Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

...I don't think he made much sense there. The pie metaphor is nonsense, and I honestly don't get it at all, I don't get how it relates to BLM in any way.

I didn't think not wanting to be unjustifiably killed by a cop was so complex that it needed to be simplified into a stupid pie metaphor.

Yeah, he's not being a vile racist right there and that's great, but I don't think there's a lot of sense there.

 

pretty sure ive heard the metaphor before, so its not even "his" metaphor. dunno if he presented it that way. dont care, really

 

I've heard the pie metaphor about general inequality, about equal opportunity, but I don't see how that fits particularly well with BLM...or at all.

Wanting a piece of the pie is an obvious metaphor, easy to understand, but BLM is not specifically about wanting a piece of the pie. Unless, we're talking about reaching for a piece of pie and being shot by a police officer, or some guy claiming he was only protecting his pie.

I mean, this:

It's complete nonsense. I don't understand it at all.

The situation isn't a bunch of friends sitting at a table dividing up the pie.

No one is saying they didn't get any pie.

No one is saying pie matters.

A piece of the pie means a share in something. Pie is almost always a synonym for money. Everyone knows this. When you talk about a piece of the pie, you're usually talking about a share of the money, business, or some economic matter. Wanting a piece of the pie is wanting equal opportunity.

That's not really what BLM is about.

BLM is about lives. It's not about a share of anything. If anything, black people are getting a bigger share of something no one wants. A bigger share of police brutality. But this pie metaphor is stupid and shouldn't be restated.

I mean, what the ****? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

 

I don't necessarily disagree with much of what you have said about crazy tin foil Beck BUT….have you read the statement of what they(BLM) wants?

It is absolutely about economics and a share of the pie.

 

You're not going to get substantive change without an economic reordering. That's why they include it alongside legal and criminal justice reform.

Here is their platform again:

And their call for reparations is entirely sensible if it includes something of real value in terms of appreciation and investment: land/property. They should also grant them a financial reset with loan forgiveness. But give them what their ancestors were denied: land

https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/

 

That's not what I've seen at all. I just looked at their site (EDIT: rather, "a" site) under "who we are" and didn't see that at all. It's largely about black people being targets. It's almost entirely focused on police brutality, or at least that's the main focus.

I haven't heard BLM being associated with economic equality very often. It's far more often associated with black people being needlessly shot by cops.

The wikipedia page (I know, I know) is entirely about police brutality.

BLM, to me, seems all about Trayvon Martin (literally what it was founded on), Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Jonathan Ferrell, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile.

It's about black lives.


Now, of course, any movement addressing racial inequality will involve economic inequality. But that doesn't seem to be the main focus of BLM, it's not the face of it.

 

It is part of the focus. You said it wasn't about that at all. Well, yes it is to a point. It's right in there in the section about Economic Justice/Reparations and Community Control. That's their platform.

Here: https://policy.m4bl.org/economic-justice/

 

I still think using a pie metaphor to describe BLM is pretty confusing, when that's not the main thrust of the movement.

I mean, it's called Black Lives Matter, not Equal Pie Distribution.

Apparently, BLM is actually about taxes? Okay, then.

But thanks for bringing that bit to my attention.

 

No, you are right that police brutality was the initial impetus behind the whole thing. We've been talking about it here as anakinfansince1983 alluded to for the last few years.Martin's death got the whole thing going. But, movements evolve. BLM is trying to break out of their current situation and into something broader and more policy specific. The platform was an attempt to do that. Whether it is successful or not remains to be seen. But you can't really have substantial criminal justice reform if you don't repair the economic situation.

 

Yeah, I'm like twenty-five minutes or so away from where this happened. It's unbelievably sickening and it gets worse the more you find out about it. I mean, the police seem to have said that they couldn't do anything about Vernon having a gun, but other records indicate that he was prohibited by law from owning a gun until 2018. So, something doesn't scan there. And it's really damning, in my opinion, for the police to have been on the scene and thought there was no trouble brewing a mere eight minutes before a murder took place. I mean, there just seems like zero situational awareness there; I would hope to God that if someone was planning to murder me in less than ten minutes that the police might be able to tell there was a situation developing.

