Black Lives Matter Creating More Division?

[ModernArtist25]

Do you all think the Black Lives Matter movement is dividing people more or are they beneficial to society? would love to hear your opinions on this..

Edited September 24, 2016 by ModernArtist25

[Delta1212]

I think Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" actually does a remarkable job of addressing much of the criticism of Black Lives Matter in this respect despite being written about an entirely different set of protests and ones that are today largely seen as heroic.

 

Relevant excerpts:

 

"You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative."

 

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

 

"I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

 

 

Full text for reference: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

[imatfaal]

Thanks for posting that Delta. Revd Martin Luther King and the Black Civil Rights Movement are not widely studied or known about in Europe; most of us - I am ashamed to say - get our knowledge from a few films and superficial media explanations. That letter showed the strength of passion and the deep resolve of Revd King allied with an incredible steely determination. But it also answered questions and refuted arguments that are still prevalent today; the raising of tension, the refusal to continue waiting, and the complicity through complacency of the well-meaning moderate.

 

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

 

[swansont]

Obviously King could express this better than most of us.

 

The division is already there; the protesters are just calling attention to it. That makes some people uncomfortable because they were blissfully unaware of it, or could easily put it out of their minds because it wasn't something they had to witness very often. The protests bring it front and center, and the ugliness is harder to ignore. Some people undoubtedly blame the protesters for their rudeness in making them feel uncomfortable, much like when the affront of being called racist yields a stronger reaction than the racism itself.

[ModernArtist25]

Black Lives Matter can be a reminder than we need to help the black youths. If more blacks are educated, they will less likely to resort to robbing and murdering(although blacks make up 13% of population, they commit half of the crime in the US, according to Bureau of Justice report). Supporting organizations such as Negros College Fund would probaby produce a more positive effect. To end the cycle of blacks getting shot unarmed, it all starts with educating the youths so they can prosper and the stigma of black people being seen as criminals might cease. With Black Lives Matter, it deters some cops from going to the ghetto areas to protect civilians which in turn increases crime rate in major cities.

And some protesters take the Black Lives matter movement out of hand. I saw a video where they are chanting "We want dead cops". I don't think that's what Martin Luther King would want to see

Edited September 25, 2016 by ModernArtist25

[John Cuthber]

Just a thought: In a country that has the death penalty for murder and where cops are seen to murder citizens (black or not)is the call for "dead cops" entirely unreasonable?
How many have been executed?

How many have even been jailed?

 

 

Also, you seem to have missed a vital aspect of this

"they will less likely to resort to robbing and murdering(although blacks make up 13% of population, they commit half of the crime in the US, according to Bureau of Justice report)"
There's no way to know what the real ratio of crimes by blacks: crimes by whites is- especially if the police are more likely to investigate ones where a black man is accused.

 

I strongly suspect that black people are disproportionately represented among criminals- but I'd not want to put a figure on it.

And in a country that has poor welfare provision and which keeps cutting back on it, the people who struggle to get jobs are going to be forced into criminality to make a living.

Is that their fault, or the fault of those who won't consider them for a job because they heard that "most crime is due to blacks"?

Or is it the fault of people who told them that?

 

Once you have a situation where some (small) fraction of the police are targeting black people for little other than being black it's difficult to see how much more division you could create.

[MigL]

Just like you have a small number of police who go out of their way to harass Black Americans, and yes, in some cases, murder them, you also have a small number of Black Americans who are extremely militant and may even want to see dead cops.

 

I'm more familiar with BLM locally.

Here in Toronto, BLM hijacked the PRIDE parade and stopped the march, unless all cops ( yes even the gay ones ) were excluded from the parade.

It may have made national news and drawn attention to the BLM cause, but it is clearly divisive.

 

You don't improve your disadvantaged situation by stepping on another group of disadvantaged people.

[swansont]

Black Lives Matter can be a reminder than we need to help the black youths. If more blacks are educated, they will less likely to resort to robbing and murdering(although blacks make up 13% of population, they commit half of the crime in the US, according to Bureau of Justice report). Supporting organizations such as Negros College Fund would probaby produce a more positive effect. To end the cycle of blacks getting shot unarmed, it all starts with educating the youths so they can prosper and the stigma of black people being seen as criminals might cease. With Black Lives Matter, it deters some cops from going to the ghetto areas to protect civilians which in turn increases crime rate in major cities.

And some protesters take the Black Lives matter movement out of hand. I saw a video where they are chanting "We want dead cops". I don't think that's what Martin Luther King would want to see

 

 

 

How will better education for black people end the stigma of being black? The issue there is education of the white people who hold those beliefs. One of the issue pointed out in all of this is that this isn't an internal issue that the affected people can fix by themselves. A police officer doesn't know your education level when you're driving a car. In fact, he may think that you stole the car if it's nice.

 

As John C pointed out, the statistics are for people in jail. That doesn't tell you that black commit half the crime. Consider what the prison population breakdown would be if one group were systematically given longer average jail sentences for similar crimes, and/or they were targeted preferentially by the police: they would end up being over-represented in the prison population, relative to the real crime rate.

