The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[Admiral Yi]

Your points are taken Ucks.

[merithyn]

I'm a little upset that we're being schooled on American Civil Rights history by a Brit and two Canadians.

I mean, I knew all of that stuff, but if you ask me anything about Canadian or UK civil rights and it's a total blank.

[Admiral Yi]

Maybe you can do me a favor and leave me out of your communal put-down next time Meri.

[merithyn]

Maybe you can do me a favor and leave me out of your communal put-down next time Meri.

Okay. I meant "we" as in Americans on Languish, but you want to internalize it as specific to you, okay. Wasn't my intent.

[Admiral Yi]

Okay. I meant "we" as in Americans on Languish, but you want to internalize it as specific to you, okay. Wasn't my intent.

I took it as Americans on Languish.  I'm an American on Languish.  If you meant Americans on Languish, excluding Yi, then I'm sorry I misunderstood.

[PDH]

Lighten up, Francis.

[Admiral Yi]

Suck my dick.

[Barrister]

I'm a little upset that we're being schooled on American Civil Rights history by a Brit and two Canadians.

I mean, I knew all of that stuff, but if you ask me anything about Canadian or UK civil rights and it's a total blank.

Canada historically has had a very small number of people of African heritage.  Not that we have none, and they weren't discriminated against.

If you want to talk about where Canada has failed in terms of our minorities you need to look at how we treated French-speaking Canadians (though that's much more in the past than some on Languish would claim, it was very real), and of course how we treated our First Nations citizens (who weren't even considered citizens until around 50 years ago).  Heck, although I disagreed with it, we had a series of protests in Canada by groups aligned with First Nations just before the coronavirus in 2020.

[Eddie Teach]

I'm a little upset that we're being schooled on American Civil Rights history by a Brit and two Canadians.

I mean, I knew all of that stuff, but if you ask me anything about Canadian or UK civil rights and it's a total blank.

People know about American history because America is the center of the universe.   

But seriously, you shouldn't be measuring how much you know about Canada against how much Canadians know about the US. You should measure it against how much Europeans or Mexicans or whoever know about Canada. I think this unwarranted expectation of reciprocity is the core of the ignorant American stereotype.

[Sheilbh]

Canada historically has had a very small number of people of African heritage.  Not that we have none, and they weren't discriminated against.

If you want to talk about where Canada has failed in terms of our minorities you need to look at how we treated French-speaking Canadians (though that's much more in the past than some on Languish would claim, it was very real), and of course how we treated our First Nations citizens (who weren't even considered citizens until around 50 years ago).  Heck, although I disagreed with it, we had a series of protests in Canada by groups aligned with First Nations just before the coronavirus in 2020.

In the UK, there's been different civil righst movements. The one that looks most like the US is the Northern Irish civil rights movement led by Bernadette Devlin, Seamus Mallon and John Hume who were directly inspired by MLK and Gandhi - right down to the hunger strikes. But their campaigns were around things like representation (the unionists gerrmandered seats to avoid Catholic majority seats), employment rights, housing equality and policing (the RUC was overwhelmingling Protestant and their reserve force was largely made up of unionist paramilitaries).

But that's the only bit I can think of that's directly similar in that there is a sort of formal system of discrimination. As I mentioned, in the UK our formal racism was exported through Empire so most BAME communities are largely from the post-war era. But there's been loads of activism that is very like the civil rights movement - the Bristol bus boycott (against a colour bar in hiring), the Grunwick strike ("strikers in saris"), plus fighting the far-right (the Anti-Nazi League etc). I think it's a lot more diffuse - but it's there.

[Gups]

We've also had the issue of discrimination in the police force and the justice system more generally. These have probably been the focus in the last 40 years starting with the Brixton riots (and those in other big cities) and the Scarman report and following through with the Stephen Lawrence murder and more tangentially the Windrush scandal.

But we don't have the same legacy of Jim Crow or de facto segregated cities.

[Sheilbh]

The President has theories about the elderly man shoved in Buffalo:

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

[Tamas]

The President has theories about the elderly man shoved in Buffalo:

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

This would be provocation on the scale of Russian opposition figures provocatively falling out of windows.

[grumbler]

The George Floyd marches are aimed at ending killing black people on the streets by police.

I think that Yi is correct when he notes that mass action with specific goals works, while mass action with vague goals (like this one) fails.  There simply isn;t any way that this protest can get the laws changed so that the police may not risk a black person's death under any circumstances (which is what "ending killing black people on the streets by police" would require - unless you literally mean "on the streets" and its okay to drag them into a building an kill them).

Sheilbh and Oex are correct that mass action is more effective when planned, and difficult to control when spontaneous (and this difficult to harness to a goal).  I think that demonstrations like the ones we are seeing are just going to go on for a while, without achieving anything specific.  And that's okay.  The memory of them will be a valuable prod to the politicians responsible  to correct the system so that deaths like George Floyd's don't happen again.  And meantime leaders of the black and Hispanic communities can work on keeping the current marchers motivated, because there will be another death like Floyd's and the crowds need to take to the streets in even bigger numbers when that happens.

Correction of the mass of police problems will be an iterative process, I think.

[grumbler]

I'm a little upset that we're I'm being schooled on American Civil Rights history by a Brit and two Canadians.

I mean, I knew all of that stuff, but if you ask me anything about Canadian or UK civil rights and it's a total blank.

FTFY.  One thing that you should keep in mind is that you can only speak for yourself.