And then, yes, I get it, he bonded out . . . but I don't know how a guy can run over a woman, admit to police that he was glad he did it, confess to being drunk at the time and state that he still intended to kill said woman . . . and then just be allowed to return to the house right next door to her WHERE HE HAD A GUN. That's just ******* ridiculous. He seems to have established a pattern of violent, anti-social behavior toward his neighbors, expressed no remorse whatsoever and explicitly stated that he intended to continue said behavior and the law's just okay with that? It's just like, "Sure, go get your gun and live next door to them?" It's infuriating. A man is ******* dead because of this stupid bastard. He was so stupid he didn't even understand that if they were Christians they weren't Muslims.

And look at this repulsive ************.



What an ugly, stupid, repulsive, nasty, racist, creepy, hideous, alcoholic, thug bully. **** you, you troglodyte piece of ****.

 

But that isn't actually the problem The problem is white people thinking the white working-class using drugs is just a sort of "Eh, they probably shouldn't do it, but whatever" thing versus it being a sort of essentialist characteristic of blacks. The problem is disproportionate scrutiny on black communities for petty crimes that ought not to be crimes in the first place.

 

Rouge 1 and a Half, that is such a good point mixed in with a story about a grotesque nightmare of a person. You always bring up many important points and examples. Heartrending stuff in this case.

I think the police that brutalize people are examples of those who have the wrong aggression outlet in some cases. There are other ways to take one's anger out (i.e. sports, writing certain essays, etc.) than to go out and shoot and/or beat people. While we should prosecute police who harm others and certainly pass sensible gun reform, we should also offer and promote better aggression outlets for certain people. Or so I've been told. A mature, rational person should have better outlets than attacking other people for unresolved issues. They need therapy, as well.

 

Interesting, sad story. This is especially nuanced and complex because a lot of the older first generation Lebanese Christians I know are pretty heavily Islamophobic themselves. Not saying the victims here were, but I know plenty of Lebanese people in Texas who feel essentially the same way about Muslims as the white Texans shooting them dirty looks for speaking Arabic in public, assuming they're Muslim.

Also, while I agree that islamophobia does have a lot of intersection with racism, there's also a lot of factors in play other than race. Just general xenophobia is a lot of it. To the extent that a person is coded or reads as as racially "Arab"/non-white - whatever that means - in the US there's certainly racism. But many Lebanese are either white or at least "pass" for white, depending on how into raciological science nonsense you are, and still feel the effects of Islamophobia (whether or not they are Muslim) or some other kind of orientalist xenophobia that may be indistinguishable from Islamophobia depending on how ignorant the bigoted person is.
(I actually spent a while once reading Stormfront threads on this topic out of morbid curiosity and found plenty of disagreement even among White Nationalists as to whether Lebanese people are "white enough" to be considered "white.")

 

I've checked out SF a few times myself and my only takeaway every single time is that every single Stormfronter seems to have a different and entirely unique view on where white ends and other colors begin. About half of them think Italians, for instance, are not white, and then the half that do think they are white, but a sub-white, and then half of those think the Southern Italians are less white than the Northern Italians.

So, surprise, people who are determined to see differences seem to see a real ****ing lot of them.

 

Yeah, they have established a boardwide definition of whiteness, but most people differ on it. One of the... I don't know if I can call it funniest... things is that one of the only things they all agree on there is "Jews = bad." But of course, there are plenty of Jewish people who meet their definition of whiteness and who they couldn't recognize as Jewish just walking past them on the street (or if they did, would also ID a lot of gentiles as well). The whole ideology just gets more absurd the more you dig into it.

 

No, you're right. But the reason I mention race is that every time someone's ****ty comment about Muslims gets called racism, they respond with "Islam isn't a race therefore I'm not racist."

 

Yeah, I got it. I've been there too.

 

Yeah back when I was seriously dating a Muslim woman I was warned off from mentioning it to my very sweet and kind Lebanese great aunts (the closest relatives in that generation left at that point) because my mom was pretty sure they would have disowned me on the spot. They also famously had a shrine to George W Bush in their home (they never married and lived together in their old age) despite being Canadians who never lived in the US.

 

ah, "southern heritage". the all-time classic, and most transparent euphemism for bigotry.

 

Any decent person with half a brain can see that for what it is.