“I have known cops who haven’t had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend; and these are white cops. They really weren’t overtly racist. They weren’t consciously racist. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrantedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me, it was almost like a therapy session for them I didn’t realize that they needed an outlet to talk,” – Constance Rice, civil rights attorney.
h/t Andrew Sullivan's blog
And this nugget from Digby:
"Turn on Fox News on any given day and you’ll be convinced that white Americans can hardly get a break these days. The ongoing conversation about race in the U.S. has evolved in recent years to include a lament from white Americans that they are the real victims of racism. Yes, that’s a fairly bizarre interpretation of how our society operates but it’s a surprisingly widespread belief among a certain sub-group of Americans.
In some ways this idea goes all the way back to the Civil War when Southern slave owners felt they were being put-upon by non-slave owners by not being allowed to expand their institution into new states and so staged the most epic hissy fit of our nation’s history. They always felt persecuted by people they believed were trying to destroy their “way of life,” but the loss of that war was the catalyst for an ongoing sense of victimization, often believed to accrue to the benefit of African-Americans.
The civil rights movement and resulting federal action to deny states and cities the right to discriminate further inflamed those feelings. A part of white America believes, and has always believed, that African-Americans are at the heart of all their troubles."
10 comments:
A potential for pain, or an unrecognizable event, causes fear. The amygdalae, organs in the limbic system, detect such possibilities and send the signals which generate the fear emotion. Unlike the rational brain, emotions trigger a variety of instinctual attitudes and behaviors. Each such emotion is chosen by the limbic brain to meet a particularly demanding contingency in life. The anger emotion switches on attitudes and behaviors which support confrontation. Fear, on the other hand, responds to danger by recalling fearful images, preparing the body for flight and by signaling muscles to freeze, or flee.
Fear acts instantly. It will stiffen your muscles before you can walk to the edge of a precipice. While fear signals act swiftly to avoid danger, they intensify when danger is unavoidable. In such situations, fear signals inhibit conscious thinking and set off subconscious searches for escape routes, while preparing the body to freeze, flee, or to defend itself. Those subconscious searches flash images of the results of failure. A lack of escape avenues intensifies the fear emotion. Together, the recalled images, the urges to escape and the bodily preparations for stress feel unpleasant.
For more on fear and what causes it.
The only black person I recall fearing was the one that threatened me. He was bigger and stronger as well. That was a lonf time ago.
"They always felt persecuted by people they believed were trying to destroy their “way of life,”
Just visit any one of the Bagger Blogs to see this whiney-assed complaining. Everyone from Obama down to the 12-year old kid being shot dead in the street is responsible for their failures.
I have a 67 year old brother in law that I've known since I was 7 years old (am 55 now). Always had a great sense of humor and I loved spending time with him. As I got older I could see that he was more conservative then me, but hey, so what. He would watch PBS newshour and loved watching Shields and Brooks. Then came Fox News network. That is now all he watches and he has become almost a caricature of the old angry white man. He has a chip the size of a VW on his shoulder and I can barely stand to talk to him about anything besides the weather. It doesn't help that he basically has not had a steady job in 20 years and blames everyone but himself. It is just so sad.
RN....I haven's found a Black Person who really scares me.....But there sure have been a bunch of Jack Pine Savages that I found inconveniently intimidating.
ohohoh... I have a quote...“For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.”
― Don Quixote
Listening to FUX News would screw anyone's mind up. I'm not surprised at what happened to your bil.
Shaw FYI,
Liberal and Loving It said...
Hey Free Twinkletoes, how about a poem?
They used to call me Free Thinkr,
And I had my fill of admirers and beaus.
I was quite a dancer of ballet,
My pirouette and my grand Pliny
were talked about for months and days.
I had my choice of theaters and plays.
I was photographed and interviewed by the best of the lot of Bagers and Libs.
I had rich men begging me for an interlude.
I had money tossed at me as if it were confetti,
I was envied by people that read me.
And then all at once at the very peak of my illustrious career,
I lost it all because I developed a taste for hamburger and beer, and became a Fan of a porn Queen..
How willing are people on all sides of the issue to be honest, if we're to believe that police being fearful is in fact true?
After all, fear is not a rational reaction or emotion; being fearful is not as if one sees a target, "profiles" the target as X and Y, and reaches a rational conclusion that, "Okay, I'm afraid because this person is ___."
"Fear" is not something that would necessarily be bigoted or have any real racial connotations, save the obvious sticking point of "Why black men?" Fear is animal; it is fight-flight. It is a visceral reaction to a perceived threat.
The "why" would need to be discussed honestly to reach any deeper understanding; e.g. is the fear unfounded; is it society's message; is it biological in nature -- tribalism, survival; which party is more responsible, if either, and other questions which must be addressed fully and honestly.
Do we study this along racial lines? And, if so, do we really go at it, or do we act like west coast-based social science and stack the deck to reach the desired outcome? E.g. only pit white cops against black potential suspects, or white vs. black, white vs. Latino, white vs. Asian, and all the logical inverse and adjacent match-ups?
My guess: Hell to the no. Nobody really wants to know. Like with many male-female debates in the feminists V world sector, stay away from things that may end up being biological, as they dispel the notion that gender and behaviors therein are learned traits rather than inborn.
"I lost it all because I developed a taste for hamburger and beer, and became a Fan of a porn Queen.."
It's all about tribalism. It trumps a person's higher aspirations toward the finer aspects of life. The guy who loves to quote the great poets and who loves to link to great music has lain down with pornographers and rogues just because they share his politics. And he's been infested by their fleas.
It isn't just those policemen who are cowards. The warmongers are there as well, willing to destroy our economy to send other people's kids to war.
Cowards are cowards, and a country full of cowards will act like a country full of cowards.
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