If you want to ignore the fact that more whites are killed by cops than blacks to focus on the rate at which blacks are killed compared to whites, then you are essentially saying that because there are more whites, those lives that were lost don't matter as much as the black lives lost because there are less blacks. Whites can afford to lose a few lives more than blacks.

I would be out marching for All Lives Matter and against police brutality in general, not march for the narrow-minded view that Black Lives Matter, when the problem of police brutality would include racism as part of it's scope. Racism isn't being denied, rather it is being incorporated into the larger problem of police brutality and corruption.

When in doubt, you can trust your child's moral compass! — Benkei

Your Christianity is showing, Sir.

At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,
And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become
as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew18

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them.
But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence. — Matthew 19:13-15

I'll be the last to say the Bible doesn't contain any truths. :-)

If you want to ignore the fact that more whites are killed by cops than blacks to focus on the rate at which blacks are killed compared to whites, then you are essentially saying that because there are more whites, those lives that were lost don't matter as much as the black lives lost because there are less blacks. Whites can afford to lose a few lives more than blacks — Harry Hindu

By this logic, the genocide of a small minority is "just as bad" as the occasional misuse of force against the majority, so long as the numbers line up. Hell Since every death is a tragedy, what relevance do police killings have besides millions of people dieing of heart failure?

I would be out marching for All Lives Matter and against police brutality in general, not march for the narrow-minded view that Black Lives Matter, when the problem of police brutality would include racism as part of it's scope. Racism isn't being denied, rather it is being incorporated into the larger problem of police brutality and corruption. — Harry Hindu

So, why haven't you marched yet?

Anyone who does not understand 'black lives matter' to precisely mean that 'all lives matter' misunderstands what 'black lives matter' says.

When I share this on Facebook, I am told I am a 'privielged white sh*t who is exactly causing the problem.' No one at all on Facebook groups even voices any concern that the same happen to other people as happened to me. — ernestm

Let me try and be a more understanding version of a social media hate mob.

There are certain topics; mostly race and gender; where you have to be careful about the position that your utterances have in the conversation. Some examples.

Social media feminist: The gender pay gap still exists and isn't shrinking.
Randomer: Men still get sent to die in war way more than women.
Social media hate mob: Get your prejudice out of here!

Social media anti-racism activist: The legacy of slavery and imperialism leads poverty to split along race lines in every country in the political north.
Randomer: Even though the majority of people in the 1% are white, the majority of white people are not part of the 1%.
Social media anti-racism activist: Stop enabling the exploitation of non-whites across the globe.

People with left politics on social media can have itchy trigger fingers. This is because they're so used to the randomer making those points to undermine their own; the randomer's utterances might be very agreeable, and have the intent to highlight an under-appreciated aspect of complexity in the discussion. But most of the time the use of these statements is as a counterpoint. Even if they're true, the assumption that they are making a counterpoint to the social media hate mob's beliefs is what they're reacting to.

So with you; highlighting that living in a poor mostly black neighbourhood with gang violence problems while you (and your family?) have white skin might be totally fucked in a slightly different way than people appreciate, as well as being totally fucked due to your neighbourhood being on the receiving end of systemic racism... You put that among the wolves like Randomer does above? They're used to seeing such things used to undermine progress in the discourse on the issues they're vocal about.

If you treat it like a counterpoint; if you raise it when you feel underappreciated or neglected make sure you're writing with care and nuance, and that you try your best to do legwork to understand where they're coming from too.

TL;DR version: don't post on fucking Facebook.

To be fair, posters here do it too, it's more likely to be explained though.

I hadn't thought what it was like living on the edge of an all-black neighborhood much since I left there. But this week I started hearing black people complaining about how much white people want to kill them all the time. At first, I remembered the black people trying to shoot me through the window while I was in bed sleeping, which is why I suddenly left with nothing but an overnight bag. then today, suddenly, the beginning of it all came back in a flood.

When I moved to Oak Park in Sacramento, I had not known it was the original home of the militant 'black panther' movement in the 1960s. I certainly did not think its heritage would still be as viciously anti-white as it was 50 years ago. So when I first moved to live under the rule of the STILL SUPREME BLACK RACE in Oak Park, the first thing that I noticed was the amount of putrid trash everywhere.

I started to clean it up, first on my own street, and then gradually, across all of Oak Park, whenever I walked to buy some groceries. I started carrying brushes and gloves and garbage bags in my grocery bag, to clean up the worse of it: the broken glass scattered on the corners to stop bicycles going near the street pushers; the heroine needles stuck in the primary school fences; the condoms thrown at the walls of the bread factory; and so on. the grocery stores were run by Vietnamese, who liked what I was doing and helped me dispose of the trash around their stores.

