Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
1/ When I was a Christian, we believed that we were persecuted. Any time there was a high profile killing of a Christian, we heard about it. Any bad thing that happened to Christians was fed through a narrative that the world was out to get us because they hated us.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
2/ As a woman, I hear a lot about sexism. I personally don't much view things through gendered lenses, and so don't interpret negative stuff that happens to me as sexism, because often I think it isn't. The wage gap is mostly a myth, yet I hear it being promoted constantly.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
3/ So I have a similar view about feminism as I do about my old Christianity - we're being emphasized specific examples in a victim narrative that gives us a sense of cohesion and power, gives shape to our pains and a clear moral direction for where to go.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
4/ Tangent: The US has been really shitty to black people. Even ignoring slavery - we've actively burned down prosperous black cities, regulated them into poverty, and also done a lot of lynching. There's a reason black people are on average poorer, and it's largely the white US.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
5/ Poverty breeds crime, and areas of higher crime get higher police violence, pretty proportionally. Since black people make up more of the poor population, they experience more police brutality. This is an indirect, lasting effect of the systemic racism of the past.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
6/ But when adjusted for poverty and crime and stuff, as far as I can tell (open to debate! lots of studies, nuanced!), it appears there's actually no significant disparity in police violence based on race. But the cultural narrative right now is the complete opposite.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
7/ This doesn't surprise me; a group's lived experiences don't necessarily mean much (unless we want to believe evangelical Christians are persecuted in the US, or ignore data about the wage gap). It's real easy to construct a wide variety of opinions on the same experience.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
8/ But moreso, I'm concerned that a more important discussion around police brutality and training is being coopted by a statistically unsupported narrative around racism. I don't mean that racism isn't real or that its lasting effects aren't part of the background here
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
9/but the huge, uncritical acceptance of unjustified racial bias in the use of police force is absolutely eerie to me. I feel like I'm in crazytown that nobody's having serious discussions about the data here. Shouldn't the data be extremely important to our attitudes about this?
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
To be completely fair, the stuff here is still nuanced! There's racial bias found some places, in some levels, depending on where you look. But even including this, it's very far from the widespread police racism that you'd think exists from looking on social media.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@IrateMillenial
So hearing about instances is generally a really bad way to go about data, because it's filtered through a lot of selection processes. If you find me a complete data list that compiles all police shootings I'm pretty sure we can find you the white person you're looking for.
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Show replies
Mojave Zen
@Zenfucius
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
My take is extremely similar to yours. Adolph Reed & Zaid Jilani and some others I can't remember have written on this (neither of those or the ones I'm trying to remember are white, since that would disqualify the writers in some people's eyes, wrongly imo).
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Manual and Pedal Laborer
@heartkeyboards
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
i would absolutely love to have conversations about this, but anytime i try to make any of the points you've made in this thread (when i talk to white people!), i don't get calm reflection or a reasoned counter: i get anger and disbelief.
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raphbaph.lens
@raphbaph
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
i think you’re avoiding the very intense and difficult emotions this triggers by trying to bring it to an intellectual level and talk about „data“. the pain, anguish and shame that are the result of slavery and exploitation are real. unless we deal with that, there’ll be no prog
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Eric Fitch
@EricFitch0421
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I would argue with you on this. its not really racism. is a circular logic... cops are in an area gangs kill cops cops hire more harder cops... kill gangs, gangs retaliate. cops hire more harder still cops... cops kill gangs, gangs retaliate. I am sure most of these incidents
Yokai Kyoto
@yokai_kyoto
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
So the real question is how to deal with bad apple officers. What did the British do?... Start with PACE 1984 and the complete change in the their polices' attitude to race.