Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Julia Blount - Salon


http://i.imgur.com/UqpfnEQ.jpg

Dear White America,

It is somewhat strange to address this to you, given that I strongly identify with many aspects of your culture and am half-white myself. Yet, today is another day you have forced me to decide what race I am — and, as always when you force me — I fall decidedly into “Person of Color.”

Every comment or post I have read today voicing some version of disdain for the people of Baltimore — “I can’t understand” or “They’re destroying their own community” or “Destruction of Property!” or “Thugs” — tells me that many of you are not listening. I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear:

I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty

If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away. Race affects our lives every day. We must consider it all the time, not just when it is convenient.

As a person of color, even if you are privileged your whole life, as I have been, you cannot escape from the shade of your skin. Being a woman defines me; coming from a relatively affluent background defines me; my sexual orientation, my education, my family and my job define me. Other than being a woman, every single one of those distinctions gives me privilege in our society. Yet, even with all that privilege, people still treat me differently.

For most of my childhood, I refused to allow race to be my most defining feature. I actually chose for most of my childhood to refuse race as my most defining feature. But I found that a very hard position to maintain, given the way the world interacts with me and the people I love. Because I have to worry about my brother and my cousins getting stopped by the police. Because people react to my wonderful, kind, intelligent father differently, depending on whether he’s wearing a suit or sweat pants. Race has defined the way I see the world like no other characteristic has.

This can be hard to understand, if you never experienced it firsthand. So again, for just one more moment, reserve your judgments and listen. This is what you might come to realize, if you spent your days in my skin.

In childhood: People regularly ask “What are you” instead of “Who are you?” This will not end, either. In high school, one kid even asks if you are “Mulatto,” which, according to some scholars, originally meant “little mule.”

A few years later: Go on a road trip with your mom. Refuse to get out of the car at a gas station in the boondocks, because you are sure the person with the Confederate flag bumper sticker is going to realize your white mother married a black man and hurt her (and you too, being the byproduct of said union). He’s carrying a rifle on a gun rack. Now even more terrifying.

As a teenager: Be the only person of color in the majority of your Advanced Placement classes, even though there are a decent number of brown and black people at your school. For years following 9/11, get “randomly” selected for the additional screening at the airport.

In college: People assume you got into Princeton because of affirmative action. They refuse to believe it could be because you are smart.

In adulthood: Your younger brother has been stopped in his own neighborhood — the neighborhood he has lived in all his life – and asked what he could possibly be doing there.

At your workplace: For two years in a row the NYPD shows up randomly at the school you work at, which has a 100 percent minority student body. The first time the police don’t even tell the school beforehand. The cops just show up early in the morning, set up a metal detector and X-ray scanner, and fill the cafeteria with dozens of policemen. As your young students file in in the morning, the NYPD scans them like they’re going through airport security right after 9/11. They confiscate cellphones, and pat some of students down, particularly the older-looking boys. As you watch this, you feel anger welling up in your chest and almost start to cry. You think, “Why are you treating my kids like criminals?!” Children are in tears. The screenings are not due to any specific threat, but rather as part of a “random screening program” — but one that never seems to make its way to the Upper East Side. White America’s children are told they can go to college, be anything. These students are treated like suspects. And that is exactly what society will tell your children one day, unless something changes.

Today, tomorrow, every day: White people around you refuse to talk about what is happening in this country. The silence is painful to experience.

These are my experiences. They have deeply affected who I am. And I am SO PRIVILEGED. Mine has been a decidedly easy life for a person of color in America. I try to conceptualize what it is like for my students who got wanded by the NYPD, my students who have been stopped and frisked, my students whose parents work multiple jobs, my students on free and reduced-price lunch, my students whom white adults move away from because they look “scary.”

I try, when I can, to listen to them, because only by validating their feelings can we begin to find a way to overcome the challenges they face. That doesn’t mean I let them off easy when they do something wrong. But I try to understand the why.

I don’t need you to validate anyone’s actions, but I need you to validate what black America is feeling. If you cannot understand how experiences like mine or my students’ would lead to hopelessness, pain, anger, and internalized oppression, you are still not listening. So listen. Listen with your heart.

If you got this far, thank you. By reading this, you have shown you are trying. Continue the conversation, ask questions, learn as much as you can, and choose to engage. Only by listening and engaging can we move forward.

Black is Beautiful and Black Lives Matter,

Julia

[DemonGeminiX]

:|

[Teh One Who Knocks]

Check your privilege :nono:

[deebakes]

:facepalm:

[PorkChopSandwiches]

I'm soooo tired of people telling me what I can think, how about go fuck yourself. I don't see your ass out their looting and supporting your thug brothers

[perrhaps]

I wonder if "Mandingo" is Julia's favorite movie.

[redred]

http://i.imgur.com/FksvZLZ.gif

[Goofy]

I stay in Scotland, they could nuke Baltimore and i still won't give a flying fuck Julia :dance: #PrivilegedScotsman

[Hal-9000]

:-k

we never do see black men in kilts......wtf?

[Goofy]

:-k

we never do see black men in kilts......wtf?

Not many black Scotsmen :lol:

[perrhaps]

No McCrips clan?

[deebakes]

:-k

we never do see black men in kilts......wtf?

from what i understand, they would need to be dresses, kilts would be too short :shrug:

[Hugh_Janus]

from what i understand, they would need to be dresses, kilts would be too short :shrug:

:racist:

[Goofy]

No McCrips clan?

I think theres a McDonalds :-k

[RBP]

My comments are addressing the OP and primarily low socioeconomic status blacks, who is really who we are talking about. And that is the difference in my mind. Not so much skin color, but socioeconomic class. Middle class whites have more in common with middle class blacks than low SES whites for example. But the cultural divide is very wide and, at the heart of the issue, is what black culture has created for itself. But they don't see it that way.

The problem with the OP analysis is the MASSIVE assumption that the "black experience" is rooted in, and ONLY rooted in, prejudice. Is there some of that? Sure there is. But it is also largely the result of their own actions. Most people could care less about your skin color and have no interest in making your life more difficult because of it.

You created ghetto culture, we didn't. And now you want me to respect it because you've declared it "cultural diversity"? Horse shit. I have no obligation to respect that, nor should I feel bad when I can't understand a word you say because you've devised your own version of English. That's your problem.

You commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime. I am not going to "check my privilege" that allows me to drive around your dangerous shithole. I am going to roll my windows up and lock my doors because you created a factual reality that I am more likely to be the victim of a violent crime from a black male in an urban neighborhood. Being vigilant and cautious is now racism? Horse shit.

You disproportionately live off government benefits and have accepted generational welfare as a black reality, then decry your economic plight. Your neighborhoods work on a cash economy based largely on criminal activity, but your incarceration rate is now "the new Jim Crow" - just another way to keep the black man down? Horse shit.

Your children are 72% born to single mothers and instead of expressing concern about the absence of family structure and support, you think I have to accept "baby mama" culture. You want me to feel sorry for you, because your children don't have a fighting chance growing up poor in a shitty neighborhood? They statistically won't be properly educated and will have a disproportionate rate of crime committed and substance abuse. And that's my fault? Horse shit.

Your "supporters" and "leaders" have more to do with this problem then some collective white boogeyman that you say is at issue.

You vote overwhelmingly liberal every election. The liberals continue to believe that giving you just enough government money to keep you hooked, while telling you the system is rigged against you if you try to say "enough" is doing you a favor. You have to have that check to live in this unjust world, right? This is what created generational poverty, and you will never break the cycle until you get off the tit and tell your representatives they are not doing you any favors by keeping you addicted to government.

And who do you turn to when there's a public story? The same people who have turned to since the 60's. The same people who were telling you then that racism was the issue (they were largely correct), that have built their entire lives since then around that idea. They have made fortunes making sure that the exact same arguments never go away. Let me repeat that. Your leadership has a vested interest in making sure you believe that white America was, is, and will always be the problem. It is what they do for a living and they will do it until they die. And yet, you turn to them and let them set the tone. You stand and cheer when they further entrench the idea that you cannot rise above because of the weight of racism.

Apparently the "leadership" you follow, who you vote for, and what economic policies you support are my fault also? Horse shit.


