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Why is "Black" capitalized, but "white" is not?
“For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police.
(Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the police" or "defund the police", because from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals)
> “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
This is child abuse.
The problem isn't a few bad apples, it's a culture that allows a few bad apples to expect impunity and protection from the consequences of their actions.
I've lived here a long time and come to the realization through observation that the NYPD operates like a private security force for capital. Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. The "community outreach" they do is just enough to keep us from getting accusatory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. And of course the more private property one has, the better the protection...
Until someone decides that the capital committed a drug crime because it smelled suspicious.
The police don't care about your personal property. Just try to get them to do anything useful in response to a burglary.
Private property, like land, or the means of production, is an entirely different story. Those things receive full police protection.
I've lived here a long time and come to the realization through observation that the NYPD operates like a private security force for capital. Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. The "community outreach" they do is just enough to keep us from getting accusatory.
Most police in the world works like this. The only exception to this rule is countries like Japan, Switzerland and Singapore. In those countries, as a working class citizen you can rely on the police to make sure to keep monopoly on violence and keep you safe, when they fail to do so, they will at least bring some level of justice to whoever did you wrong - though less in Switzerland than I'd like. At least the US of…
Why is "Black" capitalized, but "white" is not?
I don't know what style guide ProPublica uses, but very recently AP decided to capitalize Black when used as a cultural term when it conveys "essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black". They go on to say that they expect to make a decision soon about whether to do that with "white" as well. https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize... https://a…
Still... the terminology of race is never going to be precise, and to the degree it exists at all, I'm going to be seen as white rather than another thing. So we might as well be parallel, and use White along with Black and Indigenous and other tendentious but sometimes useful categories.
So if I had to bet, that's where I suspect AP will land. But I don't envy them the process of coming to that conclusion, or the backlash they're going to get either way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until someone decides that the capital committed a drug crime because it smelled suspicious.
You're confusing private property with personal property. The police don't care about your personal property. Just try to get them to do anything useful in response to a burglary. Private property, like land, or the means of production, is an entirely different story. Those things receive full police protection.
My wife was in Indianapolis for a couple days and she saw the same thing: a cop crossed over to the wrong side of the road and up onto the sidewalk to strike an unarmed black man on a bicycle head on. They claimed later that the man on the bike had struck the car while it was sitting still (hard enough to put him in the hospital with a fractured skull). No investigation was made. I think they do this because running…
Most Officer on the job injury and death comes from traffic accidents. Driving all day is dangerous. We should log Police Officer hours the same way we do truck drivers.
"sidewalk to strike an unarmed black man on a bicycle head on."
So... "to strike" this wasn't an accident?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, that 's weird. It doesn't entirely come as a surprise that they would have an international arm, since they are home to the UN and were the most visible target of the most prominent international terrorist attack. But having that money come anonymously... that's suspicious.
Still weird. The FBI and the rest of our national security apparatus exist to deal with those issues.