Seabass wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:The only people who think society is riddled with racism are racists.

US society isn't just riddled with racism, it's absolutely fucking saturated.

Keep It Real wrote:

Seabass wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:The only people who think society is riddled with racism are racists.

US society isn't just riddled with racism, it's absolutely fucking saturated.

Keep It Real wrote:

Seabass wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:The only people who think society is riddled with racism are racists.

US society isn't just riddled with racism, it's absolutely fucking saturated.

[Reveal] Spoiler: meme

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TALL, MALE, AND BLACK

New research finds that the advantages enjoyed by tall white men are largely negated for their counterparts of color.


If you're a man, there are many advantages to being tall. Research has found that tall men are more attractive to women, are perceived as natural leaders, and tend to earn more money than their height-challenged counterparts.

But new research adds a considerable caveat to that truism: It seems this positive effect applies only to whites.

"Height means something different for black men," write psychologists Neil Hester and Kurt Gray of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. "Height amplifies already problematic perceptions of threat, which can lead to harassment and even injury. For black men, being tall may be less of a boon, and more of a burden."

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe three studies that back up this contention. The first looked at more than one million people who were "stopped and frisked" by the New York Police Department before the program was outlawed by a 2013 judicial ruling.

The researchers restricted their data to non-Hispanic black and white males, and controlled for several factors that could account for higher odds of being stopped by police, including age, weight, and local crime rates (real and perceived).

They found that "tall black men are especially likely to receive unjustified attention from police."

"At 5'4", police stopped 4.5 black men for every white man," they report. "At 5'10", police stopped 5.3 black men for every white man. At 6'4", police stopped 6.2 black men for every white man."

The second study featured 318 participants who looked at photographs of 16 young men—eight white and eight black—from two perspectives: Above the target (which makes one look short) and below (which makes one look tall). They rated each photograph using adjectives related to both threat and competence.

The appearance of being taller made white men "seem more competent, and thus less threatening," the researchers report. But for black men, "being taller made targets more threatening, and thus less competent."

These findings—replicated in a final study—were exacerbated among participants who generally see black men as menacing. They strongly suggest that, for many, height activates or heightens the pervasive stereotype that black men are "physically threatening and imposing."

Further analysis showed that, when threat is removed from the equation, tall black men, like tall white men, project an aura of competence. So a black male business executive may be positively perceived at a board meeting—and then negatively stereotyped when he takes off his suit and goes for a run.

Not all tall tales have happy endings.

“They Saw Me and Thought the Worst”

For years, Black residents of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, have voiced complaints about abuses and a lack of accountability within its Sheriff’s Office. Unlike in neighboring New Orleans, no one has stepped in to help.



As Sojourner Gibbs pulled out of her parking space at a Sam’s Club in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, one afternoon last summer, she felt the familiar, sickening symptoms of diabetic shock. Weakness, confusion. She began to sweat and shake uncontrollably. And then, Gibbs said, panic set in.

Her car lurched forward a few feet. She slammed on the brakes. The groceries she had just purchased for her family’s Juneteenth barbecue jostled in the back. People started honking their horns. A concerned woman walked up to her car. “I’m a diabetic! I need help!” Gibbs yelled.

The woman called 911. Dispatcher notes show a report of a “Black female sitting/screaming” in a gold Ford Expedition. “Appears scared.” Moments later: “Needs EMS.”

Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived before the paramedics. First just one, then three more. Gibbs, a doctoral candidate in public policy, thrashed in the front seat, her body stiffening. She recalls telling deputies she was diabetic. The sheriff’s department report says she told deputies to “go away.”

She insists she heard one say, “This bitch is lying. She’s high on something.”

As deputies surrounded the car, Alicia Dardar, who is white and grew up in Jefferson Parish, pulled up nearby. Dardar felt uneasy as she saw what was happening, she said, and she thought of George Floyd, who a month earlier had been killed by a Minneapolis police officer. She started recording with her cell phone.

