Jacob Blake (WI), Daniel Prude (NY), Breonna Taylor (KY), Jonathan Price (TX) - here we go again
terp said:
flimbro said:
terp said:
Thank you for making some suggestions. I do think we need ways to foster greater accountability by the police which you touch upon. We also need to remove incentives to unnecessarily enforce nonviolent activity. Here are some suggestions I have. I wouldn't say this list is exhaustive
- End or drastically scale down the War on drugs. Simplify the regulatory system.
- Scale back qualified immunity. I think there would need to be some parameters where the police lose their immunity(person unarmed, excessive force, etc). Other police on the scene that let some of this behavior we have seen occur should also be liable. Perhaps, there could be a review board made up of police and community members to review incidents
- Funding gained from enforcement of the law(civil asset forfeiture, traffic tickets, etc.) Should leave the police department and really the government. We need to end enforcement quotas etc. But we really need to look at civil asset forfeiture
- End the programs where the Pentagon arms local police. There are very few municipalities that require military equipment
- identify alternatives to jail for certain types of crimes. Allow for people to get second chances
- Weaken the power of police unions to protect officers who display the types of behaviors that lead to violence. Get them off the force before they become an issue whenever possible
- No more no knock raids
Thanks for the list- good ideas here. Particularly the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. Since the war on drugs was in large part a federally funded war on Black and brown people what kinds of ideas do you have about disassembling structural racism?
Ok. So, I may miss the mark here. But I will give it a try.
I read a lot of economics. One thing I have learned is that Black immigrants tend to do pretty well in this country. Now there may be various reasons for that. For instance,e may be getting the most motivated people from these other countries. That fact got me thinking that the problem may be rooted early in life.
I personally think that a huge part of this problem is the public school system. This is one of those systems that is failing everyone but the problem is most acute in urban neighborhoods. I have heard and read some horror stories about schools without even rudimentary learning tools. How is someone supposed to get by in today's world without a decent education?
I made this proposal on this board years ago. To be honest, nobody liked it. I don't think that the school a child goes to should be tied to their zip code. I think the child should be able to take that $$ with them to the school of their parents choosing.
This would hopefully accomplish a couple of things. First, it would enable those living near failing schools to look elsewhere. Second, schools would have to compete for children and the budget $$ that would travel with them. I believe Denmark has a system similar to this.
Regarding the inequality, I think we should look at the Federal Reserve. This system benefits the uber wealthy and facilitates the financialization of our economy. The beneficiaries are the military, the government and their cronies, and the financial industry. I'm guessing the beneficiaries are by and large not people of color. Let those who are climbing the ladder save their $$. Why make them enter the markets competing against people who studied this field and do this for a living?
There's a very good chance that I'm misinterpreting some pertinent detail here and I will admit to not reading all of what others have posted in response- but it seems as if your ideas don't actually take white supremacy /racism into account? I can't think of a solution for a problem created and exacerbated by structural racism that doesn't have to include at least some attempt at removing the actual racist component. For lack of a more graceful example, it's almost like saying- "If you live with a person who abuses you physically, the best solution is to buy bigger boxing gloves". Having the right sized gloves doesn't address the abuse, having any gloves at all doesn't address the abuse. The gloves are not the problem- the abuse is the problem. Not sure if that really works, but hopefully you get the point.
Schools do poorly in certain areas because they are underserved and typically have a lack of resources and municipal support. That of course is by design. Crime is rampant in certain areas because jobs are scarce and the aforementioned educational prospects are ******. Health is bad in certain areas because hourly wage jobs don't pay enough to have good insurance and higher-paying jobs with employer-supplied insurance coverage are difficult to come by. Healthy diets are difficult to maintain due to a scarcity of supermarkets with fresh food. None of what goes on in poor communities is accidental. It's by design. Certainly, within that environment, poor personal choices are often made but they are choices made per the boundaries placed on that environment, and those parameters are dictated in part, by structural racism.
Schools are segregated by design. Our own bucolic villages struggle with segregating integrated schools and all of us are wonderful, well-read, alarmingly attractive, open-minded people who know better. Still, a community as diverse and glorious as ours has to be sued before we make education open and available to all. What makes you think that another slightly more affluent community with successful schools, operating within the same racist rubric but without an appreciable number of Black and brown students would welcome those students? For money? Money they don't need.
