All people, regardless of their privilege or lack of same, should support the idea of the rule of law. Because if we allow the rule of law to be degraded in its application towards other people, it will be weaker on the day we want it to be there for our own protection.
Are you incapable of expressing opinions of your own? Do you have opinions of your own? Why do you repeatedly open threads about what you say others think?
I’m a straight old white man, from a rural background and who worked in law enforcement.
But I think Donald Trump is a butthead and BLM is an important cause.
:sigh:
Yes
White suburbanites are the most important people in the country.
The suburbs and urban areas have had racial tension for decades.
Suburban white people will decide the election. BLM is popular in the cities, but so-so in the suburbs.
Suburban women will decide the election. Sorry, dude, you’re just some other ethnic group now. Suck it up.
-Suburban White Guy
Yeah but
Yes, because people aren’t born racist; racism was literally invented as a way to justify race-based slavery and capitalism in the Americas. This might sound outrageous, revisionist history, but it’s a pretty well documented fact.
Sure, there’s been slavery before, and slavery often involved selling members of conquered tribes or nations. Some of those slaves looked ethnically different, but many did not; they were just taken as war prisoners. In fact, IIRC, the word “slave” comes from the word “slav,” referring to people in the Eastern Roman Empire.
But post-Renaissance slavery ran into the Enlightenment and the individual rights movements, which thought of human slavery as highly unethical. That led to the dehumanization of certain peoples.
The reason it matters to you and other Whites is that capitalism’s abuses are suffered by whites, as well as non-whites. But when the wealthy get cornered, they typically look for ways to divide the underclasses, and racism is a way to do that. Race-based slavery gave poor whites a job: controlling black slaves. They could at least be better than someone. But they were very limited and often poor relative to the wealthy land owners.
During the 19th Century, both industrialists in the North and even land owners in the South used race to divide unionization movements, making deals with white laborers provided that they do something about their little ‘black problem’. It’s just a way to keep poor whites poor, and everyone else even poorer.
Mmmm, okay…
I’m sure many of them would like to think so.
Some of them, however, know better.
And no, they’re not going to decide the election all on their own with no help from anybody else.
And yes, of course people should give a shit about others.
– For one, it’s a moral issue. Not only for Christians, of course; but most of the people you’re talking about are Christians. So let me try putting it in those terms: what’s that bit in the sayings of Jesus about ‘what you did even to the least of these, you did also to me’? Ah, there it is, it’s Matthew 25. Reads to me very much like ‘if you don’t try to help people who are in trouble, including strangers, you’re going to hell.’ Why? Because turning your back on other humans is turning your back on God.
– For two: it’s in your self interest, because if injustice is allowed, the people who are benefiting from the injustice at the moment are likely to be on the wrong end of the stick later on. Nobody’s safe unless everybody’s safe.
– For three: it’s in your own self interest, because the person who got poisoned with lead as a child and/or told they were useless and stupid and not worth educating is a lot more likely to wind up sick with something contagious that you wind up catching, or to whack you over the head in order to steal your money.
– For four: it’s in your own self interest, because the society that writes people off also writes off all of their potential talents. How do we know that the person who would have found the cure for that illness that runs in your family, or the way to long-term adapt your seed to avoid those crop failures you’re getting, isn’t one of those kids who got poisoned with lead or shot by a cop for no good reason, which is why we don’t have that cure or that knowledge?
And for five: if you don’t give a shit about anybody else, why should anybody else give a shit about you?
Let’s do a quick count:
Yes - 16
penultima_thule
begbert2
SmartAleq
Broomstick
snfaulkner
kswiss
barkodogo
filmore
Jay_Z
JohnT
Telemark
Little_Nemo
GIGObuster
asahi
thorny_locust
Max_S (I agree with begbert)
No - 0
Unspecified white suburbanites who Yankees_1996_Champs knows, based on unspecified rationale.
Unless someone argues that a white man should not care about Black Lives Matter, I’m inclined to conclude that this debate has been resolved by default. Glad that we can all agree on something. Ladies, gentlement, good night.
~Max 
Yes, but…
I’m not, and never have been a conservative. So why trot that out?
No racism was not invented just for slavery and capitalism in the Americas. It has existed since forever. What happened in the Americas was that it was purified and refined to a greater extent than before.
Your assumption allows people to ignore the racism in other societies in other parts of the world.
@Yankees_1996_Champs, I want to congratulate you on have achieved what few (if any) have to date. You got @Max S. to post a scathingly dismissive reply to your OP. You should feel embarrassed and spend some time reflecting on your life choices.
So, like several other posters I am that suburban white man you’re talking about. I haven’t seen a black person (aside from on TV) in years. I haven’t talked to a black person in much longer and it has been 15 years since I had two black friends. My brother-in-law just mentioned he had a couple of black friends and I was surprised that he had the opportunity.
