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When will the media learn?


RelentlessMalice
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  • 2 months later...

It's interesting to me that virtually everybody I know is fixated on racist jokes made by police and the horrible injustice of Michael Brown's death ("If it was legal, we need to make it illegal!"), with nary a peep about these findings:

 

“Witness 109 claimed to have witnessed the shooting, stated that it was justified, and repeatedly refused to give formal statements to law enforcement for fear of reprisal should the Canfield Drive neighborhood find out that his account corroborated Wilson.”

Witness 113 “gave an account that generally corroborated Wilson, but only after she was confronted with statements she initially made in an effort to avoid neighborhood backlash. . . . She explained to the FBI that ‘You’ve gotta live the life to know it,’ and stated that she feared offering an account contrary to the narrative reported by the media that Brown held his hands up in surrender.”

 

Of course this isn't to say reports of racist emails, excessive force, or using the police or courts as a source or revenue aren't notable or troubling, but I do find it extremely interesting that nobody (at least nobody I know -- they didn't vote for Nixon!) has said anything about Brown not being shot in the back or having his hands up, or jurors fearing reprisals for not sticking to the narrative!

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But Pong, we are winning against racism. The Sooners booted a frat house off of campus and closed the chapter down for racist songs sung on a bus.

 

Also, I think these "fear of reprisal" people need to have more guts. The truth is a great example. If you live in a crappy neighborhood that you are not able to work your way out of keeping the underlying feelings of distrust will not fix it. It just leads to more shouting and fighting and shooting and fines in the street. Because it says you're okay with this.

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I wouldn't consider that "winning against racism". Winning against racism would be just not having any group of people think it's ok to say those things in the first place.

Black rage is, in fact, a clear symptom that, on the grand, historical sweep of things, we ARE winning against racism. We were NOT winning the war against racism back in Jim Crow times. Had you suggested even 30 years ago that a black man with a middle eastern name would be president, you'd have been laughed at.

 

Now there's a difference between "winning" and "have won." For blacks in places like Ferguson, the barriers they encounter are made all the more frustrating by the possibilities that such things as a black president imply. Proletarian philosopher Eric Hoffer notes in his Opus, The True Believer that "Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable, when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when it is almost redressed." Almost, but not quite. He further observes that both the French and Russian revolutions land hungry peasants owned approximately 1/3 of the land when the revolutions broke out, and that acquired only a generation or so previous. His most striking observation: "It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things to come which excites people to revolt. None of this is to say that their conditions are ideal. Far from it. But the contrast between what has seemed possible from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama's time makes present racial injustices sting all the more.

 

As a corollary to this, Hoffer also points out that, "The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object so fervently desired. This is true whether we move towards our goal or away from it. It is true of those who have just come within sight of the promised land and the disinherited still within sight of it." Those who've "come within sight of the promised land" in our time include minorities, feminists and LGBT types. The "disinherited still within sight of it" are the white male working class most hurt by the exodus of good wage, manufacturing and trades jobs. They are the fertile ground for reactionary fundamentalism and conspiracism.

 

Hoffer's theories, if true, go a long way towards explaining the rancorous political and social climate of our time.

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