None
5998
Yeah. Be thankful equality is being sought rather than retribution.
And that’s something those who tremble in fear for the BLM movement just can’t fathom. They know they’d seek hard, bloody retribution themselves and can’t understand equality.
My anecdote for the day:
Female POC colleague makes a point. White male management pretends she said nothing.
Five minutes later, white male colleague says EXACT SAME THING - “that’s good thinking”.
This happens all the time.
Sure, but was it because she was a person of color or because she was a woman? Those are the questions we need to be asking /s.
schurem
6002
Fucking manager’s an asshole, that’s for sure!
Rward
6003
That’s what the sentiment was amongst white South Africans before apartheid ended.
After it ended and the ANC came to power, nothing of the sort happened, instead we thankfully had Nelson Mandela saying “The time for healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasm that divides us has come. The time to build is upon us.”
I really hope the US has a change and a “Nelson” moment.
Yeah man, don’t you wish the US had a Mandela and a Desmond Tutu to help them heal.
We had Barack Obama and it did the opposite as the racists went into overdrive. Trump comes along and he gives them all legitimacy and praise.
Very much this.
Yes, this too. The big difference with South Africa is that the whites were outnumbered 10 to 1, which creates a marvelous incentive to accept an offer of reconciliation. It’s far harder for the group in the minority to get that kind of willingness, unfortunately.
KevinC
6007
I hope so too, but we’re not there yet. The US has a dangerous cancer in its heart that we need to excise before we can turn to healing, IMO.
Yes, we do. We also don’t have a leader on these issues that is anywhere near the likes of a Nelson Mandela, unfortunately.
Thrag
6009
Good stuff here shared by the President.
KevinC
6010
Imagine writing an article that Barack Obama tweets out a link to.
Now imagine writing something that Donald Trump retweets.
I want Obama back.
I’m sure Biden will invite him to hang out in the White House. You can pretend that Obama is still the president when they do pictures together.
Thrag
6012
There are a few articles in the thread in case anyone is just clicking the vox link in the preview. The NYT one on the reformation of the German police after WWII feels especially poignant.
That first article is excellent and reinforces my own conclusions about all this, long in coming though they’ve been:
Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.
The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.
They literally think it’s “us vs. them” and they’re at war, a situation further exacerbated by the fact that they’re loaded up with military gear.
KevinC
6014
I think it’s spot on. My sister is a cop, and she… well, lets just say we haven’t spoken for a little while after I shared my unfiltered thoughts on some of her recent rants.
She lives out of state but her description of Salt Lake City was insane. She described a mayor who was the enemy of the police, who was allied with the criminals and “rioters” (BLM protest the weekend where the whole nation exploded saw a cop car get left out as bait and burned, but ever since demonstrations have been peaceful) against the police.
She described a warzone where gunshots were ringing out across the city while she was there (I had to point out to her that per crime reports that wasn’t the case, and the “gunshots” she heard MIGHT have had to do with the fact that she visited on the fucking 4th of July). She berated myself and others for not having enough “respect” for herself and fellow officers. I mean the way she was talking, she was a soldier on the frontlines fighting against overwhelming forces seeking to throw down civilization and if innocents get trampled along the way, it’s just the price we have to pay for the police to hold the line.
It was fucking insane, and I told her as much. She’s been a cop for no more than 10 years or so, and she was never like this before. I haven’t had a ton of contact with her so the change was startling to me, given that growing up she was the rocker anti-authority girl. I told her that she and other police need to remember they work for US. We pay THEM to protect US. We’re not foreign civvies under the boot of martial law.
Anyway, that conversation more than anything convinced me of a dire need to defund the police. Not get rid of policing, but the entire system as it exists needs to be burned to the ground and something new built in its place. We need to completely restructure and rethink policing in this country, because we can’t have law enforcement officers with this mindset.
And just to be clear, my sister hasn’t developed that mindset because she works in a terrible neighborhood in Chicago or anything, she’s up in Wyoming where the most dangerous thing they deal with is probably drunken tumbleweeds and the occasional meth addict.
Rward
6015
Yes, this too. The big difference with South Africa is that the whites were outnumbered 10 to 1, which creates a marvelous incentive to accept an offer of reconciliation. It’s far harder for the group in the minority to get that kind of willingness, unfortunately.
I think this is one of the big differences - here, the whites are the minority, in the US they’re the majority.
