Read on Twitter
I have been giving this concept a lot of thought this past few months and now I& #39;m going to write a novel on Twitter. My condolences if anyone actually decides to read this.
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1 https://twitter.com/folding_laundry/status/1308957683941171200">https://twitter.com/folding_l...
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1 https://twitter.com/folding_laundry/status/1308957683941171200">https://twitter.com/folding_l...
I& #39;ve been trying to understand why so many black Americans cling to holding up other blacks, that they have never met, that were killed by police, even though they were criminals and guilty of some pretty terrible things.
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There seems to be a vast differences between cultures in the US and how they view criminals and I think this really started showing itself pretty openly all the way back when the Rodney King incident occurred.
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When TV sets around the US started to show their viewers that shaky VHS type home video footage of Rodney King being beaten brutally by Los Angeles police officers back in 91, America was faced with a harsh look at policing, the likes most of us had only ever seen in movies.
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In other words, it was shocking for most Americans that were white like me.
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hough, as many of the white people I knew learned more about the incident, that King lead them on a high speed chase when they tried pulling him over for drunken driving, that officers believed him to be high on PCP because of the way he was acting..
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...(though he never tested positive for it), that the police report said he was resisting, that he had a prior conviction for robbing a convenient store with a tire iron, they started to be less upset at the video.
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They began to try to understand how the police might have been justified in acting that way. Most white people usually hold the opinion that most cops are good.
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When they saw all those police officers standing there taking turns swinging, hitting, kicking King in that video, and after getting over the initial shock, they began to try to rationalize why they would do such a thing.
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Benefit of the doubt was given to police and not to proven criminals. However, for many black Americans, probably most, their processing of the incident was completely different.
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As I came to learn over years after the King incident and the LA Riots, what we saw on that VHS tape was not that out of the ordinary for many black Americans. What they saw was just another incident of police brutalizing a black person, but this time for all the world to see.
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For so many black Americans, they must have initially felt extreme sadness to watch it, but also great hope and joy that white america might finally open their eyes to a reality they had faced their whole lives.
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It must have been absolutely brutal for some of them to hold that hope and then to be hit with the reality of hearing white people around them say things like "he was a violent criminal on PCP and was fighting the police, do you know how strong people on PCP are?".
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& #39;m sure as disappointing as it was to hear so many white people buy into the police& #39;s stories about how violent he was being, they still held hope that just maybe, since the offending officers were charged and taken to trial, that justice might for once go their way.
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We all know the violent eruption of outrage that resulted in LA when the officers were acquitted.
This only explains some of it though.
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This only explains some of it though.
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I think you have to realize that for all the years in this country before 50 or so years go, being black and being a criminal were synonymous for many blacks in America. At least in so far as how they were treated by the law.
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For a long time in this country, no matter how law abiding you were as a black american, you still had a good chance of being made into a criminal by an unjust system that treated you as guilty before innocent.
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Black Americans did not have the luxury to look down on criminals as white Americans did, otherwise they would have to look down on many good people in their communities.
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When you cannot trust the justice system in your own country, how can you trust that the offenses it convicts the people in your community with are true and just?
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This and the prevalence of Christianity in the black American communities seems to be a good reason why it seems to be such a cultural norm to not look down on criminals in the community.
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I wonder though if this has lead to many young black people becoming criminals than there would be if this were not the case and if looking down on criminals was as common in black America as most of the other cultures here.
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Is this, in essence, creating a positive feedback loop where that distrust of the law and the lack of cultural shame on criminals helps create the disparity of more black violent crime which, in turn, makes people think the justice system is racist?
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If you look to cultures like Japan where simply being a criminal can spell complete disowning from your family and friends and nothing but shame is foisted upon you, you find an almost non existent crime rate.
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In most white communities I have experienced, save for some very impoverished rural ones, it& #39;s not as severe as the Japanese treatment, but if a white person is convicted of a crime, they are pretty much ostracized socially.
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From then on, if word gets out of any roughing up by police, most other white people just assume they deserved it. No one wants to defend a low class criminal.
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This is why most stories of white criminals getting killed by the cops or roughed up hardly makes it past the local town news.
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Most white communities hold this contempt for criminals that they want to make sure others in their community understands they would themselves be subject to if they became criminals.
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One could argue that morally a community that always embraces fellow members without shame regardless of their criminal past is superior to one that shames those members, but what is the proof that rests in the pudding, as they say?
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