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Should the riots really be about racism or police brutality?

Trausti said:
ZiprHead said:
Should the riots really be about racism or police brutality?
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Why can't it be about both?
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Well, how about no riots but peaceful protests?
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I tell you what. Let's go back in time just one generation--my parents' generation, if not yours--to the 1930s and I'll rape your mother in front of a five year-old you while my friends all beat your father nearly to death before stringing him up on a tree in his own front yard so you can watch him die, right next to the big burning cross we put there to terrify you and your family and neighbors.

Then we'll kidnap you and put you in a basement with chains and force you to work manual labor for forty years until you die in that basement, during which time--around say 1950--you somehow manage just once to have sex and get another of our kidnapped slaves pregnant. So we take your child from you and sell him to one of those friends that killed your father and helped me rape your mother, but your child manages to escape to the north.

And then your child will grow up through the fifties and the sixties up to today--but primarily in poverty and with tremendous struggles of his own just for looking like he does as well, including constant bullying and fights and never getting hired or once being hired, never getting promoted, etc--and watching for the countless number of times someone who looks like him--and you--on TV being excessively beaten or even killed by a police officer for no other reason than he looks like him and you.

And then we can test whether or not your child--or your grandchild, who grew up in similar circumstances and maybe had to join a gang just to survive childhood or was one of the lucky few who was able against many odds to work his way through a college education, but of course knows the story of his family's struggles, and still also grows up with the same imagery of cops beating or killing people who look like him--would be more or less prone toward a riot or a peaceful protest.

Hell, I look like the cop who killed Floyd and grew up in a perfect childhood and easily made my way through to my Master's and I consider myself to be a pacifist and yet, every day of Trump's occupation has driven me to the point of rioting, so it's not exactly hard to empathize with the sentiment.
 
I believe there is bias in who police apprehend, but I also believe it would be more effective politically to focus on police brutality in general rather than on abuse against minorities. Police are unjustly abusing people of all races, as can been seen very plainly by their actions at the current protests.
 
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