Michael Brown

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Hype
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Re: Michael Brown

#241 Post by Hype » Fri Dec 05, 2014 9:41 am

kv's quibble isn't necessarily as infantile as it looks. Yes, SR's meaning was clear, but in fact there is a genuine matter of ambiguity, of focus/scope, and of target/aim, here. There are many interrelated questions and problems that are easy to conflate (because they are conflated) when talking about "the issue of deadly force used by police [against people of colour]". There are many ways to think about these questions and problems that generate a different relationship between that singular issue and parent, sibling, or cousin issues, if there are any.

One might think, for example, that the recent hyper-militarization of the police is a broader issue that plays a role in all of this, or that it is unclear where to place the exact lapses in oversight, training, enforcement of law, etc (e.g., is it at the level of local government? State? Federal? All of them? How?)

It is possible to read kv's concern as something more like: it's not obvious that the two major cases being discussed right now are symptoms of exactly the same sets of causes (hence: not identical in that sense), even if, yes, they are indicative of at least one major problem. These are different claims. Was Trayvon Martin's case a matter of police violence against black people? (Not really, because the guy that murdered him wasn't technically a law-enforcement officer). But was it indicative of an ongoing problem to which all these other cases can be related? Almost certainly. But the philosopher wants to make sure that the activist and the polemicist and the commentator keep clear about these things, and I think there's some value to doing so.

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SR
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Re: Michael Brown

#242 Post by SR » Fri Dec 05, 2014 9:49 am

Two major cases?

Anyway, glad we're on to something important here. Thanks guys. :thumb:

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Hype
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Re: Michael Brown

#243 Post by Hype » Fri Dec 05, 2014 9:55 am

SR wrote:Two major cases?
The Michael Brown thread: Michael Brown, and now Eric Garner.

Obviously there are other major cases -- that's why I brought Trayvon Martin up. But the question of 'identity' between cases was raised with respect to the first two.

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Re: Michael Brown

#244 Post by SR » Fri Dec 05, 2014 9:57 am

No, I'm quite positive I was referring to many more cases than the two.

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Hype
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Re: Michael Brown

#245 Post by Hype » Fri Dec 05, 2014 10:20 am

SR wrote:No, I'm quite positive I was referring to many more cases than the two.
I didn't mean you specifically were only talking about the two cases (that is why I said "major cases"). Your implied meaning in "NY to Phoenix" doesn't suggest that the two major news stories aren't the major cases being discussed in the thread more generally.

But just to be clear, I agree with you in general terms, but it doesn't follow that the more cases there are the more likely it is that they are all instances of the same broader issue, though it doesn't rule that out either.

I think it is helpful to keep police brutality/sanctioned murder of racial minorities as a distinct issue from racism and tolerated brutality against racial minorities more generally. One reason for thinking this is that the society already accepts that there are contexts in which there are justified police homicides. The fact that so many of these are racial is important, but the reason why some police homicides are wrong isn't just that the people that are killed have a certain skin colour, but whether the reason why any particular case is wrong is that it can be attributed to the fact that the victim had a certain skin colour. And while the general problem is almost certainly true one might wonder how a society can reconcile the following propositions:

1. It is acceptable, morally, legally, socially, that sometimes police can use lethal force.

2. There are an exceedingly large number of cases in which it is difficult to discern whether the justification for (1) was adequate, and the victim is a racial minority.

There are many potential ways of teasing out the relationship between (1) and (2). And undoubtedly that is because there are many cultural factors at play: racial bias is well known and most of us, including black people, have it, against darker skinned people (see: Harvard bias studies). Many cities in the United States are, by comparison to the rest of the world, EXTREMELY racially segregated (I am still blown away by Baltimore and Chicago -- I have never seen anything like that before, and I still have a hard time believing this is the way things are). Social and economic inequalities correlate with race for reasons that we basically understand (legacy of slavery, continuation of, and toleration of, biases against both skin-colour and poverty). And so on.

So the question of how exactly racism plays a role across cases isn't clear. Do we want to know specific motive, if there is any, on the part of the actor, or in the reactions, or in the failures to prevent, or what?

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Romeo
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Re: Michael Brown

#246 Post by Romeo » Sun Dec 07, 2014 12:00 pm

I am deeply saddened by the outcome of the Eric Garner grand jury. Here was a case of no "hearsay" but actual video of the event
No one disputes he was selling illegal cigarettes
But there is no reason why a person should die over what would basically be a desk ticket offense
I read a post a friend shared on FB from a Brother in the Catholic church and what he said was right on point, he said like myself, we have friends and family who are in law enforcement and respect what they do, they do put their lives on the line daily to protect us. They do have to make split second decisions that we never have to make. Since we do not do that daily we will never understand what they deal with on a daily basis. However we can not blindly defend an action where some horrible and deadly mistakes were made in this case, both by the officers and the justice system.

I am proud of the fellow NY'ers who are making their voices heard that black lives matter without violence.

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