On Black Lives Matter and the GOP
I have extracted three paragraphs and I do recommend reading the whole article
Both the question and the answer focused an inordinate amount of attention on police conduct and not enough on revealing that they are simply the agents of policy instituted by officials at the behest of the body politic.
Society itself is to blame. There is blood on everyone’s hands, including the hands still clutching the tax revenue that those cities needed but refused to solicit, instead shifting the mission of entire police departments “from ‘protect and serve’ to ‘punish and profit,’ ” as Mother Jones magazine recently put it in a fascinating article on this subject.
Racism is a social construct.
That is why when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” it grates. All Lives Matter may be one’s personal position, but until this country values all lives equally, it is both reasonable and indeed necessary to specify the lives it seems to value less.
He highlights the failures by Fox News in asking the right questions by supposing that there is some equivalence in power between black communities and the state. The assumption that both played equal roles in the divisiveness is as he says, absurd.
Denise Oliver Velez asked me yesterday if I wanted to write some diaries on xenophobia and racism in Europe and this institutionalized racism is a part of that. Xenophobia has been around for millennia, whereas racism is a relatively new concept and pretty much started with colonization. I wont go into this fully here but "blood purity" within the colonies was a primary driver in what today in the US we term racism. Until we fully accept this situation then actually dealing with institutionalized racism is near impossible.
The only way in my "white" view that Black Lives will really matter is to finally deal with the disparity of power, rather than just saying there is a division and assume both have equal roles in resolving the problem. This process is also applicable to gender disparities, but one problem at a time.
It goes far deeper than the SCOTUS opinion that racism can be declared over because everyone has a vote, the whole system needs to be adjusted where all have an equal role in the functioning and power structure of the system. So that the system itself is not the source of the inherent inequality. First we need to admit that we are not dealing with equal partners in any racial division and that one group is oppressed by the other. It goes beyond trying to heal a division, to actually removing the source of the hurt.
I hope I have explained my thoughts clearly enough, and the diaries on Europe will expand upon the history somewhat.