I'll read the rest of the thread to see if someone else filled in some info I missed. I don't think I have but I will check. The fact that you liken what works in Denmark to what might work here is pretty damn funny.
Whither Denmark?
Ethnic school segregation in Copenhagen: a step in the right direction? (Urban Studies journal, 2019)
According to the paper, catchment children have first dibs on attending their neighborhood school; any seats that are left over then become available to outside families exercising choice. This, by the way, sounds like the same system that was in place when our child attended Philadelphia public schools a decade ago. (It may still be the system there.) Who knew Philly and Copenhagen shared the same choice model?
From the paper's conclusion:
In Denmark, ethnic school segregation has been on the public agenda for long because of a rising number of non-Danish citizens. This is predominantly an urban issue as ethnic minority concentrations are highest in the cities. In 2007, Rangvid concluded that while the overall level of ethnic segregation in Copenhagen was relatively moderate, the segregation of pupils due to ethnic background between schools was surprisingly high, approaching the level in US cities.
Since Rangvids study, important changes have taken place. First, the population of Copenhagen has grown considerably. The population growth is predominantly due to increasing numbers of people of Danish descent, including many children. Second, the overall share of school-age children of non-Danish background in Copenhagen stopped growing in the 1990s and is now declining. At the same time, active policies have been implemented to reduce segregation. One approach has been to convince parents of near-school age children to choose their local public school. Another has been to redraw school district boundaries. A third has been to secure a more equal distribution of bilingual children. And a fourth has been to change the bad reputation of specific schools. The qualitative material shows that the image of specific schools, in particular the share of ethnic minorities, is a key concern of parents. But the interviews also identify attempts to go against public opinion and choose the local public school, even if the perception of the general public regarding the school is negative.
flimbro said:
it seems as if your ideas don't actually take white supremacy /racism into account? I can't think of a solution for a problem created and exacerbated by structural racism that doesn't have to include at least some attempt at removing the actual racist component.
This is an important point. I am, in general, open to experiments and innovation in public policy, and the strict tying of schooling to zip codes I think is problematic, but if all we're doing is shuffling money around without coming to grips with the fact that it is not by accident that there's less money, fewer resources, and poorer services for people of color, then whatever new approach is taken is going to inevitably lead to the same outcome. It'll just be an exciting new way to disenfranchise communities of color. The price we pay for refusing to squarely acknowledge systemic racism is that even innovative, well-intentioned changes in public policy will fail. If we want to succeed, we need both bold thinking but also the courage to face up to the actual problem.
PVW said:
This is an important point. I am, in general, open to experiments and innovation in public policy, and the strict tying of schooling to zip codes I think is problematic, but if all we're doing is shuffling money around without coming to grips with the fact that it is not by accident that there's less money, fewer resources, and poorer services for people of color, then whatever new approach is taken is going to inevitably lead to the same outcome. It'll just be an exciting new way to disenfranchise communities of color. The price we pay for refusing to squarely acknowledge systemic racism is that even innovative, well-intentioned changes in public policy will fail. If we want to succeed, we need both bold thinking but also the courage to face up to the actual problem.
This is my question about these school choice plans. What happens to the students who are left behind in these schools that lost the "competition" for budget? Do we just wash our hands of the kids who didn't win the lottery, or who had the misfortune of being born into families who didn't try to get them into the "good" schools.
And with regard to the other shining example of the magic of school choice, The Netherlands -- that is a country with very little ethnic diversity, and a country that is among the lowest in income inequality of any developed country. So when we look at the academic achievement in their country and we see that they have less poverty, no fraught history of racial inequality and systemic racism, but they have school choice -- why would we attribute their success to choice? Given the correlations in our country between race, SES and performance it would seem very likely that choice plays little to no role in Dutch students' performance.
We blame "failing" schools when the root problems, but when we look at the variables that influence success, time and again it points back to racism and poverty. If we don't address those issues, we can bus individual kids all over the state and it's not going to solve the larger problems.
The pandemic lock-downs show how "school choice" is a simplistic "solution" that doesn't address the real needs.
