Hearing all lives matter and things like white history month must be very frustrating for people of color knowing they cannot even engage a conversation when their is such a wide chasm in understanding of what should be so obvious. Are things much more complicated than meets the eye? Sure they are, but there has to be movement in understanding from Caucasians that hold these antiquated point of views at this core level and then we can broaden the conversation and get down to brass tacks of slowly healing race relations. The focus now should be on long needed police reform, I think this is a valence issue that only the true racist would oppose on the face of it. Libertarians have been on this one for years in a broader context and much cooperation can be found with liberty minded folks who are wary of statist power and realize the enforcement wing of domestic government control for the most part are the police in our every day lives and they have been militarizing and in some cases morphing the relationship between police and citizens from protect and serve to enemy in a combat zone for too long now. We must acknowledge that people of color are bearing the brunt of this sometimes due to circumstance and location because obviously urban poverty areas are more crime laden and violent which brings down the force and perpetuates the visual image for the enforcers of "this is what the bad guy looks like". This combined with a lot of the police officers sometimes nefarious motivations for gaining authority mixed with inherent racism brought with them leads to a cocktail of profiling, overreacting and unnecessary violence towards people of color. However there is another side to this. Focus. If the movement wants to truly succeed with the most unity, it must at first stick to the obvious immediate issue that our police have to change the way they do business in a big way. I see a lot of push directed particularly at white people who normally do not get involved politically assigning blame if you do not choose to participate in their organized protestations, saying you are the problem and we are going to come after you in your homes either metaphorically or physically and confront you. This will not fly if you seek cooperation. I understand the emotion and hope that this attitude will morph into a more productive tone, but until then I will wait.
Virtually my entire life I have disliked and avoided large crowds and more conceptually avoid joining large organizations noting early on that the more people that are involved in something the more likely this will lead to corruption or worse violence and would prefer to keep my contact with other humans in small circles which is why in this context the alteration of lifestyle brought on by the pandemic suited us perfectly. What about people like us? What about people that take this virus very seriously and cannot comprehend the insanity of the rules and how quickly this became a life and death situation till it's not virtually overnight? And they are still trying to imply some type of regulations for businesses and the general public whilst going out in the streets and holding hands with others in large crowds? WTF indeed. Everyone get their act together and maybe I will be more vocal in public, but I doubt it. This is the only outlet I have left to vocalize my opinion in any type of public context, sadly I do not see this changing anytime soon. Quite frankly I don't see much reason to leave my property other than to get homestead supplies and a short commute to work.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul acknowledged Wednesday that he's the lone holdout on passing a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. His objection holds up the bill even as Congress faces pressure for action during nationwide protests against racial violence.
Congress has failed to pass anti-lynching legislation nearly 200 times over the past century, and the latest bill initially seemed poised for President Trump's desk earlier this year.
RP, can you turn off autostart on this video? Pretty disruptive every time I crack open this thread.
I'll check, but it's not turned on by me or even mentioned in the code snippet. And it's also not auto-playng for me. Just a regular FB embed.
Eventually it will fall off page 1...
When I look at it in html edit mode there is an autoPlay=1 in there. I'm using the legacy site. I can't imagine how, but there might be a difference there.
It actually started much earlier than that, with Gomes Eanes de Zurara's chronicle of the Portuguese slave trade in the 1440s under Prince Henry the Navigator. The Enlightenment may have taken the ball and run with it, but this was the beginnings of the propaganda regarding Africans as less than equal.
As painful as this is, what we saw was a lynching. That's what a lynching is. We saw a white man deprive a black man of his life in public, with the entire community staring — horror struck. Now the world witnessed a lynching. But there have been lynchings happening in America for hundreds of years. This is what we have lived with.
When you see the police arrest our colleagues in broad daylight, daylight, but right there, when they weren't doing anything wrong, that happens every day in America, to black people all the time. The arbitrary and capricious abuse of authority. Now, because it was on television, it was handled quickly. But that is — there is another reality here which you're starting to see. You thought maybe the world worked one way because police are nice to you, because these things don't happen to people you know, but the whole time there is a whole other America and the reason that you see people now doing the things they're doing. We have no idea who set those fires. It could have been provocateurs, anybody, the reason you see people willing to risk their lives in the middle of a plague and a pandemic and to go out and literally risk their lives to protest is because people are now fed up.
People are telling me they're tired of hashtags, they're tired of Van Jones saying to have a bipartisan solution, they are tired of people like me, they're tired of people saying over and over again that, you know, we're just basically one bill away, one election away from some progress.
It's not the racist white person who is in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. It's the white liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park who would tell you right now, you know, people like that, 'I don't see race, race is no big deal to me, I see us all as the same, I give to charities,' but the minute she sees a black man who she does not respect or who she has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan nation. A Klansmember could not have been better trained to pick up her phone and tell the police a black man, African-American man, come get him.
So even the most liberal well-intentioned white person has a virus in his or her brain that can be activated at an instant. And so what you're seeing now is a curtain falling away. And those of us who have been burdened by this every minute, every second of our entire lives are fragile right now. We are fragile right now. We are tired. And so I appreciate people who have been reaching out, I've had people reaching out to me for two days now, expressing their empathy and sympathy.
My only prayer, look in the mirror at how you choke off black opportunity. How you choke off black dignity. How you behave in ways that make it harder for African-Americans to rise in your profession, in your place of work, on your campus, in your house of worship, and start working on that. Because this is the last domino of a whole series of dominos that have been falling for a long time. And black people have been getting gas lit every time we point this out. And people tell us, well, maybe it was this, and maybe it was that, are you sure it was this, are you sure it was that? You don't get to this outcome. You don't get to the point where police officers can stand around, don't tell me about the one who has the knee in his neck. Sometimes we have psychopaths and sociopaths with power. But when that happens, you call the police.
The police were there watching it. And defending it. And now there is still no charges. That is the problem. That we have allowed this contempt for black life to build and to build and James Baldwin said it best, white people in these situations are always innocent, oh, my God, I can't believe this, teach me, educate me, help me understand, I can't let this happen, talk to me, tell me something, tell me what to do, white people are always innocent and their innocence constitutes their crime.
It is too late to be innocent. it is too late. We've had too many funerals. We've had too many funerals for white people to be still this innocent and this shocked. I'm not saying that witnessing a lynching shouldn't flatten you. It has flattened all of us. But it has been flattening us for years and decades and centuries. So now we're all in it together.
There is not an easy legal answer, there is not an easy political answer. There is a personal and spiritual accounting that all of us are now called to. How can civil rights people like me get on TV every day and promise a better outcome and fail every day and still have a job? What the heck is wrong with people like me, what the heck is wrong with all of us, we got to this place.
Yeah there ought to be some sort of rule about that. 
