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| Re: The Police union, not of the labor movenment... (1285681) | |||
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Re: The Police union, not of the labor movenment... |
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Posted by Nilet on Sun May 3 17:00:34 2015, in response to Re: The Police union, not of the labor movenment..., posted by tunnelrat on Sun May 3 10:59:47 2015. Do you genuinely want to know?It's a corruption of "black lives matter." The phrase "black lives matter" was started to call attention to the fact that society treats black people's lives as worthless— white cops and vigilantes can kill black people with impunity, and despite improvements on paper, black people are still subject to considerable discrimination (even segregation in all but name). Being black makes you far more likely to get arrested and killed (in fact, the cops are more likely to arrest and kill an innocent black man than a white criminal), it makes you far less likely to get a decent job (employers are typically more likely to hire a white felon than a black man with no criminal record) and it means being treated as, at best, someone who simply doesn't count and, at worst, a usurper or parasite with no right to exist. That's why changing "black lives matter" to "all lives matter" is racist— it erases the concern for those very real social problems. America does not have trouble understanding the idea that "all" lives matter— it denies that black lives matter. Changing it to "blue lives matter" (referring to cops) is doubly racist because the police enjoy considerable unearned respect and social standing— absolutely no one* is claiming their lives don't matter. Whenever a cop is shot (even if they survive), governments and most of the population inevitably declare that this was a terrible crime and the shooter needs to pay. Whenever a black man is killed by a cop, governments and a large swath of the population inevitably declare that it must have been justified, it must have been self-defense, it couldn't have been a crime. Black people who are tired of seeing their friends and family killed for no reason coined the term "black lives matter" to protest the situation— changing it to "blue lives matter" mocks their concern for their own lives. If someone told Martin Luther King to his face that he should be far more concerned with the rights of white people, rattled off a few individual murders with white victims not connected to a greater social problem regarding race, and asked him how he could possibly be so concerned with black people's rights, you'd have no trouble understanding that person is being racist. This is basically the same thing. *Note for the literal-minded: This post is discussion a societal problem. As such, when I say "no one," I mean "no socially significant force." As such, you cannot disprove this claim by citing one crazy person ranting on the internet as an example. |
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