Are Right Wing Extremists Crashing Peaceful Protests?

Peaceful marches are of course the right of the people. However it could be the media hype and the hateful posters carried around these marches that could act as a catalyst for the looters and thieves to join in invited or not to complete their own agenda which is to loot, thieve and vandalize.

 

I hear you ... but are the unarmed black people always unarmed? IOW many might and often do carry concealed weapons on their person or in their vehicle. Also weapons need to be defined.

 

Vigilantism is wrong and illegal at step one, at first base. Members of the police forces in America are required to undergo back ground checks, pass criminal justice school examinations, be POST CERTIFIED, and follow orders from their commanders. Heavily armed country boys have no right or authority to go around enforcing their own warped white supremacist ideas of the law on ordinary citizens. Throughout American history, vigilantes have been members of the KKK and used to raid the homes of poor Black share-croppers, to terrorize them and prevent them from voting. In Texas, the vigilantes used to ride the countryside to terrorize the Mexican land owners, to force them to escape over the Rio Grande River into Mexico. The vigilantes wanted to claim the abandoned and free land. It was a get rich quick scheme. Vigilantism is not about enforcement of the law or the respect of it. It is about white supremacists circumventing the law.

 

There is a double standard with open carry and race. Ask a black gun owner if they could just walk into a KFC with a Ar-15 "because it's their right". It's a white privilege and historically the NRA has been pro white gun owners only. Guns were good until the Black Panthers bought them then the NRA got very liberal and wanted some restrictions.

If police are so concerned with weapons they should look to white people first. Kick them out of the KFC and question them because they outnumber the black population by far. Statistically if someone is going to shoot you regardless of if you a criminal or innocent it's more likely to be a white person.

 

^^^while you are entitled to your opinion, factually everything you said there is wrong. Except that whites outnumber blacks.

 

Ok can you provide some sources for black mass shooters or black people who use their gun to stop a "bad guy" and save lives? There are examples of white people doing both. Black people now they can't open carry or else white people call the cops on them and the probably racist police force will harass them.

 

My statement is just stattisics. White people do more of everything because we are the majority. You are implying black people by being black cause more trouble. Seems pretty racist. They are about 13% of the population.

 

13%,yet they commit more than 50% of the murders, and outnumber the white on black crime by thousand fold.
Facts aren't racist, they're facts.

 

Wrong conclusions from wrong assumptions.
"But it seems right"

No. It doesn't. Check this out. You're okay with NPR aren't you unfocused?

With A Growing Membership Since Trump, Black Gun Group Considers Getting Political

 

What's your interpretation of the "facts." Are blacks inherently bad people? Natural born murderers? Born with a genetic disposition to violence? That's what they used to say about Irish and Italians.

 

The operative term is "might". Police officers aren't suppose to shoot first and ask questions later.

 

“I think the narrative that the police are in some epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that’s based on race. I think there are some situations where statistics would suggest that they (blacks) are treated differently. But I don’t think that that’s necessarily racism.” ~ William Barr, Attorney General of the United States


"But I don’t think that that’s necessarily racism." Okay, what the fuck is it, then?

 

It's easy to jump to conclusions, particularly conclusions that line up with our inner biases.

What's hard is thinking outside the boxes we've formed within our minds.

Sometimes people harbor innate racism, people admit it. Minorities and majorities alike. But is every action across race a racist act motivated by racism? "Not necessarily". Think about what that means. It means it could be, but doesn't have to be.

What else could it be? Pattern recognition. Responding to patterns.

We treat polyester different from cotton. Is that "materialism"?

We treat trucks different from cars. And each different from motorcycles. "Wheelism"?

Grizzly bears and black bears... "Bearism"?

You get the idea.

We watch, we learn, we recognize patterns.

If we repeatedly see people of different races, appearances, locations, sexes, etc, acting in unique ways then our minds automatically generalize. It's not a conscious action. The patterns become ingrained. That yellow light means a red one is coming so I better look and punch it. That guy walking at me is going to corner me and ask me for money so I better cross the street. That gal is going to approach me and ask me if I'd like to come in and "have fun". That guy there is one you better agree with or he'll punch you. Or stab you. Pop a cap if you diss him. "Chip on the shoulder" types. Loudmouths. Boasters. Walking certain ways. Body language.
Patterns.

