Quote:
Originally Posted by ISiddiqui
I know its rhetorical, but we all know why. Some are just playing dumb because it may force them to deal with their privilege. Better to simply ignore it and say pointing it out is racist.
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Nobody deals with their white privilege and biases more than police officers and those who make decisions about police officers do. People in most other lines of work never really have to be concerned with it, which is an aspect of white privilege in and of itself. They can consider themselves progressive heroes and not part of the problem if they point out racism online, or act super polite to the minorities they come across in normal aspects of their day.
Police don't have that luxury. They have be trained on, acknowledge, and confront whatever biases they have. We all have biases we're not even aware of until we're in a situation where it might actually come up. And some biases are truly based on ignorance - like how people raised in different cultures may react to authority (in the U.S., we tend to expect eye contact or it looks like you're hiding something, whereas in other cultures eye contact with authority is considered disrespectful.)
Edit: I'm looking at some of these photos of these masked police officers being screamed at by Michigan protesters. I tend to look at these things from that one officers's perspective. Or the perspective of his supervisor telling him what to do. Should he have opened fire because that's what some other officer have done in the past? Should his supervisor have told him to arrest everyone - a decision which, once made, means that the officers now have lawful authority, and a mandate through their orders, to overcome all physical resistance and see the arrest out, regardless of the force that requires? I sure as hell wouldn't do that, or order that. Regardless of what happened in the 60s, or on the border last week, or in the next town yesterday.