Alicia Dardar witnessed and filmed sheriff’s deputies throwing Gibbs to the ground as the Black woman pleaded for help. “I think the cop saw a Black person and instantly assumed she's on drugs,” Dardar said. “If it was me in that vehicle, it would have been a very different moment.”
Her video shows the four deputies dragging Gibbs out of the driver’s side door. Gibbs cries, “I don’t know why you’re doing this.” Then a deputy grabs one of Gibbs’ legs from underneath her, sending her face-first into the dirt. They secure her hands behind her back with zip ties, restraining her as paramedics arrive.

She remembers thinking of her sons, 10 and 4, and praying: Please, Lord, do not take me.

When paramedics arrived and took Gibbs’ blood sugar level, it was 17 milligrams per deciliter. Levels below 40 milligrams can be critical, even fatal. She said one paramedic told her, “You could have died.” While she was in the ambulance, deputies combed through her belongings in her SUV.

Over the next few months, Gibbs would file a complaint with the sheriff’s internal affairs division, hoping the officers involved would face consequences. What she didn’t know at the time, but would later learn, is that the Sheriff’s Office would fail to follow its own internal investigations policy. Despite her complaints, no official would ever interview her or Dardar before exonerating the officers of all wrongdoing. The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about Gibbs’ case.

Had the scene in the parking lot played out in New Orleans, just four miles away, Gibbs’ pursuit of answers likely would have had very different results. That’s because just over a decade ago, the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report about policing in the city. It found that the New Orleans Police Department had failed to properly track and review when its officers used force, that its internal investigation system was deeply flawed, that officers were disproportionately shooting and killing Black people, and that years of ignored complaints and stonewalling had eroded public trust.

The report led to a settlement agreement with the city in 2013 that has resulted in drastic overhauls in policing, turning a troubled department into a model — albeit an imperfect one — of reform. Federal monitors wrote in February that despite still needing some improvement, NOPD had become a “changed agency.”

But the DOJ has never launched an investigation in Jefferson Parish, a suburb of about 440,000 people west of New Orleans that straddles the banks of the Mississippi River. Its Sheriff’s Office is one of the largest in the state, with jurisdiction over the entirety of the parish’s 665 square miles, including those cities that have their own police departments.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office complex is named for former Sheriff Harry Lee, who espoused racist views in public statements.
Here, policing looks a lot like it did in New Orleans a decade ago, with racial disparities in the people officers shoot, little transparency in cases where force is used, and a flawed internal affairs process that critics say protects problematic deputies instead of the public. Records and data collected over the last year by WWNO/WRKF and ProPublica support the claims that many Black residents have made for years: that deputies treat white residents and residents of color in significantly different ways.

More than 70% of people who deputies shot at during the past eight years were Black, more than double the 27% of the population that is Black, the news organizations’ investigation found. Seventy five percent of the people who died — 12 of 16 — after being shot or restrained by deputies during that time were Black men.

The disparities resemble those of the Louisiana State Police, which has come under heavy fire recently over a pattern of violence directed at Black arrestees. At that agency — which Black lawmakers have asked the Department of Justice to investigate — 67% of incidents where the police used force in recent years have targeted Black Louisianans, the Associated Press reported Sept. 9. Black people make up nearly one-third of the state’s population.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, when questioned about such incidents, failed to provide vital details, exhibiting a lack of transparency. In response to public records requests, the office could not account for how often its deputies use force. It also refused to provide the news organizations with copies of complaints against deputies.

After failing to respond to weeks of emails and voicemails, Sheriff Joe Lopinto declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to written questions. He said only that when his deputies commit serious misconduct, they are arrested, noting that at least nine deputies have been booked since he became sheriff in 2017, although he could not say how many of those incidents involved officers inappropriately using force.

Based on news reports, only one of those bookings appeared to involve excessive force — a 21-year Sheriff’s Office veteran who was accused of pepper-spraying a man without justification.

