Politics Ferguson

I could see the argument that by creating a strong well educated black community many of these problems would be solved if there weren't so many essays by black professors, students and professionals talking about situations where they are assaulted by police in areas that are not what you would consider urban/deep south/or lower class.

I tried to find it but one of them describes a professors experiences for the first couple of years before the police in the college town learned to recognize him where they would routinely stop him and pull him out of his car.
Oh they would be terribly sorry as soon as they learned he was a professor but that didn't stop them from pulling him over the next time for no fucking reason other than he was black.

Or the one black executive who was stopped eighteen times on his way to work in the course of a year.
These are educated people and it doesn't stop the police.

 

Ace's victim blaming is astounding.

95% of the people Ferguson police stop for jay-walking are black. That's because they aren't educated well enough to use a crosswalk?

 

Actually, as I said, I don't think he's blaming the victims.
He is blaming the system and how screwed up it is in terms of how bad a job this country has done in terms of creating a level playing field for the black community.
If the black men had the jobs and educations that put them on the same level as the whites, the argument runs, then the police wouldn't dare go after them.
After all the police have been flat out told to ignore drug crimes in upper class communities (read white).
And while I can see the logic, the problem is it's just doesn't have real world applications.

They tried busing to balance out the schools, to make sure that black kids got the same educations as whites.
We all so how long that lasted.
My wife taught in an urban school, they suck, for countless reasons that mostly come down to people don't care.
And the jobs have been shipped out of the country or are being turned into 'at will' jobs instead of good union jobs.

So the black community and other minority communities have been dealing with the same racist crap since Selma and for every step forward they get told everything is fine now and are forced to take two steps back.

 

I think that Ace is trying to get at the fact that racism isn't just a function of active malicious intent. It also acts via the institutional residue of US history. The fact that Ferguson has such a high concentration of black people is a result of this, and the fact that its authorities are predatory and its institutions ineffective with respect to the community is a result of history.

One city with really massive white/black disparities is Minneapolis. Minneapolis is an incredibly progressive city in the north. Despite this fact, the city treats its nonwhite residents terribly. All the weak teachers are sent to schools in the poor (read mostly nonwhite) neighborhoods. Neighborhood-nurturing small businesses stay away from these areas out of concern for crime. These neighborhoods are over-policed.

None of these things are primarily the result of active, malicious, racist intent. They are all more due to the particular way our racist history has set up the present.