What people are saying.
“Some might say that the deaths of George Floyd or Sandra Bland are just anecdotal, one-offs that are simply sensationalized by the media. But that’s not the case. A plethora of research and reporting discounts this notion. A 2014 investigation by ProPublica demonstrated that Black teenagers are between 10 and 40 times more likely at being killed by a police officer, as compared to their white counterparts. (And white officers are responsible for 68% of these deaths.) Study after study has determined that systemic bias among police disproportionately affects Blacks. And Black men and boys face the highest lifetime risk of all.”
In a country erected on the explicitly codified conviction that black lives mattered less, graveyards across this land hold the bodies of black Americans, men, women and children, legally killed by the institutional descendants of those slave patrols for alleged transgressions like walking from the store with Skittles, playing with a toy gun in the park, sleeping in their homes and selling untaxed cigarettes. We collectively know only a small number of their names: Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Kendra James, Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tanisha Anderson are just a few.
What has spawned this extraordinary reckoning, the fire this time, was our collective witness of what must be described without hyperbole as a modern-day lynching. In his 1933 book, “The Tragedy of Lynching,” the sociologist Arthur F. Raper estimated that, based on his study of 100 lynchings, white police officers participated in at least half of all lynchings and that in 90 percent of others law-enforcement officers “either condone or wink at the mob action.” The nonchalant look on Officer Derek Chauvin’s face — as, hand in pocket, for 8 minutes 46 seconds, he pressed his knee against the neck of a facedown black man begging for his life — reminds me of every callous white face captured in the grisly photos taken in the 1900s to mark the gleeful spectacle of the public killings of black men and women.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Quote Source
How do we fix racism in policing?
“Breaking from something that feels simultaneously necessary and impossible.”
“Trying to solve racism feels impossible, because our definition makes it impossible, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The most common definition of racism is that racist behaviors are the product of contaminated hearts and minds. When you talk about how to cure it, you hear that.
“One of the foundational insights of social psychology is that attitudes are very weak predictors of behaviors. Racism is about behaviors, not feelings.”
“A definition that cares about the intentions of the users more than the harms of the abused- that definition of racism is racist.”
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/american-nightmare/612457/