@Julian658 What does the USA has to do to be forgiven for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow? What is the solution?
Ok. First I agree with Doc that we are not fighting the crimes of the past but the inequities of now.
Here is the unpopular answer.
You have to spend money on it. I work with poor people all of the time. None of them are given much respect by anyone. It goes like this:
If someone is desperately ill you give him medicine.
If someone is desperately hungry you give him food.
If someone is desperately frightened you give him comfort.
If someone is desperately poor you give him a speech about how he ought to pull himself up by the boot straps and how it is the responsibility of his neighborhood, and how his problems are historical in nature, and how he is black and has a lower IQ and how he is just after welfare and how you don't know why this is happening to him what with all of the programs out there he can use and how he should have paid attention in school and how his father should have cared for his family and how eh hangs out with gangs and how he shouldn't smoke dope and how, just in general, if he were a better person he wouldn't be poor because, see that white guy over there, he is not poor.
So let's all agree that you cannot solve this problem with a speech. Fair enough?
I feel sad when I see the pain in some members of black America.
Then you need to vote for legislators who take their problems seriously. That would not be republicans. We have seen what happens when the economy gets roaring. Many many black people are left behind. And don't tell me about Hispanics, or poor whites or the lot of Mung immigrants. Don't try to water down poverty. Different communities require different solutions. If you want to talk about Native American poverty we will talk about it next. Now I want to talk about the black community.
The images of police brutality elicit very powerful emotions. What can be done?
You have to fire the leadership when it happens. In this case the world is going to fall on four policemen who could have been spared this if the department had put pressure on the leadership from the time they make sergeant right to the time they hire the police chief making their continued employment contingent on the performance of their men including stopping acts of violence by those men. Training sure. But if the sergeant know he is going to get canned if one of his men breaks the rules he will be proactive. I will tell you that there is not one of these officers, now facing a long time in prison and a ruined life for themselves and their families who would do this again. So sure you can train them how to make an arrest but you have to convince them that without fail, acts of even the slightest police brutality will be punished and all allegations investigated by someone who does not have a dog in the fight.
Massive retraining of the police force? Perhaps hire large number of black policemen?
Did you look at the pictures of these four officers? We do not need more minority police though it would be nice if the police department looked like the community it serves, but rather we need officers who have leadership with a zero tolerance to any form of police brutality.
What is the solution to the nihilism of looters?
The hope that springs from seeing their community/city/state/country honestly caring about them and investing in their future. It is not enough to Cleveland to have a "program" the entire country has to have a "commitment". So if you are a poor young black kid facing poverty and a hopeless future there needs to be a step you can take
today to do something about it. A number you can call. A person with resources who is charged with helping you personally.
Some forum members say this is white supremacy. What the heck is white supremacy?
White supremacy in the US is insidious. Sure there are some who dress up and act like assholes loudly spouting a racist agenda but they are just popinjays. They are annoying but they don't matter. The white supremacy that hurts is:
People who talk about problems in the black community as "they". "They have failing marriages". "They" have a culture of welfare. "They" do poorly in school. "They" have low IQs. "They" listen to disgusting music. "They" have a community drug problem. This distances "that" community from "ours" and ours is better because, you know, it just happens to be white and don't think I am racist because I have at least two black friends. Until we can replace each of those "they's" with "our" we will never tear down the cultural wall that separates the races. And yes. We must acknowledge that black people and to a slightly lesser degree Hispanic people face challenges that poor whites do not face and do have a harder time of "it" than poor whites.
Now once we figure all of this out then we need to put our money where our mouth is. We need more money is traditionally black schools. We need money to incentivize employers to give black youth a chance. (A real job with real upward mobility not a minimum wage, dead end job.) We need money to help poor performing students get tutoring and to pay their tuition into college or university. Remember that a black kid's future, and the future of his family to come profoundly changes when he gets that bachelor's degree, or his journeyman plumber certification.
We are discussing spending a trillion or more dollars on infrastructure. What if, in addition to what we are spending now we spent a trillion dollars on the black community. Not on reparations, whatever that means, but on performance orientated solutions like the above.
Is the police force a racist institution?
Yes. Their problem is that they look at the black community as a thing. A thing with high crime, low opportunity and general hopelessness. You know that low expectations bullshit you like to spout? Well here it is. They treat the community with high expectations of trouble. And not without some justification. The problem is that this leads to individuals in the community all being painted with the same brush. So if I was a black parent today, living in one of the mostly black communities, I would tell my son to run from the police as soon as he sees them. This is not about how the police treat a community. It is about how they treat a person. One person. One at a time. So the answer is easy. Yes the police department is racist. It intends to be. It puts all black people in the same box and that is racist.
We need equal opportunity. That does not mean that both white and black people can compete for the same job. It may mean that the black person may need some extra help getting qualified. They may need a little help getting started in the job. A little extra training. Why? Because we whites did not pay the bill up front by fixing the schools, providing encouragement and stopping soul crushing poverty. And this is not oppressing the white guy who doesn't get that particular job. He has no claim to "fairness" until that black person is born with the same advantages he has.
Or are some cops racist?
All of the above.
It seems the police union protects their own.
I am generally a fan of unions. I have belonged to two of them. Public employees should not have unions. Or if they do the activities of these unions should be strictly limited to issues of pay and working hours. The idea that the union should trump the authority of the department leadership is a travesty. The union leader of the four who murdered Floyd was seen on the stage with Trump. Public employees should not be permitted to campaign in their official capacity at all. So he should be demoted or fired.
Long post. Why? Because what is going to happen in this case is:
The protests will die down.
The cops will go back to business as usual.
Trump will claim victory as a law and order president.
Trump will blame the upsurge in Corona virus cases on the protestors.
And his base is simply not intelligent enough to see all of these are bad things. But then they are mostly racist to begin with.......
- By grassroots1
- By Verv