What White America Fails to See http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html #BlackLivesMatter
FTFY
I am not advocating the course of action that was taken last night but I am not surprised. People of color have been and continue to be grossly mistreated by law enforcement all over the USA including incidents that are outright murder. Yet the police are rarely if ever convicted due to tremendous bias in the criminal justice system by everyone from judges to prosecutors to the juries themselves. This has been an issue for centuries in the USA but the recent advent of video on phones drives the issue home time and time again in a visceral way. People are angry and grow angrier every day. Some communities feel like they are at war with the police.
I was speaking to my wife yesterday about this very issue and I commented that in the absence of justice someone would eventually take revenge instead. This appears to be what happened last night and I would not be surprised if this type of thing continued until the system itself is fixed so law enforcement is held accountable for their misdeeds. I repeat that I do not advocate this course of action but it is not hard to understand why someone would eventually turn to it. I feel just as badly for the police officers murdered last night as I do those who have been murdered by other police forces. It is a shame it has come to this.
It’s definitely not hard to understand: people are so uneducated that they think violence is an effective strategy for social change when that’s almost never the case in history.
yeah…logging off for hot take Friday.
I do not think it has anything to do with education. It has everything to do with frustration.
Good article. I hope something change.
Man, this is going to get ugly
“3 Dallas cops killed, 7 wounded,” former Rep. Joe Walsh, an Illinois Republican, wrote just before midnight, in a tweet that is no longer on his profile: “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.”.
“Real America” is the new pseudonym for “White Power”.
Holy shit, I can’t believe an elected official just said that.
He’s not in office any longer. 1 term house member IIRC.
Couple of things I find interesting from following the twitters on this.
1 the number of different pictures of the supposed shooter that people are tweeting…all of them different people.
2 the weird convergence between the white gun nuts who think this is a false flag operation and some African Americans folks who believe that the identified shooter is fake and a false flag against BLM.
It’s a minor thing compared to all the death, but it seems like viral misinformation about suspects on social media is going to become the norm for public attacks like this.
Internet detectives falsely identified a man open carrying and his face got spread across twitter and the news, it’s still getting out there despite him being cleared at this point. There’s even video of him giving his gun over to cops in the vicinity as the chaos is erupting. His brother defended him on TV, and they’ve both been getting death threats now. News and social media need to be better as they are often making terrible situations worse.
Oh, I missed the “former” in there. Still…
The deceased shooter was an Army veteran who served a tour in Afghanistan. So he knew how to set up an ambush like that.
When I saw the video of him baiting the officer around the building column and flanking him, I thought “That guy is either a vet, a civilian that’s practiced a lot of UO on ranges, or a hardcore gamer.”
He was calm and “professional”, did not behave like that was his first rodeo.
But he was a moron, because these cops did nothing wrong, where just innocent people.
+1, total truth.
To me it looked like he was taking fire on that side of the column from someone further away so he went around the other side. I don’t care to watch it again though.
I’ve never heard of this before.