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

Um, I completely get the "why try" off KK's posts. I don't think he's racist, but I just attribute defeatism to that approach and it makes me sadface.

 

Oh! I thought you were referring to FiDo's post. Carry on.

 

Aye aye skipper!

 

I never did get an answer to this question, NotSoScruffyLooking.

 

Yeah but police officers, and um, not all shootings are black people, and a white guy was arrested!

 

Twitter handle of a police officer from San Jose (just a bit south of where I live). Thankfully he's been suspended for this.

 

Hopefully he's at The Interview to defend against North Korean terrorist attacks.

 

God never gave me guns.

 

You have to believe a bit harder, that is all. Just recite " I DO believe in God" a few times before bed each night and one morning you'll wake up to a fully loaded AR-15 at the end of your bed. Like magic.

 

Um...even if we were to try to put the best possible spin on that - I believe you have the right to protect yourself if you are (legitimately) threatened, but automatically assuming any so-called threat deserves death is - shakes head. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

 

The gun fairy?

 

So that cop is just literally saying that he'll shoot anyone who thinks their life matters, huh? What a prize.

 

It's not defeatism. It's trying to find where we can do the most good now.

To use an analogy, I have a big problem with the disproportionate amount of money that is spent on breast cancer research, because there are a lot of other diseases that could save a lot more lives with even a part of that funding. (Please note that I don't have a problem funding breast cancer research, only with the disproportionate funding it gets, often to the exclusion of other research.) In 2013, the Susan G. Komen Foundation alone brought in $267 million dollars, to fight a disease that has 100% survival rates when found in stage 0 or I, and an overall 89% 5-year survival rate. Contrast that with lung cancer, which accounts for 1/3 of all cancer deaths but only has a 15% 5-year survival rate, but receives less than half the public funding that breast cancer research does, and a tiny fraction of the private funding.

But, breast cancer is seen as a "women's issue", and so it gets a lot of high profile attention from people who want to make political statements. Lung cancer, on the other hand, is thought of as a "smoker's issue", so it's generally assumed that they did it to themselves (even though not all lung cancer is caused by smoking).

I don't have a defeatist attitude. I simply think that if the goal is to reduce the unnecessary deaths of young black men (as one example), then the best place to focus is where you will save the most lives. I see "saving lives" (most of whom will be black lives) as more important than "fighting racism". Put another way, how many young black men should we be willing to let die while we talk about racism instead?

 

Yes, but in your first example, money is a finite quantity. The more that goes for X the less there is for Y. There is not a finite amount of "care" out there that is being "overspent" on racism and "underspent" on other things. It is perfectly possible to care equally about ending racism and whatever else have you.

 

That is true, but there's only a finite amount of time and political capital than can be spent at a time. Those are finite resources, too. You can only really focus on one thing at a time, and just because you aren't focusing on something doesn't mean you don't care about it.

Time spent focusing the discussion on racism inherently takes time away on building and implementing policies for better police accountability, or other areas that can have more immediate impact. More importantly, all too often the focus on race turns divisive and damages any hope of building a consensus on policies that can be achieved immediately.

 

I actually agree with you about breast cancer to some extent. But the fact of the matter is that the reason the breast cancer charity industry has grown to the behemoth that it is now, is because breast cancer, being a disease that affects overwhelmingly women, was completely ignored and under-researched until it reached epidemic levels in the mid-late 20th century. Women began a movement to shine more light on the disease and increase research funding and the movement simply grew well beyond its purpose because it was one of those issues around which it's easy to build a consensus as a disease in which the victim is blameless (as you said, unlike lung cancer and the implications there, even though nonsmokers get it).

But breast cancer doesn't get a lot of attention because it's a 'women's issue.' Otherwise we'd all be pouring resources into dismantling rape culture and ending sexual assault. It gets a lot of attention because private corporations have found a way to exploit it as their own cash cow. Note that many of those pink-branded products ARE CARCINOGENIC and many of the corporations involved peddle or specialize in cancer-causing products and services. I know all of this is off topic for the thread, mea maxima culpa, but Komen and their ilk are one of my pet hates.

To circle back around to the discussion at hand, time spent focusing on racism is likely time spent that will help heal the other things you'd like to solve, like police accountability. As I said earlier, we need to treat the cause, not the symptoms. You seem to be dancing around the question of whether racism truly causes these problems - if you believe it does, then there's really no case to be made that we should put off dealing with it. If you don't, that's what we should be talking about.

 

"If you keep discussing racism you're letting blacks die" is by far the worst cop out KK has come up with yet.

 

Technically not a cop out. He's not halfway admitting it's a problem but just deflecting it with a somewhat asinine argument. Racism and police accountability intersect on this issue so focusing on both is warranted. The police use their racial biases to justify stronger measures in the enforcement and then aren't held accountable when the time comes. Saying to focus on one or the other because one has more 'support' (not a broad consensus) is really stupid. Focus on both because both issues are intertwined like some sort of ****ed up caduceus.

 

There is a time to deal with symptoms and a time to deal with causes. What we need right now isn't a long-term treatment plan, but triage, which does prioritize life-threatening symptoms over underlying root causes.

When someone is having a heart attack isn't the time to debate whether it was their diet and lack of exercise that caused it, or whether it was caused by a genetic condition, or some mixture of the two. It's the time to apply CPR to deal with the immediate problem, and after that is dealt with and the patient is stabilized you look at long-term prevention and treatment. When someone is having a life-threatening allergic reaction, you don't stop to debate policies on peanut-free schools or autoimmune diseases. You use an epipen to stop the reaction ASAP.

In the same way, the immediate problem is that police are using too much force too often, which is resulting in too many deaths. The largest portion of those deaths happen to be black men. Focusing on race right now, without addressing the immediate issues with police use of force, is like debating diet and exercise versus genetics instead of applying CPR. While you insist that race has to be the focus, more people will die like Eric Garner, john Crawford, or Tamir Rice did, or Pete Vasquez or Levar Jones could have.

If, as studies have suggested, body cameras can reduce the use of force by up to 60%, the odds are that several of those incidents wouldn't have happened were such cameras in use. According to this report, there are on the order of 400 arrest-related deaths caused by police every year. While body cameras likely wouldn't reduce that number by 60% (as that number includes people where use of force was unambiguously justified, such as when criminals open fire on police), if it reduced it by even 10%, that's another 40 lives (approximately 20 of which would likely be black men) that would be saved each year. That right there might prevent the next Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, or John Crawford.

If we don't so something, all that's going to happen is that people will fuss at each other for a few weeks and then it will all be forgotten until the next everything blows up. Every time something like this happens, we're told we need to talk about race as the cause, and then nothing really gets changed. The police continue to use disproportionate force and blacks continue to bear the brunt of it. Your approach is advocated over and over, and yet it doesn't seem to produce any tangible results.

 

That would be great if this were a medical issue, it's not. It's a cultural one that's been ignored by the constant backpatting we give ourselves for ending slavery and enacting the civil rights act. Then proudly proclaiming we're no longer racist and when actual racism crops up we brush it aside because hey, civil rights. *backpat* Even now you're trying to brush it aside with platitudes like 'political capital' and weak medical analogies.

 

Yeah, I like body cams, but unless the police are going to be held responsible for it then you're just video taping a crime in progress where one side has no reason to worry if they're caught.