Comment by AI_WAIFU
5 years ago
> Other options have been tried and failed.
To fix what? Police brutality? I don't think so. Here's some stuff that was tried and worked. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/05/18/10-citi...
Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
It wasn't just one video, it wasn't one just one incident, It's not a small amount of people who are upset, and it's not okay.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-protest-george-floyd-pr...
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
Which is why people continue to protest.
I mean you can point at all the examples of police overreach, injustice and brutality throughout history, but it was the one video that kicked it off. But you've kind of ceeded the original point, none of what you mentioned, and most of the examples cited in that link, are not specifically racial issues, even though they disproportionately affect black people. So "All lives matter" is a reasonable position to hold when presented with the issue of police brutality, that way you end up focusing on the brutality itself rather than the race of the victim. So tarring it as racist by including it in the definition of "white supremacy" in the way the picture does is rhetorically dishonest.
Which finally ties us back to my orignial claim, which is that "white supremacy" is on the rise, and thats because people who care more about themselves or non-racial issues than racial issues have been reclassified as "white supremacists".