A Racial Rorschach Test
Watching this video, do you see the tragic necessity of parents informing their kids about the realities of police interactions with black people — a necessary “The Talk” style lesson in survival in a world where one wrong move can mean your death?
Or do you see child abuse: well-meaning parents, to be sure, but parents with a rigid set of unshakable beliefs in rampant police racism . . . beliefs that they are communicating to children, causing those children to literally cry at the thought that their loved ones could be jailed or shot by police simply because they are black, and for no other reason?
Me, I see a little of both — like those pictures that were popular in the 1990s where you see a new image when you let your eyes get out of focus.
Whatever your perspective, this is tragic. And it leads me to ask: how is a reasonable, fair, non-racist police officer supposed to communicate with a generation of children who have been raised to believe the things these children believe?
It is absolutely tragic and I don’t fault black parents from doing this much. I just wished there’s more emphasis that not all police are that dangerous.
whembly (3bda0a) — 7/7/2021 @ 9:16 amPutting aside race, I wonder what our host would recommend to his own kids, were they to be picked up for something potentially serious.
Would he recommend they just spill? Or “don’t talk to cops without a lawyer?”
john (cd2753) — 7/7/2021 @ 9:21 amThis is so wrong, harmful and unnecessary. I recall a testimony from an officer who stopped a young black man who was literally terrified, shaking in fear while seated in his vehicle. The officer took time to calm him down. What must it be like for individuals like that going about in society in such fear?
Better advice is to point out how virtually every damaging encounter with police begins with an individual refusing to follow simple instructions, or worse responding with insults or physical resistance. Virtually every one.
A person in fear is going to act somewhat differently than normal, arousing suspicions in an alert officer. Perhaps escalating a contact from something simple to “I wonder what he’s hiding?”
So parents, just tell your children to remain calm and do what they are asked, even if they don’t understand why or think they’re being singled out or treated unfairly. They’ll be fine and if something was improper there are ways to complain.
ManlyDad (96e4cc) — 7/7/2021 @ 9:51 amusing your kids as political props is child abuse
JF (e1156d) — 7/7/2021 @ 9:55 amfive years ago today, five dallas cops doing their duty at a BLM protest didn’t get to go home to their kids
JF (e1156d) — 7/7/2021 @ 9:58 amA Racial Rorschach Test
They’re sitting on top of white chairs.
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 7/7/2021 @ 10:11 am@1
That lack of emphasis is a major problem. It doesn’t help when the media and others run narratives based on that.
HCI (92ea66) — 7/7/2021 @ 11:51 am@2
Don’t talk to law enforcement w/o an attorney. I recall our host discussed this in the past asserting that.
whembly (840a86) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:13 pmSaying something so formal as that little girl does would create suspicion.
They have to be careful about creating fear of (bad) police. Fear of police could cause someone to run away, and that is positively the worst thing to do.
Here’s an incident where somebody got falsely convicted. (his private lawyer was someone who didn’t care – and his later lawyer didn’t understand that he had to testify no matter what else he might have to confess to.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/magazine/yutico-briley.html
So they became comvinced he had done he robbery, too, and basically got the witness to identify him.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:16 pmPolice were invented over 150 years ago to control freed blacks and then irish immigrants. (paddy wagons) Before that policing duties were handled by county sheriffs and constables.
asset (adfb1f) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:16 pm@10 you know county sheriffs still exist right? And do the same thing as city cops in their jurisdiction?
frosty (470cf8) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:31 pmEven thhough parts of the original description didn’t match. He had an alibi, but didn’t know where to find the girl he was with.
His first lawyer, a man who as a prosecutor had had five people sentenced to death, two of them later cleared, one of whom later won $14 million in a lawsuit based on prosecutorial misconduct, didn’t get the videotape from the hotel in time, requesting after much pleading from him in recorded jail phone conversations, the wrong hours like he didn’t even bother to keep track of the time when the crime occurred. (but he didn’t forget to collect his fee and then drop him as a client)
His cellphone records were likewise not requested in time. (his cellphone was in the evidence room in the courthouse (?) and it apparently was a burner phone. When new lawyers finally got the phone more than five years had passed and no call records survived) The girl had also died in the meantime.
Sammy Finkelman (51cd0c) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:32 pmWho believes the myth that white people don’t give their kids “the talk” about how to interact with police?
And when it comes to “the talk”, is everyone giving their kids the talk about not getting pregnant before getting married, graduating HS, not getting involved in crime, etc or is it only black parents doing that?
frosty (470cf8) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:37 pm13.Who believes the myth that white people don’t give their kids “the talk” about how to interact with police?
No kidding. 😉
DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 7/7/2021 @ 12:50 pm“how is a reasonable, fair, non-racist police officer supposed to communicate with a generation of children who have been raised to believe the things these children believe?”
Even if the officer is fair, reasonable, non-racist, the system he or she represents is unreasonable, unfair and systemically racist. A robot camera R2D2 cop is racist, built by white people and filled with white peoples ideas
CRT and its social construct background is why you get articles about why math is racist, fireworks are racist. White people and their vestigial racist tails have hopelessly infected everything with racism. So if an African American police officer shoots another African American waving a gun, the whole episode is nothing but a cascade of the white mans rules keeping the black folk down in the hole. Your kid fails school because he didn’t attend? White people. Homework? White people.
Its no different from the 70’s when everything that kept a black person from moving up was because of whitey. Its just languaged more academically now, but its the same old tune.
steveg (ebe7c1) — 7/7/2021 @ 2:07 pmAnd talk about overplaying what was a great hand of guilt poker… now we are done with the racism of Bull Connor, and colored water fountains and are onto fireworks, math… and I gotta say that now that we are all the way down to fireworks and the smoke from said fireworks, unless its a shell that does the Confederate flag they’ve lost me.
Well, speaking personally, I recognize only one race. Human.
And that is the tragedy.
Gawain's Ghost (ef1cde) — 7/8/2021 @ 1:58 amWhen you have The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s second oldest continuously published newspaper entitling articles Philly cop’s brother charged with assaulting Black Lives Matter protester in Fishtown, what do you expect?
The only mention of the actual police officer was in the next to last paragraph, where it said that the alleged assailant’s brother took him from the scene to the Veterans’ Administration Hospital. But the Inquirer demonized the accused as a “Philly cop’s brother,” because the editors wanted to further alienate the public from the police.
In the meantime, the cops are solving a decreasing percentage of homicides, which are on a record pace, because the black community won’t talk to them.
The libertarian, but not Libertarian, Dana (78a597) — 7/8/2021 @ 6:01 pm