If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is a mark of your privilege. People of color cannot turn away. Race affects our lives every day. We must consider it all the time, not just when it is convenient.

So now comes the hard part, because you're right about one thing. You asked us to stop and think about black plight in America, expose ourselves, engage in conversation, listen. I have, and often. I've listened and learned and watched. And again you are asking, as you have for 50 years, for me to be understand and to change my behavior to accommodate the choices you have made for your communities. Horse shit.

What you don't understand is the issue is not that we don't get it. We do. But after 50 years, and the exact same tired horse shit generation after generation, it's on you now. We just don't give a fuck any more.

[Goofy]

My comments are addressing the OP and primarily low socioeconomic status blacks, who is really who we are talking about. And that is the difference in my mind. Not so much skin color, but socioeconomic class. Middle class whites have more in common with middle class blacks than low SES whites for example. But the cultural divide is very wide and, at the heart of the issue, is what black culture has created for itself. But they don't see it that way.

The problem with the OP analysis is the MASSIVE assumption that the "black experience" is rooted in, and ONLY rooted in, prejudice. Is there some of that? Sure there is. But it is also largely the result of their own actions. Most people could care less about your skin color and have no interest in making your life more difficult because of it.

You created ghetto culture, we didn't. And now you want me to respect it because you've declared it "cultural diversity"? Horse shit. I have no obligation to respect that, nor should I feel bad when I can't understand a word you say because you've devised your own version of English. That's your problem.

You commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime. I am not going to "check my privilege" that allows me to drive around your dangerous shithole. I am going to roll my windows up and lock my doors because you created a factual reality that I am more likely to be the victim of a violent crime from a black male in an urban neighborhood. Being vigilant and cautious is now racism? Horse shit.

You disproportionately live off government benefits and have accepted generational welfare as a black reality, then decry your economic plight. Your neighborhoods work on a cash economy based largely on criminal activity, but your incarceration rate is now "the new Jim Crow" - just another way to keep the black man down? Horse shit.

Your children are 72% born to single mothers and instead of expressing concern about the absence of family structure and support, you think I have to accept "baby mama" culture. You want me to feel sorry for you, because your children don't have a fighting chance growing up poor in a shitty neighborhood? They statistically won't be properly educated and will have a disproportionate rate of crime committed and substance abuse. And that's my fault? Horse shit.

Your "supporters" and "leaders" have more to do with this problem then some collective white boogeyman that you say is at issue.

You vote overwhelmingly liberal every election. The liberals continue to believe that giving you just enough government money to keep you hooked, while telling you the system is rigged against you if you try to say "enough" is doing you a favor. You have to have that check to live in this unjust world, right? This is what created generational poverty, and you will never break the cycle until you get off the tit and tell your representatives they are not doing you any favors by keeping you addicted to government.

And who do you turn to when there's a public story? The same people who have turned to since the 60's. The same people who were telling you then that racism was the issue (they were largely correct), that have built their entire lives since then around that idea. They have made fortunes making sure that the exact same arguments never go away. Let me repeat that. Your leadership has a vested interest in making sure you believe that white America was, is, and will always be the problem. It is what they do for a living and they will do it until they die. And yet, you turn to them and let them set the tone. You stand and cheer when they further entrench the idea that you cannot rise above because of the weight of racism.

Apparently the "leadership" you follow, who you vote for, and what economic policies you support are my fault also? Horse shit.



So now comes the hard part, because you're right about one thing. You asked us to stop and think about black plight in America, expose ourselves, engage in conversation, listen. I have, and often. I've listened and learned and watched. And again you are asking, as you have for 50 years, for me to be understand and to change my behavior to accommodate the choices you have made for your communities. Horse shit.

What you don't understand is the issue is not that we don't get it. We do. But after 50 years, and the exact same tired horse shit generation after generation, it's on you now. We just don't give a fuck any more.