Remote learning works best when the students (a) have parents with the time to spend helping their children, (b) the space to set their children up in a learning environment, and (c) the technology that makes it easier to access the remote learning.
A child in a household where (a), (b), and (c) are all better, is more likely to succeed in school. On the other hand, attending a "remote" class at the finest school in the state will not help as much for those students who have less of (a), (b), and (c).
Like it or not, similar factors affect the educations of students when attending "in person" at schools which are in poorer neighborhoods. "School choice" does not do anything to address those factors, however, and it certainly doesn't do it for all of the families in that neighborhood.
[Edited to add a quotation mark]
here's another factor that people don't take into account when comparing European countries to the U.S. Very few of them have people's homes as sprawled out as most of the U.S. Anyone who has traveled even to the most populous countries in Europe knows that most of the people are clustered in towns, and not spread out through the countryside. To go back to The Netherlands over 90% of their population is described as "urbanized." How many families' school choice involves more than one school that their kids can walk to? In NJ, is our plan to bus kids both ways every day from New Brunswick to Princeton or from East Orange to Mendham? When do those kids study? On the bus? And how do they fit any after-school activities into their plans? Seems to me the school choice proponents don't really think all of these things through. Because when you get right down to the logistics of it, the only likely alternative to be implemented is charter schools being built next the "failing" schools in the same neighborhoods. And that of course doesn't address any of the endemic problems these neighborhoods and their families face.
You fix the zip codes. The schools will then come around.
I think people know this though.
I wonder how much a simple UBI would do do to achieve this.
drummerboy said:
You fix the zip codes. The schools will then come around.
I think people know this though.
I wonder how much a simple UBI would do do to achieve this.
it might help those families where a parent has to take a second job to make ends meet. Having parents working no more than 40 hours a week would be a big benefit. Being home to read to your kids or make sure they're doing homework can only help.
We should include the elimination of homework. Make everyone's lives a lot easier.
Failing UBI, bringing the min wage into the 21st century could help too. There's just no justification for people being dirt poor when working 40 hours a week.
Simple steps - could do a lot.
With all due respect isn't this methodology lacking in some respects- missing an important detail? To me, it always seems to be a band-aids on a bullet wound sort of approach. Yes, poverty is definitely a problem, the lack of access to equal educational opportunites, over-policing, housing inequality, lopsided sentencing etc., but all of these things are the expected and intended results of our social systems. So, in my mind, if you really want to attack the problem you don't just work to smooth over the disturbances created by the problem- you actually attack the problem.
I read to my kid and helped with homework for fourteen years- but that didn't stop cops from suffocating a naked Black man in the middle of the street in the middle of the winter. When I asked terp to give me some solutions I was hoping for some solutions that had something to do with terp. I didn't expect to get any- but that's what I was hoping for, that's what I'm always looking for when I participate in these threads. I'm looking for insight from the folks who derive greater benefit from this system than others. I'm looking for the kind of introspection suggested by the Toni Morrison quote I posted a couple pages back. Instead, we always talk about ways to ameliorate the suffering experienced by the folks who are the intended targets.
We've never had a shortage of 'plans' that involve restructuring the homes, lives, and mentality of Black and brown people in response to white supremacy, but where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
Or does that hard work remain off-limits, protected by the white privilege created by the system we're all combatting?
flimbro said:
Where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
I don't have a good answer, but that is a very good question.
Well, I'm not pretending to propose a solution to racism here. I'm just calling for some basic economic adjustments to be made that should hopefully make people's lives a bit easier.
flimbro said:
We've never had a shortage of 'plans' that involve restructuring the homes, lives, and mentality of Black and brown people in response to white supremacy, but where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
Or does that hard work remain off-limits, protected by the white privilege created by the system we're all combatting?
The challenge with power is it is designed to be taken by those who already have some, and distributed to those who will continue to support/maintain the current power structure.
One way to disrupt that power structure is via revolution, which takes the power from those who currently hold it, and restructures/redistributes it into a new system. I don't know if there is another way.
People with power don't usually give it away voluntarily, so I don't foresee a mass voluntary shift in the power system. ....But if it could be given away, how would that work?
Perhaps through oversight? If oversight powers are given to those who are currently at the mercy of the power system, could that work as a method of power re-distribution? The call for community oversight of policing is one example. But the result seems more like throwing one more group into a ring battling for a piece of the power-pie against several other groups, than a structural change in the power hierarchy.