Gibbs said she has heard stories of abuses by Jefferson Parish deputies for years, but she didn’t see herself as someone who would ever have a reason to worry.

“I thought as long as I do the things I’m supposed to do, I’d be OK,” she said. “​​We pay our taxes. We have a very nice home. We go to work. We go to school. We educate our children.”

In the end, though, she said, none of it mattered. The deputies didn’t see a woman experiencing a medical emergency. They saw a Black woman acting irrationally, pegged her as a drug addict, and treated her as such, she said.

“They had a narrative in their minds of who I was and why I was and where I was. And no matter how many times I said I’m diabetic, no one responded to that,” Gibbs said. “They saw me and thought the worst.”

Carved out of land that belonged to Orleans Parish until 1825, Jefferson Parish encompasses sprawling suburbs outside the city and stretches down to fishing villages on the Gulf of Mexico. The histories of the two parishes are intertwined, their shared border revised over the years by annexations for reasons both political and pragmatic.

As the two communities grew, their histories diverged. New Orleans is an international port city, a tourist mecca famous as the birthplace of jazz. Jefferson Parish boomed in the white flight movement of the 1950s and 1960s, once electing David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to the state legislature.

A confederate flag flies at a home just a few blocks from where Ferel Burke lives with his family. Ferel says he was beaten by deputies severely enough that his eyes swelled shut and he still has migraines from the incident.
Although the population has diversified over the years — Black people now account for more than a quarter of the population, and Latinos have grown to account for 15% — Jefferson Parish voters supported Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections and sent conservative Republicans to Congress, including former U.S. Sen. David Vitter and Rep. Steve Scalise.

And while the margins of victory have grown tighter in recent years, the area’s conservative bent has repercussions for the oversight of the Sheriff’s Office. That’s because the Jefferson Parish sheriff, like the majority of the country’s sheriffs, is an elected position and answers only to the voters.

The sheriff also derives considerable power from the Louisiana Constitution, which prescribes that the position be unconstrained by governmental or civilian oversight. Sheriffs don’t answer to politicians, unlike in New Orleans, where the police chief is appointed by the mayor and can be fired. In New Orleans, the City Council approves the police budget, but the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office is funded through sources, such as property and sales taxes, that do not require outside approval. Public calls for accountability ultimately can only end up with the sheriff.

The late Sheriff Harry Lee, who served for 28 years until his death in 2007, called his job “the closest thing there is to being a king in the U.S.” Lee openly espoused racist views in public statements, once declaring: “If there are some young Blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white area, they will be stopped.” He eventually backed off the order, but he announced 20 years later that his solution to violent crime was “only stopping Black people.”

When Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levees flooded New Orleans in 2005, it prompted a large crowd of mostly Black people to attempt to cross the Crescent City Connection bridge into Jefferson Parish. They were confronted by sheriff’s deputies and Gretna Police Department officers and forced to turn back. At least one officer fired a shot in the air, according to local reports.

No one was hurt, but the law enforcement blockade led to protests and allegations of racism from civil rights groups. Lee defended the officers’ actions, saying the area had already accepted thousands of evacuees and didn’t have enough supplies to care for thousands more.

Although the DOJ later found that the officers hadn’t intentionally broken any laws, Jonathan Smith, who was with the DOJ at the time, said the events were a “big red flag.” Federal investigators knew at the time that Jefferson Parish was “a troubled department,” said Smith, who served as chief of the Special Litigation Section for DOJ’s civil rights division from 2010 to 2015. He added, though, that he could not discuss whether any specific agency was of interest during his tenure.

Ultimately what happened on Danziger Bridge in New Orleans three days later overshadowed the Jefferson Parish blockade. There, NOPD officers shot six Black people who were part of a crowd fleeing the flooded city, killing two of them. Police attempted to cover up the murders by planting evidence, fabricating witnesses and falsifying reports, an investigation later found.

In a California Desert, Sheriff’s Deputies Settle Schoolyard Disputes. Black Teens Bear the Brunt.