:clap:

[FBD]

http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks

""They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages,"



but moreso, far far far moreso than blaming anything on the populations themselves...while people like to talk about the "wealth creation " meme, such notions entirely disregard finite resources.... and while sometimes you have a company come along and break the mold, usually, companies come along, and its owners then move to shape the political process to their whims.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

[PorkChopSandwiches]

#HorseShit

[FBD]

:lol: really, its like talking about the large upswing in heroin available in the last 10-15 years, and neglecting to think of the CIA's role in its arrival


the root cause of po people is not the po people themselves, its the people that exploit them all. (non-po' included)

[redred]

:-k

we never do see black men in kilts......wtf?

dude from my friends band


http://i.imgur.com/6oMgYAf.jpg

[FBD]

from the Marshall Project:

Bill Keller: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?



David Simon: I guess there’s an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.



Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.



Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn’t even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.



How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.



What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That’s a line in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” When Ed and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn’t a white guy in the equation on a street level, it’s pretty remarkable. But in some ways they were empowered.



Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras — which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence — back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn’t know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers — however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required — it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.







What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law.



“The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley.”

[FBD]

Because the drug war made cops lazy and less competent?



How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That’s what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you’re going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who’s burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he’s going to court one day and he’s out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who’s doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I’ve just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That’s what the drug war built, and that’s what Martin O’Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.








https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish?ref=hp-1-111



culture of thuggery indeed

[RBP]

Yes, nothing is their own fault.

[FBD]

I've never sought to completely exculpate people from their responsibilities.

But when your gov explicitly does this to you...

who's to blame?

who's to blame for the fatherless children?

the state is more to blame than the community there.

who's to blame for the war on drugs, which has no actual force of law behind it, just farce of law?

states can make a drug illegal - the feds CANNOT. NO AUTHORITY. (I understand that doesnt change the reality of the feds acting like they have this power, and using it as if it is legitimate, but fact of the matter is, it is illegitimate and carries zero actual weight where the truth is concerned. As we all know, the truth may or may not have something to do with an arrest or court proceedings.)

Go ahead and read about O'Malley and tell me he didnt make the situation worse in his years "serving" the greater baltimore area.

[RBP]

The rioting in Baltimore wasn’t hooliganism. It was a protest against the depredations of the ghetto economy.

Most people can sympathize with the anger on display this week in the streets of Baltimore. It’s relatively easy to feel compassion for people who’ve suffered police brutality and abject poverty, even if you’ve never experienced either. Looting and burning is harder to understand, since torching a CVS store would hardly seem to have anything to do with protesting the actions of the Baltimore Police Department. President Obama decried the Baltimore riots as “senseless violence and destruction.” Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also despaired at the destruction. “We worked so hard to get a company like CVS to invest in this neighborhood,” she said, “this is the only place that so many people have to pick up their prescriptions.” Why would anyone burn down the only CVS in their neighborhood?

The reason, I think, is likely the same reason that poor black Americans in cities across the country burned “their own” neighborhoods in the late 1960s: They did not experience those places as their own. Then, like now, police brutality was a precipitating cause of the violence, but it was the long-term experience of the indignities of the ghetto that gave shape to the riots. Then, like now, commentators compared the rioters to animals who had run wild and needed discipline. Rioting, to these bystanders, was not proper political protest but the criminal actions of poor people who merely wanted to grab what they could for free. This narrative, which I heard throughout my childhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s, put the blame not on the depredations of the ghetto, but on the character of its residents. It completely misapprehends the political economy of our poorest neighborhoods.

ack in 1968, as the Washington Post reported at the time, it was stores that sold on credit that were the “most popular victims of the riots.” In one widely republished account, a mother told her son, “Don’t grab the groceries, grab the book.” The “book” held the records of debts that she and her son, as well as many other people in their neighborhood, owed to the store. Burning credit records, it was hoped, would erase those debts. Also targeted were so-called “easy credit” appliance stores, which sold shoddy goods, like used televisions, at usurious interest rates. By the late-’60s, televisions were as common in ghetto households as suburban ones. The difference was that ghetto televisions weren’t new, often didn’t work, and almost always cost more. Prices, a Federal Trade Commission report found in 1968, were 2.5 times higher for identical goods in the city as they were in the suburbs. If a family couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make their payments, repo men would come to their house, take their television, and then sell it to someone else. Repossessions were public affairs that everyone in the neighborhood could see, publicly shaming the family. When rioters broke into appliance stores in the 1960s and took TVs it looked, to outsiders, like brazen theft of a sought-after big-ticket item. To rioters whose TVs had be repossessed, however, it must have felt like they were taking back property for which they had already paid for many times over. And, perhaps, it was a chance to exorcise some of the shame of repossession as well.

