, police officers have scaled back on proactive or officer-initiated law enforcement, such as street stops and other forms of policing designed to prevent firearm crimes.

Exactly why is BLM being blamed for the actions of the police? And why is it that the police can somehow never do what the community is asking them to do?
No one want ‘guns on the streets’ but performing stop and frisks on a thousand Black men to find three guns ain’t the way to do it.

198

Speaking of White privilege,

199

Thanks for info.

I note that “modern” in that sense starts with the nineteenth century, and presumably with the earlier part of it. I don’t think that’s what @DemonTree’s talking about as recent; they appear to mean 21st century.

200

Speaking of which, i know a lot of people who went to those protests. And there were a lot of cases where the police escalated, and tried to provoke the crowd into violence. Sometimes by starting the violence themselves.