But as I was picking up litter, the SUPREME BLACK RACE would drive by, shouting 'work harder you white fuckhead!' at me while throwing fast-food wrappers behind me where I had just picked up, and occasionally hitting me with beer bottles. Sometimes the black parents laughed appreciatively at their children's antics, giving me a knuckle 'fuck you' sign if I dared to look at them.

Once a neighbor saw me returning from a longer cleanup foray, and shouted, "here, I save this for you," and threw a dead bird at me. At first I tried ignoring it, but after I got inside, I thought I better go back and pick it up before a car ran it over. But it was too late, and while I was scraping the splattered carcass off the asphalt from the middle of the street with a shovel, another car drove by at 40mph and opened its door just before getting to where I was standing, knocking me over and bruising me badly.

Such were the games enjoyed by the SUPERIOR BLACK RACE I was permitted to live with, as they'd remind me frequently, pushing me off the sidewalk into the gutter if I didn't get out of their way fast enough when they walked in battalions down the sidewalks they owned.

After the dead bird incident, I took to going to the market at odd hours, or between 10am and 11.30am when it was most likely the schoolchildren would not be there. But they often skipped school, the younger ones shooting air guns at squirrels for fun, until about 12years old, when their parents thought them old enough to have old revolvers to play with. I never had to pick up ammunition rounds, they were hoarded more than money. Sometimes the Mexican gardeners would throw a dime into a pile of dogshit, and the kids wouldn't touch that--Anything less than a dollar was below their dignity--And the Mexicans would smile generously as I scraped the dogshit up with their money, thinking I was poorer than their children and needed to be gifted that way. I had already learned, by then, not even to let them know if I spoke English or Spanish.

Any place I cleaned up would be instantly trashed again once, but if I cleaned it up again right away, it stayed cleaned up, and gradually, the air no longer smelled of rotting food, urine-soaked clothes, dog shit, and condom spunk. It took about six months.

After I had cleaned it all up, people wrote to the city asking if they could get my job, and the city wrote back they hadn't hired anyone. A few perplexed people asked me why I was working if I wasn't being paid for it. I said "I wasn't working." More perplexity. The following July, the headmaster of the local black school proudly took credit for the clean streets. I had no idea whom he was before, but I got a letter sent to all people in the neighborhood that children would be required to continue the work he had started and to clean up the streets under his school's supervision from then on.

That was the real beginning of the end for me, because now children all across the neighborhood were starting to hate me for cleaning up their streets, which now the headmaster was making them keep clean, and they knew I had been doing it, and when they left school, they had their eyes well fixed on making me hurt for what I had done to them.

It did raise the value of the houses, which I thought people would like; but I didn't know that most of the houses were rented, not owned, off the official market, and when their landlords wanted more money, they'd bang on my door, sometimes after midnight, shouting how I was a stupid white asshole who didnt appreciate who awful their life was, blame me for their rent increase because I hadn't left the streets full of rotting crap and shit, and always demanding I give them some money.

They were always demanding money from me for one reason or another, because, well, I'm white, and I lived there, so of course, they expected it to be natural I give them money for the privilege of them not attacking me in some way, which of course they did, if I refused to give them anything. After a few months of that, I started offering them work, and they'd run away almost immediately instead.

Also I learned not to eat in public. Once I was eating a cookie outside, and a guy walked up and indignantly demanded the cookie I had in my mouth, deeply insulted that I had the gall to eat something he wanted. The master black race loved doing that particularly. If I was holding anything, they'd walk up and tell me they needed it, and if I didn't think their behavior charming, I would have a stone hit me after they had started walking away, as if it had been thrown by someone else who wasn't there.

That was pretty much my first lesson, in fact, of what it means to live right next to the epicenter of the master black race in Sacramento, California.

That's fucking tragic. Desperate hurting people hurting desperate hurting people. :sad:

It did raise the value of the houses, which I thought people would like; but I didn't know that most of the houses were rented, not owned, off the official market, and when their landlords wanted more money, they'd bang on my door, sometimes after midnight, shouting how I was a stupid white asshole who didnt appreciate who awful their life was, blame me for their rent increase because I hadn't left the streets full of rotting crap and shit, and always demanding I give them some money. — ernestm

Fuck those landlords.

I think you are full of shit, and are making up or at least heavily exaggerating your experiences.
Your compassion is misplaced here folks, allow me to butcher a classic saying:
Dont be so open hearted your brain falls out. This guys story is obviously constructed.

