If you look at the website The Conservative Treehouse, they have a lot of posts concerning the Waco Biker gang shooting - mostly all of them (and the comments) seek to place blame at an overzealous police force using unnecessary and even unconstitutional violence in the incident.
The same website has dozens of posts concerning the recent Texas Pool Party, the shooting of Freddie Gray and those posts take on a different tenor. In those posts, victims are denigrated and the police are vilified - even in cases where actions of the police have already been deemed incorrect by the police department that employed them or the district attorney who has pressed charges.
As I wrote when a Tea Party/Libertarian-type friend of mine on Facebook linked to a similarly-themed story about the Waco shooting, “I wish you would be so upset when cops killed unarmed black teenagers.”
That’s when it hit me: It’s as simple as race and stereotypes, isn’t it?
The police confiscating hundreds of weapons from mostly white biker gangs? Unconstitutional. The police hassling open carry advocates? Unconstitutional. The police shooting a black man holding one gun in a wal-Mart or a kid with a fake gun? They were asking for it.
In a related issue that is less black and white (pun intended), the militarization of local police forces has many detractors but mostly and most vocally from the left. Why isn’t it that the right - who often point to the second amendment as something that allows them to fight against tyranny from the state - as vocal? Heck, when Obama decided to limit the sale of some military weapons to local police, some conservatives decided that wasa horrible idea.
Obama did something and some on the right instinctively have a problem with it? I wonder why…
Seriously, if it’s not biases brought about through stereotypes on race, then what else explains these discrepancies with how Americans look at the actions of the police?
Some people project their own feelings on to other people. If they’re walking down the street and a couple of white teenagers walk past them, they don’t feel worried. If a couple of black teenagers walk past them, they tense up and get nervous.
Put like that, the obvious reason why this hypothetical person reacted differently to the two pairs of teenagers is their different races. But in real life, people will subconsciously rationalize their responses; if black teenagers made you nervous, it must have been something they were doing. You’ll believe that your nervousness was a response to them acting suspicious.
White Americans are not united around the biker incident, blaming the cops. If you want to prove that, you need to do more than link to some random web site.
Now, I have no doubt that if white folks were treated the same way blacks are routinely treated, there would be a shitstorm of white protest, and something would probably get done. But that’s a hypothetical that I would be hard pressed to prove, and I sure wouldn’t use the Waco biker incident to do so.
Simply put, people see only what they want to see. People would rather see themselves as victims and underdogs rather than perpetrators and oppressors.
This goes for both sides, by the way. I don’t want to see myself as a perpetrator or oppressor either. But I like to think that I’d be able to see the truth of a video recording. When people are willing to protest for weeks because the government won’t let a rich guy steal from the taxpayer, but stay silent when a 12-year-old boy gets gunned down by the police because some busybody thought he was scary, then we should all weep at the insanity of the system. The Right talks a good game about values and morals and the sanctity of life and liberty. But it’s all empty rhetoric.
Further to what I posted, above, if it was poor white people being treated badly by the cops, I’m not so sure there would be a general shitstorm from the middle and upper class. I’m thinking the types of folks you see on those Cops shows-- wife beater T-shirts, tattoos, missing teeth, etc. Like monstro said, if you don’t identify with the victim, you are less likely be feel sympathetically towards them. Afterall, the cops treat you just fine, and you feel safe. Maybe you even feel safer knowing the cops are going after the riff-raff.
You can’t deny that race enters into it. If Cliven Bundy was a black kid taking a cigar from a store, the righties would be cheering if he got gunned down by police. But because he was white and packed heat along with his sycophants, he’s a cult hero among the righties for stealing millions from the government.
Sure, there are net incentives to bias toward an in-group. That’s why we need to give credit and credence to those who step outside that paradigm instead of washing them away under the solipsistic “both sides” catch phrase.
The right loves to talk about using the 2nd Amendment as a way to prevent government tyranny. In practical terms, this means shooting American cops and American soldiers.
And yet, when cops do act brutally toward American citizens, these same people invariably take the side of the police. If black Americans started talking about using the 2nd Amendment to protect themselves against government tyranny (i.e. gunning down brutal cops) they wouldn’t find any allies on the right.
No, I don’t agree that’s it. I believe this is an example of argument post hoc, ergo propter hoc, where you claim that because one event followed another, the first is the cause of the second.
BECAUSE he was white, and BECAUSE he packed heat, that caused him to be a cult hero among the right-wing, you argue.
But that ignores the difference between Bundy’s actions and the actions of a cigar thief. Bundy is not stealing personal property from a store. He’s asserting that the federal government doesn’t even exist, and therefore has no right to demand that he pay grazing fees. It’s much more likely that it’s that stance which has earned him whatever cult hero status he has.
I think a very large part of the problem is the political divisiveness we’re seeing in the US right now. I suspect that many on the Right are seeing the pool party and Trayvon Martin as a “liberal cause”, and are putting themselves on the opposite side- because liberals are always wrong, donchaknow. And they’ve got the entirety of Fox news telling them that they’re right when they choose that side.
Gotta admit I’d never heard of “The Conservative Treehouse”. The “About Us” section of the website is a bit flimsy on details, leading one to wonder if the entire enterprise is a dimwit living out in the woods with a generator and decent Wi-Fi.
In general, pointing at random loonies and saying “See what those Other People are like?” doesn’t resonate with me. I haven’t seen polling, but I suspect that most folks, white/black/other are opposed to biker gangs (which have minority members, and at least one of which involved in the TX incident has substantial Hispanic membership) staging shootouts at shopping malls.