On someone who knows the system
I was a public defender in a big city for almost 10 years. Police officers target young black males. Period.
I have seen so many black people arrested and harassed for things white people usually don’t even think twice about. Running a red light on a bicycle. Open container of alcohol….
READ THIS. Every single word of it.
Spent most of what was ostensibly a vacation day on the phone or IM with support, trying to get someone to fix my work website, since I only have indirect access to the filesystem, and no shell access at all. Why did it break? Someone had to reboot the VMs over the weekend, and despite the fact that they had ‘http’ IN THEIR HOSTNAMES, nobody bothered to check whether httpd had successfully restarted.
And nobody even managed to figure out that I had an application running on those boxes, so they didn’t even tell me they were performing a change that might affect me. I had to figure it all out by asking everyone on the support calls if they knew anything.
Didn’t go to any protests or marches. I’ve never been much of a joiner, and that spills over to anything that involves a lot of people standing or moving together in a group. I know I should probably try harder to get outside of that comfort zone, but to be honest, I was pretty sure there would be a CrimethInc contingent there, and I just don’t want to be anywhere near those assholes.
So instead we sat at home & listened to the helicopters circling overhead.
Watched A Most Wanted Man, which was very very LeCarre. I enjoyed it, even though I have a hard time getting even slightly worked up about the threat of international terrorism, given how many people are killed in the US every day for such an extraordinarily wide variety of terrible and stupid reasons.
It’s not as though the lack of an indictment was any kind of surprise. It’s sad that Bob McCullough couldn’t reconcile his conflicting allegiances, but hardly surprising. Prosecutors & cops are two sides of the same coin.
I look forward to reading the book[s] that will emerge from the 4700 pages of grand jury testimony released tonight, though.
I have successfully insulated myself, social-media-wise, such that I don’t have any friends in any of my various timelines making racist remarks – instead I follow folks like @YesYoureRacist on Twitter, who takes care of injecting that stuff from any of an infinite number of highly racist strangers.
It’s sad to see Barack Obama’s limits exposed – the limits of his ability to speak out as president, even one in his second term. Or the limits of any black American who is part of the power structure to speak out. Or the limits of his own empathy, as someone who is no longer young, no longer poor, no longer close to the streets.
People (mostly people in power) want to call for calm, for peaceful non-violent protest. They choose to ignore the fact that it has consistently been the police bringing the violence to the people.
As tragic and uncontrolled and, yes, short-sighted as they are, though, rioting, burning & looting have their place. They send the message to property owners that the mere fact of their property ownership aligns them with the police & the capitalist power structure, against the workers, against the people, particularly the people who have nothing.
Listen to the rhetoric in the mainstream news, or on White Twitter. The consistent underlying theme is that property trumps human life, and specifically that any threat to property is de facto justification for taking human life.
This is how it has always been, ever since private property was invented. It’s certainly the story of America from the very first moment any European set foot here.
So horribly apt, then, to be writing this a couple of days before Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays, when we ostensibly commemorate the native peoples’ willingness to share what they had with the Pilgrims. A favor that wasn’t exactly reciprocated.