musiqsoulchild wrote:League Circles wrote:wonderboy2 wrote:It’s funny on this board. I love white people but I don’t think some people will ever understand the problems blacks have to face when it comes to dealing with the police unless you are close to the situation. The problem on these boards is that people look at stats to much not knowing that everything thing the police do are not documented especially in poor inner city communities. To tell you the truth most of all my black friends I know have been either roughed up by the police or had a gun stuck in their face. Absolutely none of my friends have a criminal record and all of them are professionals. Hell most of them don’t even drink or smoke. I’ve seen some white people say they are tired of all of the protesting, well that’s to bad because black people have been tired of being the target to racist, scared cops.
Worth noting there is no so-called black experience or white experience. Of course people share things in common but if you think that every black person has been feels they have been systematically oppressed by the police you're just factually incorrect. Youre also very much incorrect to think that that doesn't happen to white people sometimes. Especially young white males. I know I've been unfairly treated by the cops and so have a number of my friends, blacks and white. 4 of my closer friends got into a big serious fight in HS. The one white guy got a felony charge he's been hassled with his whole life. The black guy and the two hispanics got off.
Check out perspectives from some of my favorite intellectuals Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. As well as Colion Noir, Lil Wayne, etc.
I'm not suggesting in any way that everything is fine for black folks and that incredibly harmful racism by police hasn't been an enormous problem. But it's helpful to give scope and scale and to know that it's not all fine and dandy for whites with cops either.
Use percentages to quantify...otherwise it looms like you are talking on both sides.
Not actual facts...just a percentage look inside your thought process.
For example:
I believe 10 percent of Cops are racist. And that the Black experience of racism is over-indexing by x percent.
I'll extremely grudgingly give you my wild, completely irrelevant guesses as a gesture of good will in this discussion:
By my definition of racism, idk, maybe somewhere between 20-60% of cops are racist in this nation. Probably a slightly higher % than the general population. This is so silly and embarrassing it hurts.
The "black experience of racism" doesn't exist. Because blacks are individuals. For many it's horrific, they've been killed due to it! For some it's trivial. To quote by memory the great John McWhorter (an extremely thoughtful Columbia U professor, public intellectual and writer for the Atlantic and democrat FWIW), "I never had to worry about the cops growing up (in Philadelphia)", and " racism to me feels like sometimes stepping into some gum on the sidewalk". Or the esteemed Glenn Loury, who grew up here in Chicago, who says it's absolutely ridiculous for elitest NYT writers to act as if they have any reason to feel unsafe because of editorial choices at the paper.
It's preposterous to try to assign a metric to a psychological experience, or the over or underestimation, of a group of tens of millions of people due to a trivial physical trait they share in common, even though we all know that tons of them, probably most, have experienced some real forms of racism, and many severe racism. Because not only are their external experiences different, their internal processing mechanisms are as well. Yet we have people like you or Lebron James or Joe Biden trying to act like black is sufficient to understand an individual's experience.
Regarding our other exchange, here are ny questions again. They are not rhetorical:
so police officers should just not believe imminent death threats by people that they have absolutely every reason to believe are willing to back it up?
(You had said death threats should not faze well trained cops)
What if he was threatening to kill his own children? Should they have just kept firing tasers and kept trying to wrestle him then? Should school shooters just be "assessed" and detained?
(If you don't think they are plausible notions, you either are ignorant of mental health and personal crisis or you don't know the reality of Jacob Blake as a 29 year old father of 6 wanted for felony domestic violence and sexual abuse who has multiple child support cases and who was, while already evading arrest for his felony warrants, trying to take the car from a woman who called the police on him. People in that situation can do or say anything. It's tragic. I understand because I spent nearly 10 years working in a level 1 trauma center and in criminal defense.
