Good. People watch sports to escape from everything else.
“Shut up and dribble” is the way to go.
“Shut up and dribble” is the way to go.
The problem with "don't politicize" is that this has a thumb on the scale of the status quo. "Politicization" means that somebody wants something done. Usually they go at it for decades until it catches some kind of national attention. At that point it's merely a tactic to say, "Well, we can't really talk about it now, because it's politicized".
I'm all for bridging divides, but not at the cost of that being an effective decision to do nothing. That's not solving problems; it's dismissing them.
Only in pop culture.
Almost every single material measure of integration has been improving. Wage gap, education gap, representation gap etc..
And from 1969->2001 even in pop culture things were improved.
It started to heat up with Obama (I love the guy, but many didn't) and went into overdrive in the last 5 years.
Watch CNN from 2005. It wasn't directly divisive, it was just somewhat biased news. Now, it's full on culture war.
And on the Twitter feed of the last President.
But even during Trump's presidency, African Americans had their lowest unemployment rate in history. I don't credit him with much of that directly, rather, but he did preside over an area of 'open business growth' for which that was the result.
Which is my point.
Even despite the toxic rhetoric of a public official, things on the ground can improve.
But that's OK, because he might have had fentanyl in his system, and that means it was definitely not kneeling on his neck for eight minutes that killed him. I'm quite certain of that because HN tells me that, over and over.
I'm using sarcasm because it's disingenuous to talk about "a public official". He was the President of the United States, and 75 million people voted for him. They approved that rhetoric. I think it's likely that many of them preferred that rhetoric, and why he finally won the Presidency after two losses by vastly more competent politicians. This is not just one person.
Your dismissal of the seriousness of this is, in my opinion, one of the reasons it's so serious. African Americans are being mocked on one side, and on the other side they feel that their concerns about literally being murdered are being met with "Well, you have a low unemployment rate".
Tweets are not actions.
There will always be sadomasochistic cops.
There will always be blowhards who are interested in promoting themselves who are confused as 'racists' when really they are just mega jerks.
During Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump 'things got better', broadly.
That is, we do that after we do our little patriotic opening song, then we leave the politics out, right?
You don't have to fully subscribe to the intrinsically-racist Black Lives Matter narrative to agree that unaccountable police are a major problem regardless of race. And IMO unaccountable police is a more fundamental issue than the newly-stoked racism.
I don't know if this is because the successful narratives tend to enrich some entrenched interest, psychopaths rise to the top, negative-sum games have popular appeal, the average person isn't smart enough to fit nuanced opinions in their head, humans are herd animals, or some mix of all of these. But whatever it is, whenever any grassroots movement gains the primetime spotlight, it invariably finds the wrong answer and runs with it.
Hope and Change turned into justifying drone strikes and persecuting Snowden. The Tea Party turned into supporting the most despotic anti-American president in recent history. The recent Democratic mandate is turning into more bullshit "gun control" rather than staying focused on real hardships caused by several decades of economic destruction. The Libertarian party is teetering at the edge of cryptofascism, just waiting for a hint of power (said as a libertarian).
Trying to argue nuance with any supporters will get you labeled as an other and summarily rejected. Even right here my comment was downvoted for what? Pointing out that Black Lives Matter is intrinsically racist? It's right in the name! Perhaps some of that racism is needed for motivation, but pointing it out runs up against the cognitive dissonance of "racism" being unequivocally bad.
Seemingly the best you can do is have such discussions with friends who won't immediately write you off, although you'll often run into the same roadblock there. My own take on BLM is that it's not meant for me, and that's fine. I wish them well and hope they don't get too derailed by self-defeating means.
Any large organization seeking change will always have members that stretch their agenda, framing it in terms of paving over everything with their pet paradigm. But judging a group by its outliers is fallacious. I've got no worry that BLM will somehow end up in charge of everything - they will be lucky if they accomplish one fifth of what they set out to do.
The energy of Black Lives Matter is based on bringing murderers to justice - something that anybody who believes in the rule of law should be concerned with. I'm unconcerned with who is statistically more likely to be killed by police. What I am concerned with is that an armed gang broke into fellow American Breonna Taylor's home and murdered her, but has yet to be prosecuted due to corruption! Every single one of these incidents is an injustice, regardless of skin color.
If you can point me to a similar non-racist or non-"Marxist" (your standard) organization fighting for the rule of law to be applied to the police, I am all ears.
As my previous comment alludes to, basing one's organization on racism is channeling a negative energy that will stay with the movement forever. But after seeing the reaction to BLM and the general events of 2020, apparently that overt racism exists to a greater degree than my New England sensibilities had imagined, and so they might as well acknowledge and use it.
So, crazy window dressing on what is ultimately a pretty tame point?
When you squeeze people, they get radicalized into outlandish viewpoints (see also: Trumpism). The answer is to listen to the core of their gripes, rather than rejecting them wholesale over the craziness.