OT: NBA & Celtics Speak Out Against Racism; George Floyd Thread (Non-Political)

[Ed Pinkney]

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[Parliament10]

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Wow.
Reminds me a bit, of Richard Pryor's type of Stand-up Comedy.
Pryor always had a message in his madness.

[big-shot-ROB]

Just something I wanted to clarify of the discussion that was going on on the previous page.

It might be true that more than half of the crimes carried out in the US are done by black people. Like it is probably true 75% of the small trouble in my town involves arabic people.

There's no relation between this and the colour of their skins. In my town, arabic people cause trouble not because they are arabic but because they are really poor, nearly homeless sometimes. And it's been nearly 4 generations since they came here, and systematic racism in school and society in general hasn't allowed them to get out of the "ghettos". Meanwhile any person coming from Europe or the US is accepted right away by the people.

In the US (I'm sure is not difficult to find statistics) most of the people living in the projects are dark-skin. The color of your skin doesn't make you a criminal, your society status and wealth does. You have way more chances to get into trouble if you are poor and have limited access to education and health care.

And in the US, as well as any other European country, dark-skin people tend to be way more poor than white people because systematic racism kicks them out of society.

Oh, and don't answer me with the "Everyone has equal chances in life" thing, "You are poor because you aren't working hard enough". That isn't even true here in Spain, where public free health-care and public free schools are WAY better (and I can't stress this enough) than the paid options.

[Parliament10]

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Wouldn't hurt.
It would keep it on peoples minds, too.

[ConstableGeneva]

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[Slax]

Peaceful protests haven not changed a thing at any point in history.

I think that depends on what you mean by "peaceful", but certainly nonviolent protests have occasionally resulted in important social or political changes. For example, in the US, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 as a direct consequence of nonviolent protests in Selma and Montgomery. (I know we're not supposed to talk politics, but I'm assuming a pretty factual take on 55-year-old history should be ok - if not feel free to delete my post.)

I want to come back to this subject, because it's one I'm passionate about. I think the philosophy behind nonviolent protest gets excessively sanitized and moralized as "protests should always be nonviolent, because doing harm to others is wrong".

1. Nonviolent protest is a strategy, not necessarily a moral imperative. The point of nonviolent protest is to create sympathy for your cause, not to prevent harm from coming to others. The impetus for choosing nonviolent protest over armed conflict is usually that nonviolent protest is a more effective strategy for a disempowered minority to enact change, because in an armed conflict, the people in power almost always win.

2. Nonviolent protest is disruptive and creates conflict by design. When black people sat in at lunch counters in Greensboro and Nashville, they were shutting down businesses and preventing other people from eating. The point of protests like these are to force the participants in power structures that create the unfairness to enforce unfair rules in as unsympathetic a way as possible - eg, literally having someone arrested for coming to eat lunch, just because of the color of their skin.

3. Taking part in nonviolent protests often requires a courageous or even heroic level of self-sacrifice. Nonviolent protesters have been blacklisted, arrested, fined, imprisoned, beat up, murdered. Provoking awful and unreasonable harms to highlight injustice in the world is *the point of nonviolent protest*. Effective nonviolent protest involves reacting to violence by making that violence appear as brutal and unsympathetic as possible. When the police come to take you away from the lunch counter, go limp so that they are forced to drag your flailing body away while knocking over chairs and banging you against walls. March straight through state troopers during a voter registration protest so that they are forced to beat and attack you to stop you. Bring children on marches so they get blasted with hoses on camera when police try to make everyone disperse.

I think nonviolent protest has gotten romanticized to the point where we encourage it as the most righteous tool for minority activity under the false belief that it encourages safety and minimizes disruptions to society, when really it is maximally disruptive, jeopardizes the safety of its participants, and requires an unnatural level of self-discipline and disregard for one's own safety. It is an unfair and unreasonable expectation to tell a powerless person that the only *moral* response to state violence against them is to seek out more violence against them to draw sympathy for their cause. But it's also one of the most effective and proven tools for enacting change.

Applying this to contemporary police brutality issues, we sounds assume police preemptively spraying protestors with rubber bullets and tear gas, running over protestors with cars, shoving protestors to the ground, etc has helped to create a sympathetic framing for the cause of protestors, while vandalism, property damage, and violence that have become associated with the protests has simultaneously worked against a sympathetic framing. It's a pretty interesting dynamic. I think for the most part the "police are needlessly brutalizing protestors" narrative has won out, and that it's reflected in the rapid change in public opinion on policing we are seeing in polls.

[ConstableGeneva]

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[ConstableGeneva]

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