Deputies in California’s Antelope Valley are disproportionately citing Black teens, often for minor infractions, like getting in fights or smoking. “They’re turning the principal’s office into the police station,” said one lawyer.



LANCASTER, Calif. — Barron Gardner, a high school history teacher in Southern California’s Antelope Valley, stared down Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies during an online meeting in April, trying to keep his composure.

Gardner, 41, had become a reluctant spokesperson for a growing movement, driven primarily by Black and Latino residents, to get LASD deputies off school campuses. His wife, a nurse, worried about the repercussions for their family. What if he lost his job? What if he became a target of discrimination or worse? After all, this valley at the western edge of the Mojave Desert, population roughly 500,000, has a long history of racial tension, including white supremacist attacks on Black community members.


But Gardner felt obligated to speak up during the meeting, which had been called by school district administrators. Some of his Black students had complained that they were treated differently than white kids caught doing the same things, like fighting, disrupting class or smoking cigarettes. He’d been concerned for a long time about the culture on campus, fearing it encouraged staff to turn Black students over to law enforcement. But Gardner knew he needed more than just a hunch and secondhand accounts, he said.

Barron Gardner is an Antelope Valley High School teacher. “We don’t need to just cancel the contract, we need a whole paradigm shift,” he said.
He also knew the LASD had a well-documented, troubled track record in the Antelope Valley. In 2013, a Department of Justice investigation found that LASD deputies there had violated the Constitution, including by conducting discriminatory and illegal searches and seizures primarily affecting Black residents. The investigation resulted in a settlement agreement that mandated a batch of reforms, as well as periodic monitoring reports. Gardner combed through the latest of those reports, from the summer and fall of 2020, in preparation for the meeting. Black people, he read, were still much more likely to be stopped and more likely to be searched.

He came prepared for the online meeting with the findings from the federal reports. “I went in, boom, and blew the whole thing up,” he said. But as he stared at the deputies through his screen, he felt intimidated, he said, and his voice shook. When Gardner finished, he said he was met with blank stares. “These people look[ed] at me like I was an alien from outer space,” he said.

Just because it’s happening on the streets doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the schools, Gardner recalls one district official saying. Both the Sheriff’s Department and the district have repeatedly claimed that no one is racially profiling students.

But according to data that California law enforcement agencies are required to publish under the terms of a law aimed at combatting racial profiling, Gardner was onto something: Sheriff’s deputies in the Antelope Valley have disproportionately detained and issued citations to Black teens on public school campuses, an analysis by KPCC/LAist and ProPublica found.

We analyzed and mapped thousands of contacts between deputies and civilians that took place during the 2019 calendar year, the most recent year not disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focused on Lancaster, one of two major cities in the region, finding clusters of stops on public school campuses. In the vast majority of those contacts, deputies cited “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” as the reason for the stops.

Our analysis found that during that time, six public high schools accounted for about 300 of the city’s 4,000 stops — or roughly 7 percent. When we compared the race of teens stopped with the demographics of those schools, the disparity was clear. Black teenagers accounted for 60 percent of the deputy contacts on campuses but made up only about 20 percent of the enrollment in those schools.

At Lancaster High Schools, Sheriff’s Deputies Have Stopped Black Teens More Than Their White Peers

Black teenagers at several Antelope Valley high schools were stopped based on a deputy’s “reasonable suspicion” up to four times as much as would be expected based on the schools’ demographics, according to a KPCC/LAist and ProPublica analysis of 2019 data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The highest number of the contacts — more than 100, in a student body of roughly 1,650 — was reported at Antelope Valley High School, where Gardner teaches and most of the student body is Black or Latino. The analysis shows Black teenagers made up more than 75 percent of the reasonable suspicion contacts — about 2.5 times their share of the school’s enrollment.

While Black teenagers at Gardner’s school were questioned at far higher rates than would be expected based on the demographics of the student body, the same was not true for white and Latino teenagers. Only one reasonable suspicion contact involved a white student.