Guess what. After thinking about it now, 10 years later, I dont really care what you think. I know what happened. I left out the guy roaring with laughter when the car knocked me down. He thought that was especially funny. It stuck in my head for a long time because of that, but after the armed teenage gang shot my cat, I totally forgot about all the earlier stuff.

children all across the neighborhood were starting to hate me — ernestm

That part made me laugh, thanks. :point:

Eh, if it's an artfully constructed justification narrative for racism, it won't stick around long.

havent got to the part where I was teaching yet. In fact, though, I dont think you want to know about what I had to do when the 12-year-olds were attacking each other with knives. I tihink you kiddies have heard enough. Good bye.

If?

Poster intent matters.

You're drinking right now aren't you? :) — Outlander

No. However, now I remembered it all, which I didnt want to, I started to feel really ill again, and its possible I might have started another heart failure, so excuse me, but I am going to the emergency room now.

Good luck.

Poster intent matters. — fdrake

The intent is interesting to consider. The guy's not psychotic so, what's the cool intent about?

According to moral foundations theory, liberals primarily value care and fairness, out of all other moral intuitions. Philosophers value reason. So here we have a forum largely comprised of individuals who value care and fairness (and is part of their identity) and also reason. So where does one end and the other begin? It could be a fun game to see where the line is drawn.

what's the cool intent about? — praxis

Whether @ernestm is relating an extremely painful story and using problematic tropes to lash out vs whether @ernestm has constructed or is using an extremely painful story as a vector of racial discrimination.

If you want my mod decision on it; seeing as ernestm's recent posts don't have a clear history of using discriminatory tropes in that way, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution and charity; I believe he's being true to his namesake, ernestm.

If you want why I think erring on the side of caution in cases like this is a good modding strategy; this is an open access forum. Moderating based on the ideological function of a post rather than its substantive content should only be considered when the poster has a clear history of supporting discriminatory ideologies in that way, and in a manner where the substantive content of their posts demonstrably uses discriminatory tropes for discriminatory purposes with discriminatory intent.

We have to be able to distinguish unfortunate phrasing and problematic opinion from propagandising and alt-right cooption. Attending to a poster's character matters a lot here.

Though I can empathize with your traumatic story, I cannot see any reason to suppose that the skin-colors of those involved had any influence on the criminal behavor or your treatment. Maybe people didn’t rush to your defense because they too live in fear of violence.

That being said, I can understand how people who have been traditionally “racialized” their whole lives would begin to harbor racist beliefs. Routinely being told that you belong to this or that racial group, arbitrarily placed upon a hierarchy of mental apartheid, seems to me to be a breeding ground for racism.

I just hope he posts more after returning from the ER so I can watch this play out.

Feeling uncomfortable about it I scanned through some of his Facebook posts to try and get a sense of Ernest. Best guess is that he's entirely serious.



Never underestimate the importance of getting a sense of Ernest.

I'll second that:clap:

Whether ernestm is relating an extremely painful story and using problematic tropes to lash out vs whether — fdrake

I heard so much of this, I dont really read it all any more. All I say is, no one in the black community did anything to help me. they all pretended like nothing was happening. Some of these people had been my neighbors for years, and some of them I had hired to do work on my home too, but they would not do anything to help me find out who was attacking me so many times, and one thing I had to figure out was whether that was because they were involved. To some extent, since they knew what was happening and who was doing it, but pretended they didn't, they were all accomplices to it, which I mostly believe they consider correct due to an overriding concept called 'solidarity.'

I only finally managed to find out who some of the gang were from a white neighbor who lived much further away and was having similar problems, although they never shot through his windows, I believe because he was not living alone like me, they just shot up his trees and patio furniture.

So while on the one hand I can appreciate why you would think I am blaming a wide community for the actions of a few, on the other hand, the wide community did nothing to stop it either. If you want to side with them on that, that's your choice, but Im sorry that will not convince me that I am in any way at fault for reporting what happened as well I can.

And that is not the least criticism I hear. the most common criticisms are

(1) I am a white privileged motherfucker who is no better than an animal and deserves to suffer (66%) and

(2) I made it all up because I hate black people (20%)

with most of the remainder making your criticism. of course most of the people saying (1) were on Facebook with profile pictures of mr potatohead holding guns, and the like, so they might have been white people trying to make me angry because they find it amusing for all I know, all I can say is, that's what I hear.

People responding to you aren't trying to invalidate what you've suffered, they're trying to show you how shallowly you're interpreting why it happened.

You lived in a damn poor place with no social programs; that's a recipe for crime, that's a recipe for victimising each other to get what you need to survive.

And I get that you were really hurt by how you were treated. And you want to hold the people who treated you like that responsible and vent; that's normal. What's inappropriate is how you're contextualising it.

You were put in a pressure cooker; if you were in the housing projects in Glasgow you might've had similar experiences. How you write makes it sound like it's about race on an individual level, you repeatedly wrote "SUPREME BLACK RACE" all the while you're suffering from the same economic discrimination that keeps communities of colour poor and disenfranchised.