Informed by this history, when I look at the Baltimore riots of the past week, I see something more complicated than mere hooliganism. To me, the riots reflect fury not just at the police, but at the constraints of the ghetto’s retail economy, where the poor pay more. As I see it, the indignity of being roughed up by the cops is of a piece with not being able to afford to shop in your own neighborhood.

Much of the violence that erupted this week took place at and around West Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, a retail stretch that is part of the same system of exploitation and humiliation rioters in ’68 stood up to fight. The neighborhood around the mall, also called Mondawmin, has a median household income of just $38,014; one-third of the neighborhood earns less than $25,000. Only one-third of households own a car, meaning many of the residents who shop in the neighborhood do so out of necessity. Shopping local, a feel-good practice for yuppies, is a burden on the poor: Ghetto residents can’t easily leave their neighborhoods to enjoy the competitive market pricing of the better-off sections of the city or the suburbs. Economists have found that prices for consumer goods can be as much as 15 percent higher for the poor. And while Mondawmin Mall may offer employment opportunities for some local residents, it’s not nearly enough to put a dent in a neighborhood unemployment rate of 23 percent.

The mall itself is home to some services for poor residents, including a WIC office. Much of the retail, however, is likely out of reach for its immediate neighbors. The “trade area” for the mall, according to its owner General Growth Properties, encompasses “4-5 miles in all directions,” an area where the average household income is $54,642—significantly higher than that of Mondawmin residents. The stores around the mall cater more to the neighborhood’s poor residents, but often in ways that take advantage of the constraints of the ghetto economy. Services that might be free for the middle class cost real money for the poor, whittling away at their already low incomes. Many poor Americans don’t cash their paychecks at banks (which typically require a minimum deposit), and are forced to use the services of cash-checking shops, which tend to take 2 percent off the top. On the 1600 block of North Avenue, where a police van held Freddie Gray on the night he was arrested, the storefront of payday lender Ace Cash Express advertises “PAY BILLS. CHECKS CASHED.” Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau denounced Ace Express’ payday lending, which “used false threats, intimidation, and harassing calls to bully payday borrowers into a cycle of debt … drain[ing] millions of dollars from cash-strapped consumers who had few options to fight back.” The looters who broke into Ace this week might well have been there before, as customers. They might also have been customers at Cash USA, a pawn shop at 2105 West Pratt Street that went up in flames this week, and which, like Ace, advertises its check cashing services. When Baltimoreans looted and burned payday lenders, check-cashing operations, and pawn shops this week, it was not just a chance to get money, it was chance to get back some of their money.

We are still in the middle of this crisis. It’s hard to know the specific motives of any one looter, and certainly not all of this week’s destruction can be ascribed to resentment of the ghetto economy. Across from Cash USA a wig store was looted; it’s difficult to imagine the latter had engaged in predatory financial practices. You might look upon the looting of a CVS, similarly, as a clear-cut act of larceny and vandalism; then again, you might not ever have had to choose between paying your rent and paying for a badly needed prescription.

If history is our guide, we can see that this paroxysm of rage cannot be as simple as poor people using a tragic death as cover for some smash and grab. It’s an expression of anger at another aspect of a system that has exploited the black community in subtler, more insidious, but similarly tragic ways. As Baltimoreans, in the ’60s and now, protested against the excesses of the police, it is no surprise that those protests expanded to include other aspects of ghetto life, where economic repression and humiliation, like harassment by police, are part of the everyday experience. In the months ahead, we must remember that it will be not enough to stop police brutality—we need to provide better economic opportunities as well if we want to improve the lives of Baltimore’s poor.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/05/baltimore_riots_it_wasn_t_thugs_looting_for_profit _it_was_a_protest_against.html

[RBP]

I've never sought to completely exculpate people from their responsibilities.