The racial disparity seen in the contacts with deputies is also evident in the district’s disciplinary data, which shows that the share of Black students who were suspended was more than three times that of white students.

At Quartz Hill High School on the city’s more affluent west side, about one-quarter of contacts with deputies involved Black teens, although Black students account for less than 10 percent of the student body.

Terrell “T.J.” Pina was a 15-year-old freshman at Quartz Hill in December 2018 when he was detained by the campus deputy in a “reasonable suspicion” stop after a fight with a white student. Pina, a special education student, told school staff that the white boy had been bullying him and calling him the N-word. Terrell was charged with felony assault and spent two weeks in juvenile detention before his first hearing, his mother, Richelle Bankhead, said.

The sheriff’s data indicates that only Pina was arrested for the fight. When asked why the other student wasn’t arrested, John Lecrivain, the Lancaster Sheriff’s Station captain who took over this year, said he could not comment on individual cases involving juveniles.

“The school district had the Sheriff’s Department snatch him up and drag him through the mud like he was a criminal,” Bankhead said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/30/virginia-beach-family-neighbor-racial-slurs-police

Black family says police told them they can’t act on neighbor blasting racial slurs

A Black family from Virginia who say their neighbor has been playing recordings of racial slurs and monkey noises since their arrival received no recourse after police deemed their neighbors’ actions “not criminally actionable”, reports CNN.

Five years ago, the Martinez family moved into their dream home in a quiet cul-de-sac of Virginia Beach, about two hours outside of the state’s capital.

“The minute we found this home, I loved it,” said Jannique Martinez to CNN. “It was everything I envisioned for my family and for raising my kids in a nice, quiet neighborhood.”

But soon after, Martinez said a neighbor soon began harassing the couple, blinking lights or playing music whenever her family or another family in the area would leave their home.

“We noticed a little erratic behavior like these blinking lights that are on a sensor. When my family or any other family leaves or returns to their homes, they all start to blink,” Martinez said, in addition to loud music that the neighbor had customized for each family.

Soon after the Martinez family called the local police to complain about the blinking lights and music, Martinez said her neighbor’s erratic behavior escalated. The same neighbor began playing monkey noises whenever Martinez’s family would arrive or leave their house. The neighbor also began playing skits containing racist slurs.

“Since that day he’s been playing [N-word] skits that he found online,” Martinez said, skits that say: “Black people have nothing better to do but go to a comedy club on a Friday night,” and, “Hey everyone, look it’s [N-word] guy. Everyone say, ‘Hi [N-word] guy.’”

Even after authorities were alerted about the harassment, the Virginia Beach police department confirmed in a statement that “though appalling”, the neighbor’s actions are “not criminally actionable”.

“He finds ways to stay under the law,” Martinez said. “He can’t be wrong in the eyes of the law. He doesn’t care about the morals.”

“It feels hopeless and sad. I’m so drained,” Martinez said.

Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.

Hermit wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:

Seabass wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:The only people who think society is riddled with racism are racists.

US society isn't just riddled with racism, it's absolutely fucking saturated.

So true. Someone who sees racism as a problem sees racism wherever it occurs. Conversely, someone for whom racism is not a problem does not see racism anywhere.

Keep It Real wrote:

Hermit wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:

Seabass wrote:
US society isn't just riddled with racism, it's absolutely fucking saturated.

So true. Someone who sees racism as a problem sees racism wherever it occurs. Conversely, someone for whom racism is not a problem does not see racism anywhere.

Wilful and transparent squirming misrepresentation. If that's what the Goethe quote meant it would be phrased entirely differently, perhaps: "A man notices in the world that which he is knowledgeable about." Also, the alternative (and obvious) interpretation of the quote: that those who see racism as being ubiquitous are themselves racists, jibes perfectly with:

a) False consensus effect
b) Classic psychological projection
c) Anecdotal evidence of white BLM activists acknowledging their own racism

All three of which are evidenced and expounded upon already in this thread. Read it Hermit? Case closed.

