Here's How US Media Would Report if Baltimore Uprising Took Place in Ukraine

[georgephillip]

"If what is happening in Baltimore happened in a foreign country, here is how Western media would cover it:

"International leaders expressed concern over the rising tide of racism and state violence in America, especially concerning the treatment of ethnic minorities in the country and the corruption in state security forces around the country when handling cases of police brutality.

"The latest crisis is taking place in Baltimore, Maryland, a once-bustling city on the country’s Eastern Seaboard, where an unarmed man named Freddie Gray died from a severed spine while in police custody."

No doubt the western press would emphasize the Jim Crow/Nazi roots of Baltimore-in-Ukraine more frequently than the number of windows smashed and drug store arsons.

How Western media would cover Baltimore if it happened elsewhere - The Washington Post

 

[georgephillip]

"Resident Joe Smith, a member of the white majority ethnic group, said outside of a brand-new Starbucks near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, 'I don’t know why these blacks are destroying their own communities. Why don’t these people follow Martin Luther King’s example? Those guys got it good from the police back then too, but they didn’t try to rise up and fight back and make everyone uncomfortable, you know?'”
You know?
How Western media would cover Baltimore if it happened elsewhere - The Washington Post

 

[jwoodie]

Rising tide of racism? By whom?

 

[georgephillip]

Rising tide of racism? By whom?

"Black Americans, a minority ethnic group, are killed by state security forces at a rate higher than the white majority population. Young, black American males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than white American males."
How Western media would cover Baltimore if it happened elsewhere - The Washington Post
While the overt, violent, and legal racism of the US in the 1960s has largely disappeared, institutional racism can still be found in US schools, for starters.
"Let’s start with pre-school. Black pre-schoolers are far more likely to be suspended than white children,NPR reported. Black children make up 18 percent of the pre-school population, but represent almost half of all out-of-school suspensions."
Institutional Racism Is Our Way of Life - US News

 

[Rambunctious]

Search the phrase “every 28 hours” on Google, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and thousands of messages like these will come up. This is the phrase that has gone viral after police-involved killings of black males in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.: “Every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police.” It is now being used to describe the deaths of two New York City police officers, to draw comparisons between the deaths of police and deaths of unarmed African Americans killed by police.

PolitiFact rated this claim false in August when a CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill said it on air. Hill corrected his statement after the PolitiFact article.

Yet the claim is still being perpetuated widely. It’s written on signs at protests, shared through #every28hours or written on social media memes. Where did this statement come from, and is it accurate?

The Facts
The figure “every 28 hours” comes from an April 2013 report titled“Operation Ghetto Storm” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report analyzed officer-involved killings of African-American victims in 2012. The report “is a window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and practice of a government and a society that will spare no cost to control the lives of Black people,” according to the preface.

It’s not hard to debunk the claims using basic findings and methodologies from the report. (Twitter user @FeministaJones did it in a series of tweetsusing Storify.)

The report looked at the deaths of 313 African-American men, women and children in 2012, who were killed by police officers, security guards or “vigilantes.” Vigilantes are defined “self-appointed enforcers of the law” who had immunity under self-defense legal protections such as the stand-your-ground law or the castle doctrine.

If you divide the number of hours in a year (8,760) by 313 deaths, it does come out to one death per 28 hours. But the rest of the claim is problematic.

Among those killed in 2012, 136 people (44 percent) had no weapon on them when they died. That negates the claim that people who were killed “every 28 hours” were unarmed. Since the study looked at police officers, security guards, police officers moonlighting as security guards, and “vigilantes” that do not fit under any of the other categories, the claim that an African American is killed “every 28 hours” by a police officer is also false.

The viral claim that a black person is killed by police every 28 hours - The Washington Post

 

[jwoodie]

"Let’s start with pre-school. Black pre-schoolers are far more likely to be suspended than white children,NPR reported. Black children make up 18 percent of the pre-school population, but represent almost half of all out-of-school suspensions."

You think that has nothing to do with the children's behaviors? If they were treated equally, the percentage would be even higher. Instead, we are requiring teachers to more more "culturally aware" (i.e., don't hold Black students to the same behavior standards as White students). To the extent "institutional racism" exists, it can be blamed on government programs which foster the financial dependence and personal irresponsibility permeating the Black subculture in this country.

 

[georgephillip]

Baltimore 1968

"America was born out of protest. We felt economically suppressed and politically repressed, and we changed things. Slaves weren’t freed by benevolent leaders wanting to do the right thing. No one gave the American worker better and safer conditions out of gratitude for a job well done. Vietnam veterans didn’t get their benefits from an Agent-Orange-denying government by sitting at home waiting patiently.