But when your gov explicitly does this to you...

who's to blame?

who's to blame for the fatherless children?

the state is more to blame than the community there.

who's to blame for the war on drugs, which has no actual force of law behind it, just farce of law?

states can make a drug illegal - the feds CANNOT. NO AUTHORITY. (I understand that doesnt change the reality of the feds acting like they have this power, and using it as if it is legitimate, but fact of the matter is, it is illegitimate and carries zero actual weight where the truth is concerned. As we all know, the truth may or may not have something to do with an arrest or court proceedings.)

Go ahead and read about O'Malley and tell me he didnt make the situation worse in his years "serving" the greater baltimore area.

All these articles including the one I posted just prior to this post, and including your police history report (and 100+ more at every turn), serve the same purpose. They all seek to continue to define the external boogeyman that has continually kept the black man down. Nothing has changed in 50 years, so the story goes. That is exactly what I was saying, the narrative stays the same because the leadership wants it to stay the same. Nothing changes in those neighborhoods because it's accepted that it is not their problem to fix. And nothing will change until the leadership changes and the communities decide they better take ownership and fix it themselves. I have ZERO expectation that this will happen in my lifetime.

Last year I was at a school conference in New Orleans. These are Clinical Mental Health Counselor and PhD candidates, so I am used to the decidedly liberal stance. One of the PhD candidates was very firm in her belief that slavery should always inform our race relations decision making. That we owe a debt for slavery.

Me: "so what's the statute of limitations on slavery guilt?"
Her: "I never said guilt, I didn't say i was guilty, I said it should be part of the discussion."
Me: "Okay, so what's the statute of limitations?
Her: "I don't understand."
Me: "At what point can we as a nation say that current lives should be dealt with on current situations and not have to bring slavery into the discussion?"
Her: "Never."

[DemonGeminiX]

Sounds like a big ol' crock of shit to me. The article you posted, that is.

[RBP]

Sounds like a big ol' crock of shit to me.

because it is.

[DemonGeminiX]

All these articles including the one I posted just prior to this post, and including your police history report (and 100+ more at every turn), serve the same purpose. They all seek to continue to define the external boogeyman that has continually kept the black man down. Nothing has changed in 50 years, so the story goes. That is exactly what I was saying, the narrative stays the same because the leadership wants it to stay the same. Nothing changes in those neighborhoods because it's accepted that it is not their problem to fix. And nothing will change until the leadership changes and the communities decide they better take ownership and fix it themselves. I have ZERO expectation that this will happen in my lifetime.

Last year I was at a school conference in New Orleans. These are Clinical Mental Health Counselor and PhD candidates, so I am used to the decidedly liberal stance. One of the PhD candidates was very firm in her belief that slavery should always inform our race relations decision making. That we owe a debt for slavery.

Me: "so what's the statute of limitations on slavery guilt?"
Her: "I never said guilt, I didn't say i was guilty, I said it should be part of the discussion."
Me: "Okay, so what's the statute of limitations?
Her: "I don't understand."
Me: "At what point can we as a nation say that current lives should be dealt with on current situations and not have to bring slavery into the discussion?"
Her: "Never."

:lol:

That is a crock of shit.

[RBP]

:lol:

That is a crock of shit.

That same woman and another flipped when I said I disagreed with them on crack versus powder cocaine sentencing. They believe that the sentencing law changes were a deliberate act for the purpose of controlling and imprisoning blacks, not an emergency effort to stem an epidemic that simply had a larger impact on blacks than whites based on use patterns. :roll:

Edit: I forgot to mention that real catalyst was the urban legend that Len Bias died from a single use of crack cocaine. He never did crack, it was powder cocaine that triggered his heart condition. But the Anti-Drug Act ("Len Bias Law"), triggered by the incorrect story, is what set the draconian crack sentences.

[FBD]

lol....well, slavery is largely extinct these days, and the war on drugs, police, feds, have varying levels of contempt for the restrictions on their positions, that is the rule of the land...

so what's more of a problem?

(never is a retarded argument from that lady :lol: nice twisting her brain with the statute of limitations :lol: )