Your anger is justified, you simply have the wrong target for what caused you to be treated like that in the first place. People hurt each other when they're hurt themselves. You and the people who victimised you were hurt by the same conditions of life.

You've probably hurt too much to forgive, but don't let that stop you from understanding.

People responding to you aren't trying to invalidate what you've suffered, they're trying to show you how shallowly you're interpreting why it happened. — fdrake

Well thats a very good start. As you claim not to be shallow, you should perfectly well understand that I am more interested in finding a cat to replace the one the gang killed, rather than talking with you any further, then. Have a nice day.

And that is not the least criticism I hear. the most common criticisms are

(1) I am a white privileged motherfucker who is no better than an animal and deserves to suffer (66%) and

(2) I made it all up because I hate black people (20%) — ernestm

Sorry to hear about your rough time and of the typical tone deaf response you get. Guess you haven't lived in the nicest neighborhoods.

Yet this shows perfectly just why "the race issue" isn't going anywhere in the US as the whole discourse falls into a repeating circle where basically nothing will improve. I should add this isn't something just limited to the US, this is a more of a general phenomenon of how societies are unable to approach the problems they have. Many think the problems are inherently about people themselves, not factors like poverty or that the society is broken. Many of those who oppose racism still think that that it is all because of some group of people that are racists that all the problems exist. So they are looking for certain culprits, not looking at how complex the issues actually are.

A big problem is when the discourse turns into a pseudo-religious sermon: that there's a correct way to talk about the problem in the society and there's the correct response to be given, just like when the priest says something and the congregation answers. Anything other and you are defined to be a bad person. There's no genuine effort to improve things as in the end the debate just falls into the category that people want to blame someone. What I'm basically trying to say that we fall in the end usually to the traditional left-right juxtaposition or a similar divide and fume in our hatred of the stupidity of the other side without any will to listen.

Hence if you tell about incidents with people belonging to social group X, people will at first think your a bigot or a bad person (etc.) as some racist/xenophobic populist is telling how bad social group X is. That you don't share at all the view of the populist that group X are inherently inferior to others doesn't matter, people just notice that you are speaking about same kind of incidents.

If you live in a "rough neighborhood" with poverty, poor economy and social problems with presence of gangs, these issues what happened to you can happen totally without the American racial factor. You will also get similar hostility when telling about your reality, I can assure you that. You will get similar responses. Of course people can deny this and say that the skin color issue is totally different from everything else, which means that they aren't seeing the larger underlying structure of the problem.

It should be obvious that this isn't just confined to race. Don't think the the division, distrust and hate wouldn't be there even without race being a factor as being white doesn't create social cohesion itself. Humans can be always look with suspicion and hatred at others, be it the nationality, ethnicity, religion or simply class. You don't need skin color for that. Especially ludicrous in Europe is this idea of "Caucasian" meaning something. Looking at history you can easily see just how evil people can be to each other. Just look at North Ireland, the Balkans etc. Poverty, problems in the distribution of wealth and other social problems or unresolved historical tensions are the real underlying factors.

well I agree. But Ive not had any success in doing anything about it either. In the end I just say, look, I know I am only a white animal and obviously I am physiologically inferior. I know an education at Oxford University only makes me even more despicable and elitist too. I did want to help your problems, but I tried, and most of what I hear is, I am a despicable white animal with an even more despicable over-privileged and useless education.

And that's what I was mostly told when I was a volunteer teacher, which was basically regarded as one huge fantastic opportunity for ridicule and nothing else. I never managed to teach them anything. the only reason I survived living next to an all-black community for so long was that I was dating a very beautiful Russian model who could easily give any of them an erection at 100 yards, and frequently enjoyed doing so.

But that was nothing to do with me, and when she moved back to Russia as per long plan, the assaults started within a few weeks of her not showing up. When they found out I had been working on gun control, they started shooting at me too.

I guess you could say they like beautiful young white female animals alot. Me, no, I'm just an ugly white animal with a despciable Oxford education. I learned to accept that, but I do find it curious how frequently I am now accused of also being a racist. Maybe I just have to be racist too, or I dont fit the mold they put me in.

Today, I only got told off for being totally shallow and banned again from Facebook because I pointed out closing the police dept in Minneapolis will probably result in several hundred black people being murdered whose lives would otherwise have been saved by police intervention. I even produced statistics from Baltimore showing that happened last time Black Lives Matter insisted on the arrangement, and after being called an over-privileged white animal a couple more times, I was again banned for being a racist who hates black people. Overall that's a vast reduction in the number of insults thrown at me in the last 10 days. Maybe people are calming down or something.