• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

WSJ op-ed by longtime conservative activist: Black Lives Matter based on myths

Status
Not open for further replies.

Jay-Hova

Banned
I do think there are some things wrong with the way people on "our side" have been attacking this subject, but this article is really just a misinformed mess.
Also it feels like it's simply making point's against arguments that no one is making.
 

quaere

Member
Overall, this article is a mess of cherry picked statistics. But there is one line I found worthy of discussion:
Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.
Assuming this is true, putting aside individual incidents and considering the average, doesn't this suggest that police officers are already being overly cautious and not engaging when they should have?

If your view is that this is a systemic problem across all police, what would an acceptable ratio be? If police were to be more even cautious before engaging suspects, would it be ok for 3.5 officers to be killed for every black suspect killed? 4.5?
 

Chichikov

Member
no sarcasm. it's nice when bigoted cunts like the writer show their ass.
I agree, but you could've made that point without baiting posters into thinking you're agreeing with the article, right?
No big deal, just saying, these types of threads can get heated enough on their own, no need to stir shit.
 

Slayven

Member
Can you elaborate? I don't understand.

And I corrected 'write' to 'right'

Black people, especially black men are seen as aggressive and threatening. Even at a young age black children are seen as older and face school punishment at a higher rate then other children. There been cases where a cop beat a young boy cause the boy looked at him wrong.
 
Overall, this article is a mess of cherry picked statistics. But there is one line I found worthy of discussion:

Assuming this is true, putting aside individual incidents and considering the average, doesn't this suggest that police officers are already being overly cautious and not engaging when they should have?

If your view is that this is a systemic problem across all police, what would an acceptable ratio be? If police were to be more cautious in engaging suspects, would it be ok for 3.5 officers to be killed for every black suspect killed? 4.5?

This is a terrible, terrible question.

Biased policing is well documented for starters. Next, you're acting like recognizing systemic racism entails being ok with police being killed.

Disgusting.
 

Herbs

Banned
I agree, but you could've made that point without baiting posters into thinking you're agreeing with the article, right?
No big deal, just saying, these types of threads can get heated enough on their own, no need to stir shit.

there was no baiting. saying it's refreshingly honest doesn't even begin to imply I'm agreeing with it.
 

fixedpoint

Member
Completely unsurprising coming from the WSJ. The author, Heather Mac Donald, is a hard-core "conservative" and a racist.
Got to pad that Fox News application.
She won't have far to go - the WSJ is a News Corp. property just as Fox News is.
 

Nikodemos

Member
Black people, especially black men are seen as aggressive and threatening. Even at a young age black children are seen as older and face school punishment at a higher rate then other children. There been cases where a cop beat a young boy cause the boy looked at him wrong.
It's because of all that "super-predator" garbage of the early '90s, which coalesced into "black kids aren't kids! they're miniature adults!"
 

Slayven

Member
Overall, this article is a mess of cherry picked statistics. But there is one line I found worthy of discussion:

Assuming this is true, putting aside individual incidents and considering the average, doesn't this suggest that police officers are already being overly cautious and not engaging when they should have?

If your view is that this is a systemic problem across all police, what would an acceptable ratio be? If police were to be more even cautious before engaging suspects, would it be ok for 3.5 officers to be killed for every black suspect killed? 4.5?
First off police dying in droves is a myth.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1112234

5JzBsNq.png
 
From what I understand, she's saying a police officer is more likely to consider himself in danger while confronting a black suspect as opposed to whites or hispanics because 6000 white on white deaths are a much smaller number coz whites are a majority and 6000 black on black deaths is much bigger as there are much fewer black people than white people.

I'm not saying that she's right or you're wrong, I'm just trying to understand her point. It makes sense for an officer to feel more threatened when they're told that 17% of the country's population has more homicides than the 60% majority. (I'm sorry if my numbers are wrong.)


I understand. Black people aren't biologically any more violent than any other race, and a lot of crime is because of the system and the situations that these communities are placed in. However, while this explains black on black crime, the point about an officer feeling more threatened in crime ridden areas and more likely to use force also makes sense, doesn't it?

I completely understand what she's getting at but understanding those statistics at all still don't justify the situation at hand. Ok so let's say I can understand that the police have a false perception of black violence due to their minority population compared to the majority. And I can understand the idea of being more cautious in a crime ridden area. That however has nothing to do with the larger conversation about the response to a situation in which an unarmed civilian is in fact killed by an officer. Their own false perceptions about how much more violent they believe blacks might be should not excuse that response of deadly force when unwarranted and certainly not aquitalls of offending officers that have killed unarmed black men and women.

And honestly, as entities designed to work with a community they should have a better grasp on these very statistics enough to know that a minority community will falsely seem more violent than the majority so any fear that "blacks are more dangerous" should be unfounded in an officer's mind.
 
The article itself is bad enough, but the WSJ editorial blurb at the top somehow makes it all worse. So Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and John Crawford II are "myths" and "fiction", WSJ editors?
Shit is garbage.
 