Knowing what someone will likely do based on accumulated experience is an intuition - not racism. Racism is where people believe there's a difference in worthiness based on race. We don't see much of that going on anymore. We've reached the point of knowing there's spectrum of well-behaved to nasty people across all races. We can quickly tell someone acting belligerently from someone acting respectably.

The real issue is why don't some people know enough to act respectably? Why are their parents not educating them? Do we need another public school program so the government can teach "How To Act Toward Other People"?
How do we fix this, which is the real problem, and unrelated to race???
We've been saying "you can't fix stupid" and jailing people for behavior that's stupid and disrespectful. Is that working???
Or should we be concentrating on teaching the children in the 1-7 range to act respectfully, and continuing to reinforce good behavior and attitude throughout their upbringing?
I think the answer is obvious.
And has been for a long time!

 

First of all, thank you for taking the time to share with us what seems to be a sincere and thoughtful effort to try to understand the negative reactions people have toward other humans who are different from ourselves. I don't know whether you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking but you've pretty well summarized the main thesis. We react to our environment on the basis of snap judgments that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. They are part of our adaptive unconscious, and are often useful in helping us make decisions that are statistically helpful in getting us by in a complex, busy world. However, they can also lead us to make disastrous mistakes --.particularly where racial, ethnic and religious stereotypes are involved.

Your perceptions of racial minorites may be shaped by personal experiences, but probably also by films, TV shows, gangsta rap, and other media portray African Americans as dangerous and criminal to an unfair and unrealistic degree. And if you think about it, your personal experiences with minorities are limited just by virtue of the fact that you're only one person and couldn't possibly know enough other people to make a statistically valid generalization. Racism is a strategy we use to categorize a stranger, based on instincts of tribalism going back to our earliest ancestors. It's rooted in the logical fallacy of categorical thinking and overgeneralizing from limited experience. It may sometimes contribute to our survival, on a "better safe than sorry" basis, if we're not too concerned about the innocent victims. Gladwell says that racism involves a fixation on one cue (race) to the exclusion of others (speech, facial expressions, etc). .


Gladwell, who is part Jamaican, also talked about his own experience, which became the inspiration for his book. Once he allowed his hair to get longer, he started getting speeding tickets all the time, although he had never gotten one before, and was pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. Then he was accosted by three police officers while walking in downtown Manhattan, because his curly hair matched the profile of a rapist. The suspect looked nothing like him otherwise. I must confess, I have my own similar prejudices. There's an African-American technician at my pharmacy who has what I'd describe as a "wild" hairdo that makes him seem rather intimidating, until he opened his mouth and seemed very polite and intelligent. When that happened, my attitude toward him changed dramatically. I still don't understand why a normal person would wear his hair that way, or wear piercings or tattoos, but I'm willing to consider the possibility it's my hangup. Gladwell shows how little things can make a big difference in our perceptions. To my relief, Gladwell would say I'm not a racist, because i quickly readjusted my negative reaction to hairdo when exposed to another behavioral cue: speech. A racist fixates on one characteristic (s)he's learned to be a salient negative to the exclusion of others. There are plenty of skeevy looking white folks I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

In Chapter six, Gladwell discusses the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, where four New York police officers shot an innocent black man on his doorstep 41 times.The officers ,who were eventually acquitted, claimed to have mistaken him for a rape suspect from one year earlier, a claim never confirmed by objective evidence,or perhaps a robber. In plainclothes, they stopped him and asked if they could talk. Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, who didn't speak English well and whose friend had recently been robbed, ran up the steps toward his apartment house doorway at their approach, ignoring their orders to stop and 'show his hands', and reached into his jacket and withdrew his wallet. The investigation found no weapons. But one of the officers shot Diallo, and the other officers, thinking Diallo shot their fellow officer, shot him, too. Overkill! Were the officers "racists"? Gladwell thinks it was a "grey area". Critics think he cut the officers too much slack. Would the same thing have happened if Diallo had been white? Gladwell thinks it's in the "grey area" and was taken to task by liberal critics for being so generous. That was 1999. How many unarmed black men have added to the body count since then?