PVW said:
flimbro said:
Where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
I don't have a good answer, but that is a very good question.
BET founder Robert Johnson, the country's first African American billionaire, has called for reparations of $15 trillion. He says that wealth transfer is what's needed to right the wrongs of inequality.
Thoughts?
cramer said:
PVW said:
flimbro said:
Where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
I don't have a good answer, but that is a very good question.
BET founder Robert Johnson, the country's first African American billionaire, has called for reparations of $15 trillion. He says that wealth transfer is what's needed to right the wrongs of inequality.
Thoughts?
I mean, I've long voted for candidates who want to take more money from me and redistribute it. But that feels like I'm being too easy on myself. Necessary but far from sufficient.
flimbro said:
With all due respect isn't this methodology lacking in some respects- missing an important detail? To me, it always seems to be a band-aids on a bullet wound sort of approach. Yes, poverty is definitely a problem, the lack of access to equal educational opportunites, over-policing, housing inequality, lopsided sentencing etc., but all of these things are the expected and intended results of our social systems. So, in my mind, if you really want to attack the problem you don't just work to smooth over the disturbances created by the problem- you actually attack the problem.
I read to my kid and helped with homework for fourteen years- but that didn't stop cops from suffocating a naked Black man in the middle of the street in the middle of the winter. When I asked terp to give me some solutions I was hoping for some solutions that had something to do with terp. I didn't expect to get any- but that's what I was hoping for, that's what I'm always looking for when I participate in these threads. I'm looking for insight from the folks who derive greater benefit from this system than others. I'm looking for the kind of introspection suggested by the Toni Morrison quote I posted a couple pages back. Instead, we always talk about ways to ameliorate the suffering experienced by the folks who are the intended targets.
We've never had a shortage of 'plans' that involve restructuring the homes, lives, and mentality of Black and brown people in response to white supremacy, but where are the plans for restructuring the lives of the beneficiaries? How do those people, who are repulsed by the savagery of structural racism realign their lives to combat it or begin to deconstruct it.
Or does that hard work remain off-limits, protected by the white privilege created by the system we're all combatting?
I didn't mean to suggest at all that we don't have serious endemic issues to solve regarding racism. But maybe I buried this at the end of a long post about other stuff:
ml1 said:
when we look at the variables that influence success, time and again it points back to racism and poverty. If we don't address those issues, we can bus individual kids all over the state and it's not going to solve the larger problems.
I don’t have any good answers, either, flimbro, but this is what I’ve been thinking about over the last 24 hours.
You’re right to challenge me to realign my life. I won’t. Mainly because I don’t have to, and I’m not that courageous or committed. Also because nothing I do would upend the white power structure, any more than whatever changes or sacrifices I make in my life will turn the tide of climate change and save the planet.
No, that’s not true. There is something I could do: I could be part of the revolution that sprout talked about. I agree with her that to demolish white supremacy, that’s probably what it will take. So I could become an activist, organize, arm myself and others. Again, I won’t. I’ll try to prepare myself to join the revolution if it comes, but I’m not one of its fuses.
Short of that, there’s the amelioration, which doesn’t get to the root of the very serious problem that we white people have now but maybe has a chance of getting us ever closer to the critical mass of white awareness that drives systemic reform through voting and democratic institutions without a revolution. More waiting, more Black lives savaged, more me saying, “I’m in if others are.”
So if there’s an insight from a day of thinking about your challenge, I can’t get around this craven one: I accept it, and I’m not up to it.
An honest answer. I'm not sure mine is much different.
Being able to actually see the problem and acknowledge it is a start, but so, so inadequate. And yet even this feels so difficult. To the extent I'm doing anything at all, it's in trying to really see, and to try and get other white people to see it. But that takes up pretty much all the air in the room -- I don't even know the last time I saw a direct challenge's like flimbro's.
