{"id":14524,"date":"2011-11-23T22:57:42","date_gmt":"2011-11-24T06:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14524"},"modified":"2011-11-23T22:57:42","modified_gmt":"2011-11-24T06:57:42","slug":"news-from-white-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14524","title":{"rendered":"News from White Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karnythia sort of beat me to this<\/a>, but I found two very interesting news items yesterday. One comes from James Fallows’ blog on The Atlantic<\/a>, courtesy of an anonymous reader:<\/p>\n

You all (and by you all I mean whites, yes I’m black) let this happen because the people being hurt by police brutality were mainly poor, black and brown, and in many cases, immigrants. It has always been this way.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

The most frustrating thing for me in the last 24 hours after seeing the footage from UC Davis is knowing that if it was a group of people like me protesting there wouldn’t be the same outrage. It’s not every day you get told over and over again you don’t matter. It’s depressing<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do go read the whole letter, as the reader makes a salient point about how the military industrial complex has influenced our police forces.<\/p>\n

The second item came from Naomi Wolf, via Twitter:<\/p>\n

well I am very sad to say we do have our first death in the US caused by police violence and it is a fetal death:… http:\/\/fb.me\/VQ5K50OT<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…our… first… death?<\/p>\n

Later, Wolf wrote that she meant “in these protests,” and that “I wish you give me or anyone the benefit of the doubt, it was an error.” Fine, but you know, I’m so very, very sick of white people fucking up and then immediately going on the defensive. What Wolf doesn’t realize is that in an issue so absolutely racialized as police brutality, a mistake like this one is not neutral. In misspeaking, you support a long, widespread, ruthless history of suppressing knowledge of violence against communities of color. Anyone with any sense of justice would be more disturbed by the damage such a comment can cause than by the backlash they received. Why was her first and only instinct to snap at people instead of to apologize?<\/p>\n

Let me put it another way (and I’m not the first person to make this analogy): let’s say I accidently slam a door on someone’s fingers and, surprised and in pain, they bark out something I perceive as mean. Even if I later grumble to myself about how they shouldn’t have hurt my feelings, if I respect them as human beings, my first instinct is going to be to tell them I’m sorry and get them some ice.<\/p>\n

H\/T Brown Femi Power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karnythia sort of beat me to this, but I found two very interesting news items yesterday. One comes from James Fallows’ blog on The Atlantic, courtesy of an anonymous reader: You all (and by you all I mean whites, yes … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-police-brutality","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14532,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14524\/revisions\/14532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}