Goethe wrote:Dichter: Geh hin und such dir einen andern Knecht!
Der Dichter sollte wohl das höchste Recht,
Das Menschenrecht, das ihm Natur vergönnt,
Um deinetwillen freventlich verscherzen!
Wodurch bewegt er alle Herzen?
Wodurch besiegt er jedes Element?
Ist es der Einklang nicht? der aus dem Busen dringt,
Und in sein Herz die Welt zurücke schlingt.
Wenn die Natur des Fadens ew’ge Länge,
Gleichgültig drehend, auf die Spindel zwingt,
Wenn aller Wesen unharmon’sche Menge
Verdrießlich durch einander klingt;
Wer theilt die fließend immer gleiche Reihe
Belebend ab, daß sie sich rythmisch regt?
Wer ruft das Einzelne zur allgemeinen Weihe?
Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlägt,
Wer läßt den Sturm zu Leidenschaften wüthen?
Das Abendroth im ernsten Sinne glühn?
Wer schüttet alle schönen Frühlingsblüten
Auf der Geliebten Pfade hin?
Wer flicht die unbedeutend grünen Blätter
Zum Ehrenkranz Verdiensten jeder Art?
Wer sichert den Olymp? vereinet Götter?
Des Menschen Kraft im Dichter offenbart.

Lustige Person: So braucht sie denn die schönen Kräfte
Und treibt die dicht’rischen Geschäfte,
Wie man ein Liebesabenteuer treibt.
Zufällig naht man sich, man fühlt, man bleibt
Und nach und nach wird man verflochten;
Es wächst das Glück, dann wird es angefochten,
Man ist entzückt, nun kommt der Schmerz heran,
Und eh man sich’s versieht ist’s eben ein Roman.
Laßt uns auch so ein Schauspiel geben!
Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben!
Ein jeder lebt’s, nicht vielen ist’s bekannt,
Und wo ihr’s packt, da ist’s interessant.
In bunten Bildern wenig Klarheit,
Viel Irrthum und ein Fünkchen Wahrheit,
So wird der beste Trank gebraut,
Der alle Welt erquickt und auferbaut.
Dann sammelt sich der Jugend schönste Blüte
Vor eurem Spiel und lauscht der Offenbarung,
Dann sauget jedes zärtliche Gemüthe
Aus eurem Werk sich melanchol’sche Nahrung;
Dann wird bald dies bald jenes aufgeregt,
Ein jeder sieht was er im Herzen trägt.
Noch sind sie gleich bereit zu weinen und zu lachen,
Sie ehren noch den Schwung, erfreuen sich am Schein;
Wer fertig ist, dem ist nichts recht zu machen,
Ein Werdender wird immer dankbar seyn.

Bunch, 28, said he and a group of his friends met up in England -- a small city about 30 miles southeast of Little Rock -- to shoot a rap video in the neighborhood where he grew up. He said the officer watched them as they got together and then followed as they drove through town.
Bunch has an uncle who also is an England Police officer, so he said he and his cousin flagged Moore down so they could introduce themselves.
"The reason I walked up (to him) recording is I could kind of feel -- I had a gut feeling -- that there was going to be a bad vibe from the way he followed us everywhere we went," Bunch told CNN.

felltoearth wrote:What’s funny is how much more racist Police seem to have gotten since the cameraphone was invented.

Arkansas police officer fired after telling a group of black men that 'you don't belong in my city' - CNN

Bunch, 28, said he and a group of his friends met up in England -- a small city about 30 miles southeast of Little Rock -- to shoot a rap video in the neighborhood where he grew up. He said the officer watched them as they got together and then followed as they drove through town.
Bunch has an uncle who also is an England Police officer, so he said he and his cousin flagged Moore down so they could introduce themselves.
"The reason I walked up (to him) recording is I could kind of feel -- I had a gut feeling -- that there was going to be a bad vibe from the way he followed us everywhere we went," Bunch told CNN.

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