[ModernArtist25]

Education will work because if black people finish high school instead of dropping out and if they go to college, they are more likely to find a decent job so they wouldn’t have to resort to robbing or other crimes. They will less likely to be arrested and get into altercations with police. Numbers of black people incarcerated would go down.

 

 

Plus you can’t really believe everything you see in the media. A white person being gunned down unarmed is less exciting as a black man being gunned down unarmed. So ofcourse they are going to show more of that stuff to entice viewers. All you see on tv are cops gunning down people but actually many of them use tasers to put down a person but you don't see that because it's not that exciting.

 

 

On the other hand, maybe the entire world is just messed up. History has shown over and over again that the less advanced people or species are the ones that are “picked on” or “bullied”, we see them as “below” us.

[Delta1212]

Do you think you could cite two or three instances of police gunning down an unarmed white man in the past month?

 

Also, how does the fact that police taze people more than they shoot them change the fact that they also shoot people? The instances of police shooting unarmed people in the news aren't false, and those alone are too frequent, regardless of what else the police do. Nobody believes that every single police interaction ends with someone getting shot, but the fact that it ends with anyone who isn't an immediate threat to police or others getting shot is a problem. The fact that lots of people don't get shot by police doesn't make the instances where people do somehow less important.

[John Cuthber]

"Education will work because if black people finish high school instead of dropping out and if they go to college, they are more likely to find a decent job so they wouldn’t have to resort to robbing or other crimes."[/size]

They will only get jobs if someone educates the employers.[/size]

"They will less likely to be arrested and get into altercations with police. "
Only if someone teaches the police that not all crooks are black.

"A white person being gunned down unarmed is less exciting as a black man being gunned down unarmed."
Really?
Why?
Anyway- it's not difficult to find the stats. And the stats show that the dead guys are seldom white.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
So, you are right- "you can’t really believe everything you see in the media."

[Delta1212]

"Education will work because if black people finish high school instead of dropping out and if they go to college, they are more likely to find a decent job so they wouldn’t have to resort to robbing or other crimes."[/size]

 

They will only get jobs if someone educates the employers.[/size]

 

"They will less likely to be arrested and get into altercations with police. "

Only if someone teaches the police that not all crooks are black.

 

"A white person being gunned down unarmed is less exciting as a black man being gunned down unarmed."

Really?

Why?

Anyway- it's not difficult to find the stats. And the stats show that the dead guys are seldom white.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

So, you are right- "you can’t really believe everything you see in the media."

 

 

So based on that, exactly twice as many white people as black people have been killed by police this year in the US, but because of the population disparity, a black person is about 2.5 times as likely to be shot by police as a white person.

[Ophiolite]

To answer the OP question, the BLM movement is more effectively revealing an existing division, not deepening it.

[ModernArtist25]

 

 

So based on that, exactly twice as many white people as black people have been killed by police this year in the US, but because of the population disparity, a black person is about 2.5 times as likely to be shot by police as a white person.

Where in the website did you see that twice as many white people as black people have been shot?? Cuz all I see are pictures of people who got shot Edited September 25, 2016 by ModernArtist25

[Delta1212]

Where in the website did you see that twice as many white people as black people have been shot?? Cuz all I see are pictures of people who got shot

Are you looking on desktop or mobile? The desktop site gave a breakdown by state, race and allowed to filter by total or per capita. New Mexico has a scary per capita police shooting rate.

 

Total number of white people shot so far by police was 388 and total number of black people was 194. The per capita was, iirc, 1.9 something white people per million shot by police vs 4.56 (I think) black people per million shot by police.

 

Native Americans were actually the highest per capita group killed by police.

[ModernArtist25]

Are you looking on desktop or mobile? The desktop site gave a breakdown by state, race and allowed to filter by total or per capita. New Mexico has a scary per capita police shooting rate.

 

Total number of white people shot so far by police was 388 and total number of black people was 194. The per capita was, iirc, 1.9 something white people per million shot by police vs 4.56 (I think) black people per million shot by police.

 

Native Americans were actually the highest per capita group killed by police.

Oh ok I see it now. How can one tell if this is accurate though or it's just one of those things you shouldn't believe online?

[swansont]

Education will work because if black people finish high school instead of dropping out and if they go to college, they are more likely to find a decent job so they wouldn’t have to resort to robbing or other crimes. They will less likely to be arrested and get into altercations with police. Numbers of black people incarcerated would go down.

 

 

 

You're ignoring all of the innocent black people stopped by the police, simply because they were black. How does this education change that?

[ModernArtist25]

 

 

You're ignoring all of the innocent black people stopped by the police, simply because they were black. How does this education change that?

If more black people have education and a decent job thus reducing amount of crimes committed, it might remove the stigma of bad black behavior that hurts their race. And hurting their innocent counterparts.

 

I agree with everyone here, it is not just blacks need to make a change, but also the police, the employers, and justice system.

