AMERICA’S DREAMING
Aug. 28th, 2013 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrog[Guest sociopolitical commentary from Team Def Political Batshit Curator Lucky Bensonhurst]
50 years ago today:
It’s one of the great speeches, and one I highly recommend listening to from beginning to end at least once. And by “listen” I mean “really listen”, not “play it in the background while you scroll through yr Facebooks, Twitters and Tumblr dashboards”.
And of course, as you may know, MLKJr’s Dream has not yet been achieved, as was pointed out Sunday in the DC.
Which isn’t to say we’re still in the segregated 1950s. We have come a very long way. For example, African-American people only occasionally get thrown out of restaurants for being frightening to white people, and that’s just the result of Frightened White People, not actual policy. So instead of institutional racism we have case-by-case racism.
Progress!
Still, the above Wild Wings incident shows we’ve got a ways to go. As do things like the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program and the apparent fact that it’s apparently more illegal to smoke weed if yr a black person than if yr a white person.
To say nothing of the whole Trayvon Martin case – as conservatives helpfully pointed out last week by making hay about thosethree black teenagers two black teenagers and a light-skinned black teenager black teenagers (and maybe a white teenager) who killed Chris Lane for a laugh.
The coverage of the Lane murder is arguably a low point for conservative media – not just in the way they seemed to deliberately pretend there was no third white dude involved at first, but also by using it to accuse Obama and other Trayvon defenders of hypocrisy by not being as outraged when black people kill white people.
It’s a dumb comparison, of course – as if there’s no difference between teen psychopaths killing a guy for fun and the bizarre circumstance of a neighborhood watch guy chasing and ultimately killing a black kid (in self-defense!) for wearing a suspicious hoodie while being black, and not even being arrested for it for 44 days because it’s not illegal to defend yrself against people even if you have to chase them down to do it.
But a bunch of prominent conservatives are making that comparison anyway, because they want both murder cases to be about something other than what they are about. They wanted the Trayvon Martin case to be about the constitutional right to suspect black people of being suspicious and shoot them in self-defense as guaranteed in the 2A. Consequently, they want the Chris Lane case (and pretty much any other case where a black person does violence on a white person) to serve as proof that Zimmerman was justified in pegging Trayvon Martin as a potential perp.
All of which boils down to the fact that a lot of white people are afraid of black people because GANGSTA RAP and HOODIES and BLACK PANTHERS or whatever, and hate being called racists whenever they try to point to statistics showing all the black people in prison (though that’s been going down) and all the black people killing white people (though actually homicides are way down, interracial or otherwise).
Basically they want to justify their own fear, and they don’t think it’s fair that blacks get to make a big deal of a white (Hispanic) killing a black kid but whites don't get to make a big deal about black kids killing a white guy. As if everything African Americans have had to endure for the last 600 years from slavery to Jim Crow was magically erased with the Civil Rights Act and The Black People are being ungrateful for not pretending all that other stuff never happened.
Or something.
So. Yes. MLKJr’s Dream has a ways to go, Jim.
– L. Bensonhurst
50 years ago today:
It’s one of the great speeches, and one I highly recommend listening to from beginning to end at least once. And by “listen” I mean “really listen”, not “play it in the background while you scroll through yr Facebooks, Twitters and Tumblr dashboards”.
And of course, as you may know, MLKJr’s Dream has not yet been achieved, as was pointed out Sunday in the DC.
Which isn’t to say we’re still in the segregated 1950s. We have come a very long way. For example, African-American people only occasionally get thrown out of restaurants for being frightening to white people, and that’s just the result of Frightened White People, not actual policy. So instead of institutional racism we have case-by-case racism.
Progress!
Still, the above Wild Wings incident shows we’ve got a ways to go. As do things like the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program and the apparent fact that it’s apparently more illegal to smoke weed if yr a black person than if yr a white person.
To say nothing of the whole Trayvon Martin case – as conservatives helpfully pointed out last week by making hay about those
The coverage of the Lane murder is arguably a low point for conservative media – not just in the way they seemed to deliberately pretend there was no third white dude involved at first, but also by using it to accuse Obama and other Trayvon defenders of hypocrisy by not being as outraged when black people kill white people.
It’s a dumb comparison, of course – as if there’s no difference between teen psychopaths killing a guy for fun and the bizarre circumstance of a neighborhood watch guy chasing and ultimately killing a black kid (in self-defense!) for wearing a suspicious hoodie while being black, and not even being arrested for it for 44 days because it’s not illegal to defend yrself against people even if you have to chase them down to do it.
But a bunch of prominent conservatives are making that comparison anyway, because they want both murder cases to be about something other than what they are about. They wanted the Trayvon Martin case to be about the constitutional right to suspect black people of being suspicious and shoot them in self-defense as guaranteed in the 2A. Consequently, they want the Chris Lane case (and pretty much any other case where a black person does violence on a white person) to serve as proof that Zimmerman was justified in pegging Trayvon Martin as a potential perp.
All of which boils down to the fact that a lot of white people are afraid of black people because GANGSTA RAP and HOODIES and BLACK PANTHERS or whatever, and hate being called racists whenever they try to point to statistics showing all the black people in prison (though that’s been going down) and all the black people killing white people (though actually homicides are way down, interracial or otherwise).
Basically they want to justify their own fear, and they don’t think it’s fair that blacks get to make a big deal of a white (Hispanic) killing a black kid but whites don't get to make a big deal about black kids killing a white guy. As if everything African Americans have had to endure for the last 600 years from slavery to Jim Crow was magically erased with the Civil Rights Act and The Black People are being ungrateful for not pretending all that other stuff never happened.
Or something.
So. Yes. MLKJr’s Dream has a ways to go, Jim.
– L. Bensonhurst
