The article states that it is sort of a collective action problem, and I think that is a good way of looking at it... which makes me think that you needs some government intervention probably, or some incentive to change those behaviors. — ChatteringMonkey

Yeah, it is absolutely a collective action problem (but then again all politics is!). I do think state action can play an important role (part of what you're seeing happening in the US right now is a total failure of state policy), but politics can't stop at the edge of government - it also needs individual leadership, a diffusion of ideas, money and funding, and so on. Ideally, working symbiotically with each other. The incentives are indeed skewed right now. Systemic racism requires systemic solutions. It cannot come (just) from good-willed individuals. If you have the time, there are some really interesting proposals peppered throughout this talk which is among the most astute analyses of the current situation I know. I linked the bit where race comes into explicit discussion. Basic message: race needs to be thought together with political economy or not at all.

And I believe that terrifying someone into submission usually doesn't work, sorry. — ssu

Then you don't know history and should probably stop talking. When the ruling class get scared, that's when massive, systemic change happens - everytime.

Oh the irony in liberal leftists being a cause of rather then the solution to systemic racism. — ChatteringMonkey

There's no irony friend. You're just uneducated on the distinction between liberals and leftists.

The article is helpful in providing some concrete tips for praxis.

Again, not my country. And if you need to wait for someone to declare 'civil war' then you've already lost. You don't wait for a holocaust before deciding maybe that things are not so good. And given the systematic murder of blacks in the US, perhaps your worrying about flags, is just bullshit irrelavence by way of contrast.

The question is why you are so terrified over what 'the right' thinks. That 'the right' is a regressive force which stands for nothing but sucking the dick of the rich and powerful is simply a given: a strong reaction on their part is a sign of going in exactly in the correct direction, of doing exactly what is needed. The more terrified they are, the better. The only worry is what happens when 'the right' begins to agree with you - it's a sign that something is terribly wrong, and a mistake has been made somewhere. Consensus is the sure sign of a wrong move.

As for the whole 'unity' shtick - those who say peace when there is no peace say nothing at all.

Oh look, another person to no longer take seriously. Ah well.

My 'motive' is that you literally have no idea what you are talking about. The attempt to frame systemic racism as a matter of belief is so ignorant as to defy serious conversation. Perhaps rather than trying to fit real world violence into your little pet-philosophical project which you've been wrangling to no avail for years - a disgusting bit of curve-fitting that intellectualizes real life hurt - you might actually educate yourself rather than mouthing off about things of which your ignorance is embarrassing. Here's a reading to get you started:

"Race is a social construction; racism is a function of social behaviors and relations. Racist ideologies are not the cause of systems, institutions or actions that perpetuate or exacerbate racialized inequality – they are produced to justify and legitimize these states of affairs. In other words, the actual practice of racialized group-making and inter-group competition is more fundamental than the popular discourses and ideologies which frame them. Yet many contemporary antiracist efforts -- especially among highly-educated, relatively well-off, white liberals – focus primarily on ‘hearts and minds’ (beliefs, intentions, attitudes, feelings), symbols and rhetoric. Antiracism has largely shifted from a sociological project (focused on institutions, behaviors, the distribution of resources, etc.) into a psychological one. Even sociologists seem to be increasingly adopting psychologized frameworks for understanding.

...Awareness of systemic racism does not cleanly translate into actual behaviors that reduce inequality -- neither does supporting racial egalitarianism through words, beliefs or feelings. Indeed, among the primary beneficiaries and perpetuators of systemic racism today are whites who are already convinced of their privilege -- who both understand and lament the disadvantages people of color face. It is precisely these convictions that blind them to their own role in reinforcing racialized inequality, thereby pushing them to look externally to identify culpable parties (i.e. the problem must be the ‘bad’ people who say, feel, or believe the ‘wrong’ things about others from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups)." (my bolding)

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/wd54z/

The last words of Elijah McClain, murdered by police:



Fuck police violence, and fuck all cops.

May these protests get infinitely 'stupider', forever.

And may people who, in the face of the above, worry about 'microagressions' or burning cloth, go straight to the ninth level of hell.

Anyone who cites Prager U disqualifies themselves from being taken seriously, ever.