The Implicit Association Test measures our unconscious attitudes to race etc. Most people have an unconscious preference for white over black people. When people are asked to pair dangerous objects with photographs of either black or white people, they’re quicker to associate the objects with black people, perhaps reflecting the racist stereotypes accumulated in the adaptive unconscious.Showing people images of Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela prior to them taking the test, the results change (possibly not yours). There is also the halo effect in which a person having a positive quality is thought to be superior in other, unrelated respects. For example, Warren G.Harding who just looked like a President but was otherwise undistinguished.

When you talk about it being hard to think outside the boxes of our minds, are you including your own mind in that statement. You say "The real issue is why don't some people know enough to act respectably? " That sounds ironic coming from a person who admires Trump. To me, he is the very epitome of somebody who doesn't act respectably and gets away with it. You and his other cult like followers seem to enable that behavior. When people show up armed to the teeth at courthouses to protest infringement of their "right" to go maskless during a pandemic, that to me is lawless behavior. You may feel the same way about people who march in protest against the latest killing of an unarmed black man by the police, especially when some use the occasion to riot and loot. Those have been the minority, but that's not the impression people have from the media.

Another problem in looking "objectively" at crime and race is that race in this country overlaps with poverty and sub-culture, and the untrained mind has trouble sorting them out. Criminologists are in agreement that violent crime is highly correlated with poverty, and poverty is highly correlated with race. To your credit, you also seem to recognize that sub-cultural factors are also involved. "Why are their parents not educating them?" Maybe one of them is permanently absent--hit the road or is in prison--the other one is on drugs, and the kids are being parented by street gangs. But that's mainly in the ghetto. Believe it or not, some African-Americans are raised in the suburbs in two-parent families and "act respectably. So white folks who panic if they learn a black family is moving into the nice neighborhood might ask what kind of black family has the money to do that? Most of the blacks I know are professionals, and I really don't worry about being mugged by any of them.

So the problem, as I see it, is to induce racial minorities to become educated and adopt middle class lifestyles. At one time, Irish and Italians were looked down upon for being inherently violent low lifes. Teddy Roosevelt, whose face disgraces Mount Rushmore, wrote of the 1891 lynchings of eleven Italians in New Orleans: "Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so." Irish and Italians never had to contend with race per se as a barrier to their mobility, since many couldn't readily be identified by their appearance. They also never had to cope with the legacy of slavery and institutionalized segregation, although "No Irish need apply" was a barrier to many lines of employment. Remember the stereotypes that used to surround the Irish: that they were drunks and liked to fight a lot (the fightin' Irish). Do you feel that way about them today? I you meet Clancy, oh, that Clancy, do you say to yourself "I better be careful. If I say the wrong thing, I might get his Irish up and Clancy might lower the boom, boom. boom, boom?

I'm a Native American, Chickasaw by tribe, and have experienced the dominant society's stereotypes about Indians: that we are dumb, lazy alcoholics living on government assistance--none of which hold for me. Stereotypes can have some basis in fact, as a trip down the streets of some Oklahoma towns can verify. My impression is that tribes with a nomadic traditional culture fare worse than those with a more sedentary traditional culture like mine when thrust into the white man's world, but considering we were robbed of our land and dumped in the middle of Oklahoma, we Chickasaw's are doing alright for ourselves. I personally don't drink because my father thought we weren't biologically equipped to handle it, and I never wanted to put it to the test.

If the government offered an educational program to teach "How to Act Toward Other People", would you enroll? I think you could use some sensitivity training. But I think you have a point about starting young. It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. A psychology course on the Dunning-Kruger effect might be helpful, but by definition, those in most need of it wouldn't take it.

 

Especially if you keep your eyes shut...

 

So I guess they should wait until they are under threat before they react? If so then within a few months the death rate among police officers will be sky high.

 

By the same token in many areas "statistically" the "criminal" is more likely to be a non white person.

 

If a colored person walks through town with a gun, several white cops will surround him, and yell "drop it!" One second after that they will empty several 16 round Glock pistols into that colored person. If the gun is carried by a white man, the matter turns into a second amendment issue.

 

These stats also say whites keep the blacks in poverty and harsh living conditions which include employment discrimination. The white Republicans have always been against equal employment opportunity and discrimination laws. The white always say black are lazy when at the same time refuse employment to them. The white man's line of shit is getting old.

 

No. The operative standard is "objectively reasonable". Deadly force can be used it is objectively reasonable "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party" ("defense-of-life" standard) or to prevent a suspect from escaping if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.