Cybit

FGC Waterboy
I saw this today and was pretty dumbfounded. It's probably the most racist and downright infuriating article I've ever seen posted on a mainstream news publication.

Edit: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myths-of-black-lives-matter-1455235686

I'm going to selectively bold some of the parts that stood out to me, and I'm going to insert some commentary in certain places.



This is interesting because right from the start this article, written by a white woman, is telling you that black people's lived experience is wrong. I think the applicable term might be whitesplaining? This goes beyond that though.




Funny statistics for the win. We can make the numbers tell a completely different story by changing what we use for the denominator. Of course now we're measuring something completely different and barely even related to what BLM is all about, but why should that stop us?



That last part is great. It's like a 12 year old getting killed for holding a toy gun is justified because minority communities are more dangerous.



Here's the one part of the entire article that has some merit, and it's buried near the end.



So here we've got victim blaming. We shouldn't be angry that people like Tamir Rice, Eric Garner or Freddie Gray were needlessly killed by police; we should really be blaming black culture.

I can't even deal with this crap. I feel like establishment conservatism has dropped all pretense of not being racist. The right is going fucking nuts.

The math. My brain hurts.

The part about minority police officers...this hurts to admit, but it's sort of true. My dad and I volunteer for the Innocence Project, and the one thing we always tell people who have been accused is that if there is a cop of your same race (and you are a minority), SHUT THE HELL UP. We have (unfortunately) strong evidence that they're often used to screw people of their own race even more often than someone of a different race would. The blue > the blood, unfortunately. :(

Outside of that, the entire op-ed infuriates me. I hate when people manipulate statistics for their own means.
 

nib95

Banned
WSJ is Murdoch owned trash under the false pretence of being reputable and established. This sort of crap from them doesn't surprise me.
 

Aurongel

Member
this woman is so sheltered it hurts, absolutely tone deaf responses from her on forms of discrimination that she has never and will never experience.
 

sephi22

Member
I completely understand what she's getting at but understanding those statistics at all still don't justify the situation at hand. Ok so let's say I can understand that the police have a false perception of black violence due to their minority population compared to the majority. And I can understand the idea of being more cautious in a crime ridden area. That however has nothing to do with the larger conversation about the response to a situation in which an unarmed civilian is in fact killed by an officer. Their own false perceptions about how much more violent they believe blacks might be should not excuse that response of deadly force when unwarranted and certainly not aquitalls of offending officers that have killed unarmed black men and women.

And honestly, as entities designed to work with a community they should have a better grasp on these very statistics enough to know that a minority community will falsely seem more violent than the majority so any fear that "blacks are more dangerous" should be unfounded in an officer's mind.

I understand and agree with the bolded. The Eric Garner situation for instance is completely unacceptable. If that's the core of what BLM stands for, then this woman is misdirecting people and I fell into the trap of arguing about something that's not related to the movement. I'm brown, and a lot of people in my community hold the same views against black people as racist white people do. While I try to be more educated on American racial issues than other people from my country, some white vs. black arguments bring me to an impasse, where beliefs against black communities are also held by my peers, but the counterarguments against white communities don't work against my peers, since my race is not one that's privileged. It leads to a situation of minorities hating other minorities, and certain black issues being downplayed because my community doesn't face the same amount of overt racism from white people that black people do.
 

Dai101

Banned
The article itself is bad enough, but the WSJ editorial blurb at the top somehow makes it all worse. So Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and John Crawford II are "myths" and "fiction", WSJ editors?
Shit is garbage.

Well, there's people that believe that no kid was killed at Sandy Hook.
 

Kettch

Member
Those were black lives that mattered, and it is a scandal that outrage is heaped less on the dysfunctional culture that produces so many victims than on the police officers who try to protect them.

Probably the most disgusting line in there. Trying to downplay the problem is bad enough, but this is straight up implying that the lives of those shot by police don't matter.
 

TAJ

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Pretty surprising to me that more cops die from shootings than from auto accidents considering how much time they spend in cars on highways.

It's a lot closer when you notice that motorcycle crashes are listed separately. If you also count being run over by cars (which is often accidental) then it's easily higher than guns.
Beatings + stabbings vs. shootings was particularly interesting to me. Hold that L, gun advocates.
 
For starters, Hispanic-on-Hispanic crimes are unbelievably high in Mexico. This proves that racism doesn't exist and that white people are actually the victims
 

Demoskinos

Member
I started reading that article and then had to quit. Holy shit that is infuriating. I'd really like to see her stare the families of all the dead kids that these officers shot and tell them that there isn't a problem with police brutality.
 

Paskil

Member
At this point, I hope no one in surprised in the Republican party about why the VAST majority of Black voters vote for Democratic candidates. One party is too busy blaming blacks for their problems and waving their hands at the problems they have, telling them they aren't really problems.
 

Macam

Banned
It's the WSJ Op-Ed pages, which contains some of the most notoriously and hilariously ignorant shit you can read from a bunch of supposedly educated people. I wouldn't expect anything less.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom