I think you are looking at history with some very rosy glasses there if you think change only happens when you protest peacefully and follow the law.
Occupy Wall Street barely had a message. They didn’t even know how to voice what they wanted and they squandered the attention they had because they didn’t have the detailed work you spoke of. It’s not accurate to say the Civil Movement was entirely peaceful or lawful. At no point did I say that violent protests would work alone either.
For longer than I’ve been alive, police shooting minorities has been a problem and we’ve been talking about it to no change whatsoever. I am not going to blame a group that confronts the police and shuts down a road because the nice comfortable not scary peaceful movement you seem to want has produce zero results. And the political arena we have right now is not exactly a welcoming environment for change.
We have violent protests. We have celebrities using their voice and position peacefully. We have politicians engaged in the process and the same group hates all of it and will resist it to the nail because all they want to do is talk about some made SJW conspiracy while people literally die in the street from men and women who are supposed to server and protect us.
We’ve had several incidents in the world, not just the USA, where students went up against the government, largely unarmed, and were killed by the military. I am assuming you would tell them the same thing?
Just about any protest worth a shit is going to be in violation of some law or another. Maybe we should have “free speech zones” that keep that kind of thing off the streets so that nobody’s comfortable little (white) lives get affected.
In many of those cases, they were protesting government’s where they had no right to peaceful protest at all.
In the US, you have the right to peaceful protest and freedom to express your views.
If you turn to violence, then you are rejecting the system of government, and taking your chances with the adjudicative.
In a situation of severe government oppression, rejection of that government may be the best option. But in the US? The system of government is pretty good, and rejection of it and it’s rule of law is foolish.
You are kind of muddying any argument you are trying to formulate by making random attacks at the US government.
Even in cases where their actions were illegal, the success of the civil rights movement hinged heavily upon its being non violent, because it was able to claim a moral high ground over those employing violence against them.
Because a minority isn’t likely to win a was based on might. They must convince the majority to see their side. But such convincing is not likely to take place through a direct attack on society.
No I am holding you accountable to your statement. You’re saying when someone does something illegal, they’re not afforded protections. I point out that there are cases in this world where unarmed students go against the government, often illegally, and they’re killed for it. I assume with the statements you are making, you’re okay with that. You come back stating those governments don’'t allow them to protest legally. I remind you this happened in the USA, right here, in modern history… and now you want to divert from the fact that your earlier implication indicates that illegal actions means what exactly, that the law enforcers can do anything if someone does something against the law?
We’re in this conversation because you put us there, not me.
I should have added that corollary to my how to succeed at gaining civil rights- you need a threat to the majority (does not have to be violent) , and support of a decent amount of the majority for it to happen.
Right now I think BLM has a bit of both, but not enough.
They are shown painfully vivid, heart-wrenching dash-cam
footage of officers being beaten, disarmed, or gunned down
after a moment of inattention or hesitation.
Here’s an example of one of those dash-cam videos:
Video summary/link
Pretty disturbing stuff. Georgia deputy pulls over a speeding Vietnam veteran. The vet is instantly aggressive and uncooperative and soon pulls out an M-I Carbine from the cab of his trunk and they trade fire. It’s no contest, though, and the vet proceeds to execute the officer, one bullet at a time. Click at your own risk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-ycSkoYfc
I’ve also been told that the other kinds of training videos tend to have brown/black actors performing as the villains. [citation needed]
I’m not blaming anybody. The Charlotte freeway shutdown is perfectly understandable as a direct response of a community in pain. What I’m saying is that it’s not effective, particularly in the absence of a concrete political agenda. Suppose protesters shut down interstates in every major city next week. That would accomplish - what, exactly? Do you really expect annoyed commuters to lobby for better police oversight as a result? If not, then what is the precise point of shutting down an interstate?
(I have no problem with civil disobedience, and I would have no problem with shutting down interstates as a form of civil disobedience if someone could convince me shutdowns were an effective way of changing people’s minds. But so far as I can tell, freeway shutdowns are just a way of pissing off the maximum amount of people without making them think about the underlying issue at all.)
You keep saying that nothing has changed, but that’s not true. For most of US history the complacent majority has blithely accepted the cops’ side of things when there’s a police shooting. Now, for the first time, those people are being forced to re-examine their faith in the police. You might say, “Yeah, but that’s really just because small video cameras were invented, not because human nature has changed,” and that would be true. Be that as it may, the advent of the small video camera has opened up a window where it is actually possible to change people’s minds on this issue, and it’s vital that window be used to good advantage. That’s going to require concrete political action, not just shutting down freeways because people are (understandably) angry.
I think these two statements somewhat contradict each other. For the first time people might consider their auto believe the police stance but it has nothing to do with the rioting and the protests we see after every questionable death?
I’m with ShivaX though. I don’t think the auto-believe police supporters are re-examining anything. They’re just becoming more entrenched, they’ve found their president, the union is with them, and there are people that are just mad that this interrupts their daily lives and don’t care either way.
The racial divide feels like it’s getting worse, not better.
Well, for some people–often people of color, immigrants, the poor–there never has been much faith in the police. It’s that some middle-class white people are now starting to see that all those calls for “law and order,” without any caveats or even definitions of what that meant, played a role in creating the mess we’re in. That when given free rein, law enforcement will do what law enforcement pretty much always will do, everywhere, when it has little real oversight–it will treat everyone as a criminal, or at least, everyone it can get away with. Just like insurance companies, given their druthers, would take our premiums and mandate we live in a foam-rubber room and never leave, so they never have to pay out, the police have a world view, taken collectively, that everyone is bad, only the police keep people from an orgy of violence and crime, and that there are no innocents.
Perhaps I state it too strongly, but from what I can see, that’s pretty much it. There’s a reason for the extensive and difficult oversight of the police that communities developed over the years, and which seems to have been rolled back out of fear of things that often never existed or were of a very different nature than what was presented to the public.The relatively large numbers of people who stridently support the police version of these shootings without much if any reservation or attempt to look at what actually happened in that situation (and there are of course a lot of justified police uses of force) aren’t really making a comment on the specific happening. They’re in effect stating their concurrence in the world view of law enforcement, a Hobbesian take on society colored (no pun intended) by the view that it’s always “them,” usually non-whites, or other people not like “us,” who are the problem. This despite the actual crime statistics in much if not most of the country, where the jails are filled with local whites, and despite the fact that most middle class Americans are hardly ever touched by serious crime.