That being said, they just put up a graphic on the news showing that 48% of shooting victims in the City of Denver are Black despite them making up something like 10% of the population. I’m not sure how its possible to look at that and not say its fucked up. Then we’ve got the video of the kid in Aurora who was walking home at night, black, and dies in police custody shortly thereafter. That seems more messed up to me than George Floyd since at least George did something illegal shortly before. Assuming you pay attention to the work around you is seems impossible to not agree that the US is a pretty fucked up place for Black people.
I agree with Black Lives matter that cops should quit killing black people. I sort of agree with the OP in that it doesn’t affect me directly so I don’t get emotional about it but unlike Putin killing his citizens I can help to effect change here in the US.
My problem is I haven’t seen a good solution presented yet. Though I like the one sending mental health professionals on 911 call dealing with mental illness instead of the police. Though I’m not certain that it does much for the Black community.
I want to be accurate: “racism,” the idea that a set of racial and ethnic characteristics, in and of themselves, make them inferior and somehow ‘subhuman’, is absolutely, positively an invention of Western capitalism.
That is not to suggest that discrimination didn’t exist before then. Antisemitism isn’t racism per se, but it’s definitely a form of ethnic discrimination and persecution. There has been ethnic strife for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but much of that had to do with which religion people were going to worship and pay tribute to in which regions; it certainly bears similarities to modern racism, but it’s not exactly the same. Racism, particularly in the Americas, was devised as a way to create a permanent underclass of people that would provide cheap (free) labor in ways that were less controversial and offensive to the sensibilities of the aristocratic and educated classes of the day.
To add to this line of thought, I’d argue that people are inherently tribal - that’s in our DNA, I believe. People are, from early on, trying to figure out who the members of their tribe are. But ‘tribe’ is something that people define. A tribe could be a literal tribe of kinsmen and women. It could be membership of a nation-state. It could be a political party or a sports team. Or a race. You get the idea.
What about Sparta and the Helots? That would seem to be comparable situation that occurred far, far earlier in history and was unrelated to the Americas.
So yes, the chattel slavery of the Americas stands out in history for the sheer numbers involved, the brutality, and so forth but creating a permanent enslaved underclass and treating them terribly was not an innovation of Western civilization, capitalism, or recent history.
Imma be honest.
I have always known the police, in general, don’t give a fuck about black people. But it really opened my eyes to see the police not giving a fuck about white people protesting on behalf of black people! Seeing all those videos of police brutality made it really sink into me that the problem is not just racism. The problem is that we have yielded entirely too much power to amoral thugs and a system that supports and encourages them. People of color are disproportionately targeted by this system, but the system threatens all of us.
So why should white Americans care about what happens to black people? They should care because one day white people will be a minority. If we fix the system now, then white people don’t have to worry about what will happen when their privilege slips away. White people can reap the benefits of the lessons we are learning now so that they don’t have to be oppressed the way others have been for so long.
Another reason to care: The person who gets unfairly picked on doesn’t tend to become Mr. Congeniality. They usually have “issues”. Issues that spill over and affect everyone around them. White folks can’t seriously complain about black dysfunctionality and then turn a blind eye to the causes of that dysfunctionality. It just doesn’t work that way.
The BLM protests are moving the needle on social justice, whether the skeptics want to acknowledge this or not. A year ago, something like this would have been unfathomable:
Stuff like this is going to help white folks just as much as it helps people of color. Because plenty of mentally ill or homeless white folks have caught a bullet because of trigger-happy policing. People complain that Black Lives Matter is a divisive slogan blah blah blah, but what has saying “All Lives Matter” done for folks? Nothing, that’s what!
This right here is why I fight back against TERFs–because in the eyes of the elite rulers anyone who aligns themselves with a marginalized group becomes equally marginalized. If an AMAB decides to transition into being a woman and takes on all the opprobrium reserved for us by the misogyny mandates along with all the freight of being trans and the whole passing mandate and possibly the freight of being queer along with it–well then, I say “Welcome to the party bus, sister!”
To my mind it is the moral duty of every human to lessen the burden of any other human that they possibly can and shirking that duty makes you an asshole. Especially if your help costs you nothing, that’s needing a special circle of hell if you could do something but just can’t be arsed.
It’s not quite the same; the Helots were conquered people in neighboring territories. In some cases, they weren’t completely enslaved, but were more like peasants who lived with their own families but whose only opportunity to earn a living was to engage in low-wage or free labor. You could argue that there were some similarities between Helots and, say, Native Americans or other indigenous peoples who’ve been conquered and then either eliminated or subjugated.
But colonial slavery is different in that there was an awareness that slavery of human beings was immoral, which led to a deliberate and even academic and legalistic effort to differentiate levels of humanity. That, as far as I know, did not exist at any time prior to the Enlightenment. Slavery in the Americas did not necessarily originate as a race-based institution, but it quickly evolved into one, and more so in the United States than elsewhere in the colonial world.
“With liberty and justice for all”, if practiced, make this nation truly great. People who do not see the BLM issue as a serious and important one are betraying the tenets upon which this nation is based.