While we’re “just posting” things, I’ll add this story from last yearto the pile. You don’t have to be a behavioral psychologist to understand how treating black men as something to be shot at might add a degree of bias in real-life situations.
We know. That’s part of the problem.
So you admit that BLM have a valid complaint about the situation being “intolerable”. Good to know. It’s true that the BLM do sometimes get irrationally angry after yet another shooting of a young black man, which I understand you see as uncivilized and counterproductive. Perhaps if you explained it them…?
Post-hoc rationalization is always easy to do. I posted above a link to some examples (and admittedly examples are anecdotal, but you’re working from examples as well) of white suspects involved in the sort of behavior that is getting black suspects summarily shot and still walking away - sometimes without charge. And of course even with clearcut cases such as Castile’s or Tamir Rice’s there’s still plenty of effort to justify what happened as being the victim’s fault.
Let me just reiterate the point about Rice: a twelve-year-old boy with a toy gun in his waistband was shot within two seconds of the police pulling up. It doesn’t get much more “baffling and outrageous” than that, and yet there’s still plenty of “debate”. And I note that the officer involved in the shooting will not face trial. How do we proceed from this? If the shootings of Rice and Castile aren’t worthy of public protest, what is?
Your fundamental argument that victims of such behavior must be perfect innocents in all regard or else the arguments against police misbehavior fail is a longstanding tactic of dismissal of claims of injustice. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black woman arrested for failing to give up a seat on a bus, but MLK knew that whichever case they used for their civil rights campaign would involve every possible effort to denigrate the victim as deserving of the treatment they’d had at the hands of police and society, and so she became the ‘poster child’ for the movement.
Eric Garner was no poster child but he didn’t deserve to die. Alton Sterling have been going for his gun (which was still in his pocket when he died) as the police officer shouted - or maybe not - it’s too bad the police body cameras were disabled and we can’t see what happened. But when even the deaths of children are seen as not good enough to effect change, the movement has to choose between working with what they have and waiting while more die.
And your response is to insist that a minority group already struggling to achieve change should do the work of their critics as well?
Got it: it’s black men’s fault that the police treat them all as potential violent criminals, just like it’s Muslims’ fault that they’re all treated as potential terrorists and it’s online gamers’ fault that they’re all treated as violent misogynistic oh wait, sorry, I forgot - #notallmen.
Okay, that’s a bit snappish, but the argument that “most of the criminals police encounter are black men and therefore it is understandable that police treat all black men as potential criminals”, even if true and argubaly valid, remains fundamentally unjust to black men. And subsequently drives the argument “police treat all black men as criminals even if innocent, therefore the police cannot be relied upon to be fair and just”. To place the burden solely on black men is unfair here, particularly as police are trained professionals serving the public - the WHOLE public - and thus ought to be subject to a higher level of scrutiny and behavior.
Nobody’s “accepting criminality”. The issue is disproportionate responses to that criminality. And to suspected criminality. And the lack of justice with regard to those disproportionate responses. Which, despite their clumsy and “counterproductive” methods, is the very worthy issue BLM are trying to address.