Also reading. — Baden

Man, the 5th chapter just... explodes. I wasn't expecting it. Wow.

I'm reporting this to the paragraph police. — fishfry

Wee woo wee woo *snip*

I dunno about the soliders but the Goddess... could it be Boethius?

If you think burning a shitty piece of fabric is more important than the deaths of black people then you're well and truly fucked. Have you considered that what has 'divided Americans' is people dying and not some magic cloth? Or have you so throughly bought into Fox news propaganda that you have a genuine concern for that trash?

Just saying that countries can always disappoint you. — ssu

If you're not prepared to be disappointed, and if you're not prepared for a massive reaction by Fox news-types, then you don't understand anything about anything.

So I guess soon burning the US Flag will be an act of protest against systemic racism and then flying the US flag will become a microaggression and racist. — ssu

Don't threaten me with a good time.

Some of the most haunting images that came out of the civil rights movement are those of of civil rights activists training for sit-ins. They expected to be cajoled, hurt, and assaulted, and they prepared themselves for it, because they knew what they are doing would upset people enough that they might be harmed for it:





This is the kind of shit that doesn't get told when white liberal story-telling remakes the civil rights movement into a bunch of kum-bai-yah shit sprouted by MLK holding hands on a nice long walk somewhere. The activists above knew very well that this is what it would take - and what it did take - to effect change.

There already have been people killed in the protests - almost all of them by police and by white supremacists. But the fucktards blubbering about 'violence' are silent as a fucking grave about it.

The funny thing about the "it's unproductive" response is that it is so totally, utterly wrong, at every empirical level. Pieces of shit like NOS will play their script-fed lines about how this is just virtue signaling despite the fact that these protests have done more to move the needle on racial injustices in the US since the civil rights movement. There has literally never been a more 'productive' moment in racial politics for the last however many decades, and these shit-for-brains will literally look reality in the face and tell you the opposite. These people are projecting their own shitty discomfort as though it reflected anything more the state of their little-dicked anxiety and try to pass it off as grandma's hard-lived wisdom. Anyone like twobitCarlos who plays the 'unproductive' line is either stupid, a liar, or both.

Fear works, antagonism works, discord is wildly productive.

Here, it would benefit us to recognize that our differences seem to be on a ontological/metaphysical level, which amounts - in some ways - to the linguistic framework we're using to account for racism and/or racist belief. Well, and we also differ in what we espouse to be the necessary method for realizing the changes needed... for making them happen! — creativesoul

I. do. not. give. a. shit. about. belief. No one talking about 'belief' is on 'my side'. Anyone talking about 'belief' has no idea what systematic racism is and ought to go join the Klan for all the good it does.

Worth noting how different the US was back then too in general, btw.

MLK might be publicly and officially revered now, but are the Black Panthers too? — ssu

It's a convenient feel-good myth that the US was 'different back then'. The most that has happened in that the forms of racial prejudice have been displaced from a lack of rights to present disenfranchisement at the level of wealth, education, housing and other places. As for the Black Panthers, they were fucking heroes and anyone who does not revere them like they do MLK ought to stop pretending they give a shit. The Black Panthers set up breakfast programs for hungry schoolchilden, provided clinics for the sick, childcare, book programs, transportation networks for the elderly and more. They unquestionably did more good at the level of concrete practice than MLK did.

Get this through your head: the US is dealing with the same problems that have existed since the end of the civil war, in many ways in worse forms, not better. More black people die at the hands of the police in the US than they did at the height of lynchings in post-reconstruction US. If the US is 'different' from 'back then', it is fucking worse along a range of metrics.

This discussion was merged into 0.999... = 1

"Our bodies were loot. The forced extraction of our labor was loot. A system of governance that suppressed our wages, relieved us of property and excluded black people from equal schools and public accommodations is a form of looting. We can speak of the looting of black property through redlining, slum clearance and more recently predatory lending. Police departments and municipal courts engage in their own form of looting by issuing and collecting excessive fines and fees from vulnerable communities.

...The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood the vexed relationship between black people and property. While his phrase that riots are the “language of the unheard” is always trotted out in times like these, he made a more powerful statement in an address to the American Psychological Association about a month after the Detroit rebellion in 1967.

“Alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, [the looter] is shocking it by abusing property rights,” he said. The real provocateur of the riots, he argued, was white supremacy. Racism is responsible for the slum conditions that were the breeding grounds of rebellion. He added, “if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.” What to do? Dr. King was unequivocal: full employment and decent housing, paid for by defunding the war in Vietnam."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html

Contemporaneous revision: gtfo of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This thread is too stupid to continue existence.

Worth also noting that Martin "peaceful" Luther "protest" King had disapproval ratings at levels far worse than current day BLM throughout most of his activist life up to his murder - which tells us that either BLM is not going far enough in stoking antagonism and sowing division, or that all those whining about BLM will be one day similarly viewed as the already-dead historical artifiacts that they are - the kind we will study in history books henceforth while aweing at how it is that such putrid, shit people still existed 'in this modern age'.

"Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn’t enforce its own laws because the color of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can’t give them justice." - Malcolm X, Oxford Union Speech.

Any protest worth its name is disruptive and upsets people, otherwise it doesn't deserve to be called protest. Not necessarily violence, but it should definitely make at least some people mad, and others afraid.

It appears that @TheMadFool is again being a complete moron and not taking into account the fact that woman have were excluded by the kinds of educational and employment opportunities afforded to men for most of history.

But wanton violence against random places that just happen to be nearby? No. — Pfhorrest

There is wanton violence against blacks who sleep in their own home, who just happen to be driving a car that one day, who just happen to be in the path of a cop with impunity. The whole fucking system is a system of wanton violence, perpetuated primarily by those with power - and people want to moralize about the powerless engaging in over-represented, media-spotlighted instances of violence against property? I guess you simply have to be the right color to perpetuate violence otherwise you get tut-tut'd by the sanctimonious who only like it if their blacks protest in just so a manner, amenable to nanny's dinner time etiquette.

You can read the damn book, just don't buy it. Pirate it. Borrow it from the library. Steal a copy.

No that's the motherland, who taught us Aussies everything we know about subjugating an indigenous population.

Not my country. My country is arguably worse.

No more state murder of black people. Ideally, no more state murder of any people. This is not hard.

Until then set fucking fire to everything, make everyone uncomfortable, and heighten every tension available.

Consensus is ruling class poison. More division, more agitation.

No one needs 'consensus' about the murder of black people. It simply needs to stop. No more, no less. No justice, no peace.

Those who whine about broken windows and have nothing to say about broken black bodies ought to shut the fuck up. Protestor violence is counter-violence and those santimoniously crying about it without having a word to say about the pervasive social violence visited upon those same protestors are hypocritical wanks who don't give a shit about violence at all - expect when it is practised by those of the wrong color.

However, in order to get a full view of those effects/affects, we must also acquire knowledge of exactly how racist belief has been legalized/legitimized - empowered - throughout American history as well as how those policies affected/effected black Americans over the centuries, particularly after the Civil War. Those effects/affects remain to a large degree... in the results - as you say. — creativesoul

No. The 'effects' are racist, not merely a result of prior 'causal' racism. Racism is dead black men at dispropotionate rates, not some epiphenomenon whose real centre of gravity is somewhere else. I don't give a shit about 'knowledge'. George Floyd was not some epistemic glitch, he, and thousands like him, are dead people, not an after school fair project for you to 'acquire knowledge' about.

:lol:

Imagine thinking political lobbying works and is not completely useless :rofl:

Burn more shit, it works.

Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon - Wretched of the Earth

I've put off Fanon for too long, and this couldn't be a more appropriate time. I'm actually so excited.

From whence systemic racism come if not from systems put in place by racists? — creativesoul

From racist outcomes. A system in which more black people are disporportionally murdered by the state is so regardless if every single government officer was an avowed anti-racist. What matters is results, not (just) intention.

Did you read the articles StreetlightX posted earlier by any chance? — Isaac

By chance, I was watching an interview with Adolph Reed the other day, who wrote one of the articles I linked and by George he's a terrible speaker. Rambly and really unhelpful at making explicit what he's talking about.