In a lot of ways Trump's made things easy for white people who oppose him. The racism of him and his supporters and that whole political ideology is so clear and easy to denounce that if you're opposed to Trump you can pat yourself on the back for doing such a good job of being an anti-racist. But, to recall an earlier point flimbro made: "None of this has anything to do with progressives, conservatives, libertarians, Democrats, or Republicans other than the fact that the systemic racism at the root of this attempted murder is reified and maintained to benefit a white supremacist power structure comprised of progressives, conservatives, libertarians, Democrats and Republicans"
To try and actually see is the bare minimum, and that's about all I'm doing currently.
Scott Woods’s complete post, from 2014:
Opening with the Weather Underground, this essay by Hari Kunzru discusses a range of answers to flimbro’s challenge, including the kind of “allyship” raised by PVW and the relative impotence of “self-actualization.”
Raising or changing consciousness is conceived of as a prelude to possible future collective action. Perhaps if enough minds are changed, then social or political progress will be a natural (and preferably nonviolent) consequence. The difficult questions—of collective organization, of how the individual gets subsumed into a collective project, and of course the exercise of power—all fade tastefully into the background. The time is always soon, but never now.
The Wages of Whiteness (NYRB)
DaveSchmidt said:
Opening with the Weather Underground, this essay by Hari Kunzru discusses a range of answers to flimbro’s challenge, including the kind of “allyship” raised by PVW and the relative impotence of “self-actualization.”
Raising or changing consciousness is conceived of as a prelude to possible future collective action. Perhaps if enough minds are changed, then social or political progress will be a natural (and preferably nonviolent) consequence. The difficult questions—of collective organization, of how the individual gets subsumed into a collective project, and of course the exercise of power—all fade tastefully into the background. The time is always soon, but never now.The Wages of Whiteness (NYRB)
Thanks for posting. Need to reread the article and think about it a bit more, but one aspect to this, to my mind, is the relationship between taking personal responsibility for ones own actions while acknowledging the impossibility of change without systematic overhauls. Put another way, I don't think pointing out structural racism lets us off the hook for also personally acting in a way that attempts to counter that racism. The "extreme passivity" of Boudin the article opens up with I can't agree with.
PVW said:
Thanks for posting. Need to reread the article and think about it a bit more, but one aspect to this, to my mind, is the relationship between taking personal responsibility for ones own actions while acknowledging the impossibility of change without systematic overhauls. Put another way, I don't think pointing out structural racism lets us off the hook for also personally acting in a way that attempts to counter that racism. The "extreme passivity" of Boudin the article opens up with I can't agree with.
As Kunzu puts it, extreme passivity for Boudin was a “surrender of agency” that allowed her to offer herself as a tool for a (violent) movement to demolish structural racism. I can’t go there, either.
There is much in between. Many of us have listened, learned, looked within, and see general problems externally. But we can take a closer look to identify problems we can help address.
I noted three areas through my work where we could make small, but significant, changes to our internal power structure, to a large external system's procedures, and to another system's incentive structure to make these systems slightly more representative and equitable.
For me the hard part is inertia. Each of these changes requires effort to really frame the problem and develop a feasible approach for making changes, finding those more knowledgeable or powerful than me to help move things forward (and dealing with rejection from some of them)... and then more effort to do the work needed to organize and implement change.
Change is really hard, and I'm getting exhausted. I've been working on one of the problems for decades. I should double my efforts now as, theoretically, there is greater openness to change at this time. But I need to get past being overwhelmed with everything else I have going on... and past the anticipation of the additional rejections that lie ahead.
Louisville grand jury offers no significant charges against murderers of Breonna Taylor.
"What does it mean when the system says everything that happened in this Breonna Taylor shooting was legal?"
"The truth is people, nobody is winning. As a society, we are all losing right now. And until there is real justice, nobody wins."
Details on the Jonathan Price case are sketchy at this point. The story so far is that Price was trying to break up a domestic dispute at a gas station and was shot by a local cop.
Won't post more on it til the story fleshes out more.
well, this is welcome news
This is big. https://t.co/UpHKqaDjGd
— Jolie McCullough (@jsmccullou) October 6, 2020
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When the color of your skin is seen as a weapon.... you will always be armed..in some people’s eyes. It’s impossible to be in a white skin, and think you know why black and brown people react to systemic oppression. You can’t get it, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing how some people can fixate on the violence of the darker ones...when the lighter ones walk with long guns and crowbars smashing windows and walking away so the “thugs” can move in and loot.