The Official Racism Thread Social • Page 18

It's this aspect that I cannot handle. In the 2nd Alton Sterling video it was the ending where you can see him still alive after 6 fucking shots to the chest, succumbing to the injuries. I fear being over-dramatic and getting personal at a time where I shouldn't, but it is something I will never forget watching; it has made a profound impact on me.

 

Try the Kelly Thomas video on for size. Hearing a grown man scream for his father while two pigs beat him to death for nine minutes will fucking scar you.

 

There's also a photo of the car that shows both tail lights were working.

 

I've seen this used to support the girlfriend was lying and that they were pulled over for a more serious crime: not that that fucking matters.

I don't think that's what you were going for, and I have no idea if the photo is legitimate, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that she or the officer had confused tail light with brake light or turn signal.

 

Definitely wasn't going for that. It was probably your good ol' racial profiling. But yes, guess it could've been one of those things as well.

 

It's also very possible that the officer was lying when he pulled them over.

 

Movement To 'Police The Police' Started With The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense - Counter Current News

 

Is guns being banned in America even a possibility?

 

Never going to happen

 

That responding with violence to police harassment is morally justifiable for black men.

For our part, white folks need to stop being so tone deaf as to continue preaching nonviolence and acting as mere translator for our racist and stupid white peers. If the rest of white America needs a violent white vanguard to legitimize the conversation as more than rowdy black thugs causing a ruckus over justifiable homicide, we should show solidarity with our brothers and sisters of color and kindly accommodate them.

 

I'd think letting the police force have guns in case there was a specific situation but not having them allowed to carry them would be something they could do. I'd hope that the number of illegal guns would drop drastically if they were banned and just being found with one would mean you'd face serious jail time. I mean there'll always be people getting guns when they shouldn't be but in the UK it's no where near what it is in America. I'm actually not sure what the gun laws are over here, whether the police have access to them at all or not.

 

If you make possessing a gun automatic years in jail there are gonna be a lot more young black people in jail

 

I'd hazard a guess that he means it's time to fight back. How many times has this sort of thing happened and there has been literally no steps taken by anybody to prevent them happening again? Non-violence (e.g. peaceful protests etc.) has not worked, so it is time to force change with (perhaps) destructive protest that will purposely call attention to the matter.

It's something I believed to be appropriate when I saw the first video of Alton Sterling's execution, but felt it not my place to say so, as I am white and outside the USA. How that is done is not something I can answer, however.

 

Guns aren't the problem. Before guns, white people had lynching ropes and whips. Besides, Eric Garner didn't have a gun; Sean Bell didn't have a gun; Amadou Diallo didn't have a gun; Mike Brown didn't have a gun; Tamir Rice had a toy gun; Rekia Boyd didn't have a gun. It does not matter if a gun is present or not. Our bodies are enough to threaten and call forth violence. It is, in other words, white supremacy as the status quo. It is the source of their rage and aggression towards us, it is what their institutions are built upon.

 

Reminder that we literally don't even track deaths caused by police. The Guardian has a project to do so. We don't give the slightest fuck about regulating our police, and in fact are encouraged to grovel at their feet for their service in "protecting our streets."

 

that guardian piece is horrifying

 

Combine this also with the fact that I, and I imagine all poc twice as much, have absolutely no faith in the honesty of the police either. Consider the unarmed, black, and in some cases mentally ill people shot in the back by police forces following Katrina, and that higher ups literally obstructed investigation and destroyed evidence to protect their own. Body cams are a must to rebuild trust, but as Dom said, they are far from sufficient.

 

“I have no particular love for the idealized “worker” as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

 

Link?

 

The Counted: people killed by police in the United States – interactive

 

Who Killed Eric Garner? | Jacobin

When Alton Sterling was murdered by police, he was selling CD's outside of convenience store, which he often did. Sterling, like Eric Garner, relied on the informal economy to get by.

"Today, the state actively generates the conditions of austerity that force people like Garner to survive by whatever means necessary — then watches them at every corner, ready to police, imprison, or murder them for daring to survive. Those deemed superfluous live in an existential bind: when they look for support, they are ignored; when they find ways to get by, they are harassed. In Garner’s unforgettable words, 'every time you see me, you want to mess with me.'

Garner’s murder is therefore not only about the justice system. It’s also about how capitalism creates racialized categories of “surplus” people. We have to question not just the police, the courts, and the judicial system that commit and cover up such killings, but the social system that makes it all possible. We must therefore take a cue from the anti-racist movements of the past and find ways of linking our critique of racism with our critique of capitalism, so that no one can ever be called 'surplus' again."

 

We have exhausted all means of redress, and nothing has been done to stop police officers from murderinng us. In fact, they've arrested us during our demonstrations, been called thugs, smeared, etc. No help is forthcoming from the state, its institutions or its laws, because they require the sort of monopoly on violence we see in those videos. That violence legitimates the socioeconomic relations that constitute this nation-state. That violence has always been centered on people of color, and black people in particular. Nothing has changed, just a different mode that is directed at us. In other words, the violence against us is foundational. The only means of recourse, then, is to destroy the foundation, the edifice and its representatives, eg, cops. Cops and white people need to feel fear of taking black lives.

 

I am at a loss. This country and what it does to it's own is fucking horrifying.

 

I think we need to organize and get something comparable to the Black Liberation Army. That is the sole means to make legible our pain to them, that is, by inflicting it upon them. But, yes, they should fear that, if we are murdered, we will respond back in kind on multiple levels. The alternative is pleading and protesting, as we have been doing, and attempting to appeal to their humanity. It does not work. Appealing to humanity works when it is white folks, because they are structurally considered free-acting subjects; we are considered objects that can be thrown away, accumulated, and torn apart, so on that level, there is no basis for appeal. The only thing left is to lash out in a direct and organized way, to make their communities worse, to make sure we have our weapons on us, to make sure that they do not feel safe at any point in time in this world.