Edited September 26, 2016 by ModernArtist25

[StringJunky]

Education will work because if black people finish high school instead of dropping out and if they go to college, they are more likely to find a decent job so they wouldn’t have to resort to robbing or other crimes. They will less likely to be arrested and get into altercations with police. Numbers of black people incarcerated would go down.

That won't solve anything in the long term because the problem will still perpetuate until white people do a 180 in their attitude towards people of colour. The solution you support puts a plaster on the symptoms instead of addressing the true cause.

Edited September 26, 2016 by StringJunky

[Ten oz]

Black Lives Matter can be a reminder than we need to help the black youths. If more blacks are educated, they will less likely to resort to robbing and murdering(although blacks make up 13% of population, they commit half of the crime in the US, according to Bureau of Justice report). Supporting organizations such as Negros College Fund would probaby produce a more positive effect. To end the cycle of blacks getting shot unarmed, it all starts with educating the youths so they can prosper and the stigma of black people being seen as criminals might cease. With Black Lives Matter, it deters some cops from going to the ghetto areas to protect civilians which in turn increases crime rate in major cities.

And some protesters take the Black Lives matter movement out of hand. I saw a video where they are chanting "We want dead cops". I don't think that's what Martin Luther King would want to see

You mean half of all prison inmates are black? That is not equally to committing half of all the crime. Many crimes actually go unsolved. The majority of rape, robbery, burglary, vehicle theft, and etc go unsolved. More blacks arrested for crimes may simply just be a reflection of uneven policing. Sometimes who gets caught has as much to do with who is being watched than it does anything else.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/clearances

[Genecks]

Something I did not learn until after I was out of school and done with Martin Luther King Jr. reading was that Martin Luther King Jr. relied on people removing racism in order to create a more unified Christian America. Martin Luther King Jr. relied on religion to make his arguments rather than just saying it was the nice thing to do. I felt lied to by the public school system, as I was never told about the Christian excerpts from his works. Thus, I look back and see it as 1984-Orwellian brain washing. Sure, the school system managed to create a division between church and state, but just prevented me from knowing his work as Christian and instead sophisticatedly pushed it as non-religious (emphasis on sophist).

 

I like the black lives matter thing a lot more, though, because they aren't pushing religion, at least Christian religion.

Edited September 28, 2016 by Genecks

[Delta1212]

I don't think it's so much a secularization in particular as it is that MLK and the Civil Rights movement in general is very dumbed down and kind of sanitized on a high school level. It basically goes Rosa Parks -> sit ins -> I have a dream -> assassination. And for most people, until maybe your last year or so of schooling, you'd think Rosa Parks was a woman who spontaneously refused to give up her seat and sparked a movement instead of being someone who volunteered for the role and was carefully vetted by an already well organized movement specifically for that purpose.

 

Anything about MLK's personal education and beliefs tends to get glossed over beyond a superficial "inspired by Ghandi's example of non-violent protest." He made allusions to everything from the Bible to Shakespeare in his speeches, but that barely gets touched on, and while I had heard of the Letter from a Birmingham jail, I didn't actually read it until college.

 

Just in general, we have a tendency to cartoonize our historical figures and distill them down to a few achievements and sound bytes and anything that doesn't fit neatly within the confines of that simple narrative just gets dropped from the curriculum. It's essentially parablized history.

[Ten oz]

@ Genecks, his name was no clue Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr? He was a reverend and his doctorate was in theology. One of the most famous lines from his most famous speech is "free at last, thank god almighty we are free at last".

 

I am not attempting to be rude but one would have to simply not been paying attention in school to have missed that Rev Dr Martin Luther Jr was a religious man who wove christian idealogy into his speeches and many religious sermons.

[ModernArtist25]

Something I did not learn until after I was out of school and done with Martin Luther King Jr. reading was that Martin Luther King Jr. relied on people removing racism in order to create a more unified Christian America. Martin Luther King Jr. relied on religion to make his arguments rather than just saying it was the nice thing to do. I felt lied to by the public school system, as I was never told about the Christian excerpts from his works. Thus, I look back and see it as 1984-Orwellian brain washing. Sure, the school system managed to create a division between church and state, but just prevented me from knowing his work as Christian and instead sophisticatedly pushed it as non-religious (emphasis on sophist).

 

I like the black lives matter thing a lot more, though, because they aren't pushing religion, at least Christian religion.

In his speeches, I really didn't feel like he was forcing religion on anyone...on what MLK speech did you think he was guilty of this?

[DrmDoc]

Here's a link to a Review-Journal video report about a defense attorney ordered to remove a BLM pin from her lapel by a Las Vegas judge. The judge said the pin represented a political statement that was inappropriate for court, while the attorney believed the judge was infringing on her free speech. The attorney refused and her cases were delayed pending resolution of this issue. Although I do believe the attorney was making a political statement, I think the judge may have erred in what seems his assessment that wearing a small BLM pin might compromise the just and lawful proceedings of his court. However, in America, judges are well within their authority to remove protestors and protest displays from their courtrooms regardless of display size and who displays the protest. So, do you think it was a political statement inappropriate for court or a violation of the attorney's free speech privilege?