http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/10/1410507/-When-There-Is-A-Nail-That-Needs-Hitting-You-Can-Count-On-Charles-M-Blow-To-Hit-It
Both the question and the answer focused an inordinate amount of attention on police conduct and not enough on revealing that they are simply the agents of policy instituted by officials at the behest of the body politic.
Society itself is to blame. There is blood on everyone’s hands, including the hands still clutching the tax revenue that those cities needed but refused to solicit, instead shifting the mission of entire police departments “from ‘protect and serve’ to ‘punish and profit,’ ” as Mother Jones magazine recently put it in a fascinating article on this subject.
Racism is a social construct.
That is why when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” it grates. All Lives Matter may be one’s personal position, but until this country values all lives equally, it is both reasonable and indeed necessary to specify the lives it seems to value less.
He highlights the failures by Fox News in asking the right questions by supposing that there is some equivalence in power between black communities and the state. The assumption that both played equal roles in the divisiveness is as he says, absurd.
Denise Oliver Velez asked me yesterday if I wanted to write some diaries on xenophobia and racism in Europe and this institutionalized racism is a part of that. Xenophobia has been around for millennia, whereas racism is a relatively new concept and pretty much started with colonization.
I wont go into this fully here but "blood purity" within the colonies was a primary driver in what today in the US we term racism. Until we fully accept this situation then actually dealing with institutionalized racism is near impossible.
The only way in my "white" view that Black Lives will really matter is to finally deal with the disparity of power, rather than just saying there is a division and assume both have equal roles in resolving the problem. This process is also applicable to gender disparities, but one problem at a time.
It goes far deeper than the SCOTUS opinion that racism can be declared over because everyone has a vote, the whole system needs to be adjusted where all have an equal role in the functioning and power structure of the system. So that the system itself is not the source of the inherent inequality. First we need to admit that we are not dealing with equal partners in any racial division and that one group is oppressed by the other. It goes beyond trying to heal a division, to actually removing the source of the hurt.
once again i find myself with less to say because it's all being said within these recent articles truth surfaces eventually but how many are around to witness and really accept it as something to give unbiased thought to that is our conundrum getting it out there enough that a majority is exposed and actually begins to create a dialogue of each others thoughts
respecting one another enough not to over talk or close their minds and quietly wait for their opportunity to ignore the other and express their own with no consideration because the never really heard there is a difference in recognizing the noise of vocal utterances and actually hearing what is said other wise listening is like having the TV on but you are engaged in conversation on the phone you hear the noise but you don't recognize what is being said.
simply put we all know that all lives matter but when someone says to you Black lives Matter and you respond all lives matter you just successfully nullified the statement and made the subject something other than what it started out to be.
try reversing that and the fact of racism and bigotry in America how do you think Whites would respond if they were told all other lives mattered while you were trying to tell them in light of the recent crimes exclusively against Whites that their lives matter, walk a mile before you criticize than recognize
