Life Matters

[Seven77]

http://www.chariotfire.com/?p=1643

 

a blog post I wrote about today's feast day of St. Peter Claver… please read and share your thoughts…

[Quasar]

My thoughts:  My highest respect is reserved for men who physically put themeselves on the line to protect the more vulnerable.  I have far less time for men who  have worked office jobs their whole lives, yet critique cops or soldiers from the safety and comfort of their living rooms.  

Cops who actually police low income black communities and do so with respect and love are the real activists.  They're actually doing something to seek justice for black crime victims, make black communities safer and alleviate some of the fruits of systemic racism.   Since cops are the only ones getting off their sofas and doing something, they're also going to be the ones to screw up.  The best way to never screw up is to be an audience member while someone else takes action.

Responsibility for systemic racism belongs to all, and it's dishonest yet so convenient to place the blame on law enforcement.  Politicians must breath a sigh of relief that no one is holding them to the fire to address inequality in education, job opportunities, and access to health care.  

 

 

[Seven77]

10 hours ago, Quasar said:

My thoughts:  My highest respect is reserved for men who physically put themeselves on the line to protect the more vulnerable.  I have far less time for men who  have worked office jobs their whole lives, yet critique cops or soldiers from the safety and comfort of their living rooms.  

Cops who actually police low income black communities and do so with respect and love are the real activists.  They're actually doing something to seek justice for black crime victims, make black communities safer and alleviate some of the fruits of systemic racism.   Since cops are the only ones getting off their sofas and doing something, they're also going to be the ones to screw up.  The best way to never screw up is to be an audience member while someone else takes action.

Responsibility for systemic racism belongs to all, and it's dishonest yet so convenient to place the blame on law enforcement.  Politicians must breath a sigh of relief that no one is holding them to the fire to address inequality in education, job opportunities, and access to health care.  

 

 

4

Hmm. Not sure that I was critiquing cops or blaming law enforcement for systematic racism. It's more like I was speaking out about the callous disregard and devaluing of life involved in basis and prejudice, an attitude found in * some* law enforcement personnel and in a wide variety and spectrum of people in our world today. I don't even necessarily exclude myself from taking responsibility for systematic racism, to an extent.

 I should have addressed the points you raised… I think I rushed through the article.

[Era Might]

On 9/9/2016 at 9:55 PM, Seven77 said:

http://www.chariotfire.com/?p=1643

 

a blog post I wrote about today's feast day of St. Peter Claver… please read and share your thoughts…

The premise of the Civil Rights movement was that citizenship is not an abstraction. If you are a citizen, you have the right to the opportunities and advantages of citizenship. What do all citizens deserve? They deserve to be part of a commonwealth that actively promotes and realizes the common good: the ability to vote, first of all, but also education, healthcare, justice that serves the community and not the legal system, etc. In the 19th century, blacks gained citizenship, but it was only on paper. Segregation was a deliberate system to repress blacks from the opportunities and advantages of citizenship. The Civil Rights movement started with the most basic right of all, voting, which was impossible for blacks in places like Mississippi and Alabama. But, voting was only the start. You can't be a citizen when you live in rat infested housing, when you're starving, when you have no real education. Neoliberals (conservatives, in the modern parlance) want to keep citizenship as an idea, abstraction. They say, give people the theoretical rights, but let them fight it out amongst themselves in a free market, in a private charity-based commonwealth, in a strict legalistic justice system, etc. They call it "classical liberalism" because it was from the 18th century, when the new bourgeoisie took power from the aristocracy, and that was fine for them as long as the bourgeoisie was in control (i.e., white, male, property owners). Once you had women working in factories, once you had women demanding the vote, once you had blacks freed from slavery, once you had immigrants pouring in from the Old World, things changed. This wasn't in the interests of the old bourgeoisie so they developed forms of social control, since they couldn't exclude these new groups in the law itself. So what did they do? For blacks, they maintained a separate but equal system of segregation, they created Jim Crow laws to get blacks into prison, out of society, onto the chain gang (it was just the repackaging of slavery). The Civil Rights movement changed a lot, but it's an absurdity to imagine that the millions of ghetto dwellers are the realization of productive citizenship. So what do neoliberals do now? They try to turn it from a Civil Rights problem to a moral problem. Blacks, they say, are violent, lazy, degenerate animals, and we need law and order to keep "good citizens" safe. Just as they turned the working class against each other, they have to turn racial and ethnic communities into us vs. them. They want legal immigrants vs. illegal immigrants, they want middle class blacks vs. ghetto blacks, and ghetto blacks in the community vs. ghetto blacks in jail. After the voting rights campaign, Martin Luther King went to the North, to places like Chicago where blacks lived like urban cattle. He denounced militarism, too, the height of the Vietnam War, because he saw that it was all connected. The Civil Rights movement did not end with the fall of segregation, it is still ongoing, and mass incarceration (and the police state that serves it) is, I think, the major civil rights issue today. Yes, all lives matter, but not all citizens have equivalent prospects and realistic expectations for a real, and not theoretical, citizenship. That is why black lives matter in a particular political context.

St. Peter Claver is a good witness for civil rights today, because he faced the same problem: yes, the church and secular governments may have acknowledged a theoretical dignity to slaves, but what kind of dignity did they have in reality? None.

[Era Might]

On 9/9/2016 at 10:51 PM, Quasar said:

My thoughts:  My highest respect is reserved for men who physically put themeselves on the line to protect the more vulnerable.  I have far less time for men who  have worked office jobs their whole lives, yet critique cops or soldiers from the safety and comfort of their living rooms.  

Cops who actually police low income black communities and do so with respect and love are the real activists.  They're actually doing something to seek justice for black crime victims, make black communities safer and alleviate some of the fruits of systemic racism.   Since cops are the only ones getting off their sofas and doing something, they're also going to be the ones to screw up.  The best way to never screw up is to be an audience member while someone else takes action.

Responsibility for systemic racism belongs to all, and it's dishonest yet so convenient to place the blame on law enforcement.  Politicians must breath a sigh of relief that no one is holding them to the fire to address inequality in education, job opportunities, and access to health care.  

 

 

Just as a note, police are generally working class people, as are corrections officers. As I said in my post, the working class gets divided and conquered. It's been that way a long time, going back to when Irish cops divided immigrant communities between good and bad. Policing is not a morality tale. Most cops are just following orders. They don't make the laws, but, they have the power to enforce them, and that power comes with its own corruptions. Police should belong to the community, not to the politicians and business interests.