I don't often wade in here, and maybe I'm making a mistake to do it now. But I'm going to do it anyway, because that's more and more how I roll lately(i.e, let the chips fall where they choose to, so be it, etc).
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Originally Posted by ISiddiqui
do people go against Martin Luther King, Jr. because he focused on his own community? I mean they did at the time, even accusing him of encouraging division (the Letter from the Birmingham Jail is about that). Nowadays it is usually gauche to criticize King's tactics because we see that he was morally correct in his position. But he did focus on his own community. When your community is marginalized, why is it wrong to try to raise them to the same level as the rest of society before you are required to take up the banner for everyone?
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This is one of the more reasonable points I've read you make in a while. I think there's room though, to generally agree with Dr. King while at the same time not endorsing every way he went about things. We shouldn't make untouchable heroes out of virtually anyone. My issue here is that I'm basically against anything that increases polarization and antimosity towards the Other, whoever that happens to be at the moment. 'Your community' is something we need to excise. The community is globalized now. Your community should be humanity. If it's smaller that, you are marginalizing everyone you didn't include, which is the exactly the thing that we're fighting against here. This is why, for example, I no longer describe myself as a patriot. I don't want to be that close-minded and biased against people outside of their United States. My life, the lives of my family etc. are no more important than theirs and I think it's highly arrogant for me to act otherwhise.
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Originally Posted by rjolley
When people talk about breast cancer awareness, does that mean that breast cancer matters more than other cancers? Or that there needs to be more awareness given to breast cancer? It's a similar line of thought with Black Lives Matter. The name doesn't mean black lives matter more than other lives, it means black lives matter as well and there are issues related to black lives that need to be addressed.
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If they called it Citizen Rights Awareness, or Police Excesses Awareness, or something like that, I would agree with you. They don't. As has been pointed out, BLM has not been completely silent on other forms of violence - but they spend a lot more time and energy traveling around to whatever the current 'hotspot crisis' resulting in a tiny fraction of the deaths that the other things do on which they spend far less time. Their priorities are clear. And when they get there, they say divisive and completely unhelpful(racist is not too strong a word) things like 'Watch. Whiteness. Work" in response to standard police procedures. They can say all they want that black lives don't matter more to them and that they care about all people. Their words and actions and where they choose to focus their activism say otherwhise. At best, they have very poor judgment. I hope that's the case, because the alternative is rather worse.
As for me, I'm far more concerned with what is frankly the real issue; social breakdown. I.e., three times as many blacks are born into families without a father as whites(by contrast, the number of people shot by police? More whites than blacks on the whole, though blacks at a somewhat higher rate but not one disproportionate to the higher crime rates in those communities). Family breakdown has all sorts of negative things associated with it(drug use, poverty, crime, incarceration, education, you name it). It's conspiracy-theory level territory when you consider the amount of time and energy being devoted to issues of such relatively minor impact like police shootings, compared to those devastating whole swaths of the nation. There are many possibilities as to why this focus occurs, but none of them are good or heartwarming.
To me, it's self-evident that for our nation to heal, we must tackle the biggest problems.