"Each time, Americans took to the streets to be heard.

"I suggest we all pay attention to what’s happening in Baltimore, because it’s very likely that unless the economic and injustice issues raised there are addressed in a meaningful way across the country, we will be seeing many more Baltimores throughout the election season."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Baltimore Is Just the Beginning

 

[jwoodie]

"I suggest we all pay attention to what’s happening in Baltimore, because it’s very likely that unless the economic and injustice issues raised there are addressed in a meaningful way across the country, we will be seeing many more Baltimores throughout the election season."

What economic and injustice issues? Is the solution more welfare, more racial preferences and legalization of drugs? We've been doing that for 50 years and it has only made conditions worse.

P.S. Who cares what Kareem says? Is I.Q. measured by height?

 

[georgephillip]

You think that has nothing to do with the children's behaviors? If they were treated equally, the percentage would be even higher. Instead, we are requiring teachers to more more "culturally aware" (i.e., don't hold Black students to the same behavior standards as White students).

According to the NPR link, blacks are more likely to be more severely punished than whites even for the same infraction.
"Here's what the education data show: kids who are suspended or expelled from school are more likely to drop out, and those dropouts are more likely to end up with criminal records. In many places, school discipline pushes kids directly into the juvenile justice system.

"Take just one example: a school fight can end in an arrest for assault.

"Education and civil rights groups have dubbed this phenomenon the 'school-to-prison pipeline.' There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that white students, even when the infractions are the same.

"A new government study on discipline in the nation's public schools shows just how very early that gap is present. According to the report, black children make up 18 percent of preschoolers, but make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions. (We're talking mostly four-year-olds, people.)"

Four year-olds often aren't the best at managing their anger, and many resort to violent behavior against self, property, and others when they perceive negative motivations of others. That is partially explained by multigenerational trauma stemming from two centuries of slavery followed by another hundred years of Jim Crow, and the current living conditions many black children find themselves born into. The absence of opportunity to heal or access benefits available to the wider society often leads to feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-destructive behavior. If so, society isn't helping the situation by setting four year-olds on the classroom to prison pipeline.
Black Preschoolers Far More Likely To Be Suspended Code Switch NPR

 

[georgephillip]

To the extent "institutional racism" exists, it can be blamed on government programs which foster the financial dependence and personal irresponsibility permeating the Black subculture in this country

What do you imagine race relations in the US would be like today if government hadn't dealt with the historical consequences of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and the school to prison pipeline?

 

[georgephillip]

P.S. Who cares what Kareem says? Is I.Q. measured by height?

Anyone who's been paying attention over the past fifty years cares what Kareem has to say:
"Abdul-Jabbar is also a best-selling author and cultural critic. His first book, his autobiography Giant Steps, was written in 1983 with co-author Peter Knobler. (The book's title is an homage to jazz great John Coltrane, referring to his albumGiant Steps.) His latest is On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, co-written with Raymond Obstfeld. His previous book, Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes, co-written with Anthony Walton, is a history of an all-black armored unit that served with distinction in Europe."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

 

[georgephillip]

What economic and injustice issues? Is the solution more welfare, more racial preferences and legalization of drugs? We've been doing that for 50 years and it has only made conditions worse.

Conditions have gotten worse for the working poor and middle class over the past 50 years.
"In the workplace, black college graduates are twice as likely as whites to struggle to find jobs - the jobless rate for blacks has been double that of whites for decades. A study even found that people with 'black-sounding names' had to send out 50 percent more job applications than people with 'white-sounding names' just to get a call back.

"And it gets worse the higher up the pay scale you go. For every $10,000 increase in pay, blacks’ percentages of holding that job falls by 7 percent compared to whites.

"The disparities exist in our neighborhoods and communities. About 73 percent of whites own homes, compared to just 43 percent of blacks.

"The gap between median household income for whites (about $91,000) compared to blacks (about $7,000) is staggering, and that gap has tripled in just the past 25 years. The median net worth of white families is about $265,000, while it was just $28,500 for blacks."

Institutional Racism Is Our Way of Life - US News

 

[georgephillip]

"America’s ethnic blacks have been displaced from many of their communities due to a phenomenon experts on the region call 'gentrification,' when wealthier residents move into a lower-income area. Baltimore is no exception to this trend, with some areas seeing home values rise as much as 137 percent after corporate dollars move in on opportunities in poverty-stricken areas."
How Western media would cover Baltimore if it happened elsewhere - The Washington Post