• Protests over Charlotte Police Shooting move to Highway
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[QUOTE=TornadoAP;51092207]Of course you'd never know that with media never reporting positive things since negatives get more clicks.[/QUOTE] The media that edits 911 calls to fit an agenda? The media that uses years old pictures to better portray their narrative?
[QUOTE=Zombinie;51092070]Can someone elaborate on this buzzword? Because it seems like a buzzword. What "system" is in place to keep any individual, black or not, from working hard and making a successful life for themselves? Is it the system run by Barack Obama? Why do you ignore all the successes of self made African-Americans? Show me how an African-American is not privy to all the opportunities afforded to everyone else?[/QUOTE] It isn't a buzzword - it's a pretty well-documented term referring to (as code3 said) the judicial/criminal system as a whole. It includes law enforcement interaction, sentencing disparities in the courts, bias in the prison system, the school-to-prison pipeline, and it can even go so far as funding inequality for inner-city public schools. It's an enormous clusterfuck where historical racism, class, poverty, race, location, industry, politics, economics, and literally almost any topic of American culture collides. There are successful, self-made African-Americans, no doubt. But the plain reality is that it is [i]on average[/i] more difficult and less likely for a black American to achieve the successes of a white American [i]on average[/i]. Not every black American will think racism is a major issue, because they're all different individuals with varying social and political views, and they're not a monolithic voting bloc like they're often portrayed as in the media. Again, it's [i]possible[/i] for black Americans to have successful lives, nobody is arguing that it isn't, but as a statistic, it's far less likely. Individuals can be successful even when the group isn't. Places like Chicago and Detroit have teenagers with undiagnosed PTSD from watching their friends/family get shot and high-school dropout rates miles above the national average. Up until recently, crack cocaine carried a sentence over a [i]hundred times[/i] longer than that of regular powder cocaine - despite being the same chemical. And this doesn't excuse any violence. That isn't acceptable. There's just a [i]lot[/i] of issues that prevent black Americans from having the same success of white Americans [i]on average[/i], and pretending that racism is somehow over is unbelievably ignorant, when there are studies that strongly suggest that [URL="https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html"]simply having an "ethnic" name is enough to reduce your likelihood of getting a call-back for a job application[/URL]. This isn't just police, it's a deep-seated system of racial bias rooted as far back as Jim Crow laws and (more recently) the racist housing policies of the 80s. It's the intersection of poverty, class, violence, education, job opportunity, stereotypes, politics, failing industry, local economics, white flight, de-facto segregation, drug abuse - all of these things contribute. Racism is simply one part of that - you see similar things in Canada with First Nation groups (of Native American ancestry, not African) and in Australia with aboriginal groups (of Austroasiatic ancestry). Hell, you see the same in Europe among different ethnic groups, like the Roma, and in places all across the globe. The history of how we've treated black Americans in this country has a compounding effect that hurts socioeconomic mobility among that group, even if racism is absolutely less prevalent than it used to be.
Curfew is happening, it's past midnight in NC, and a large group of people are just walking towards the direction of ??? together. don't know if theyre all going home to the same place but it doesn't really seem like it. a lot of people just kind of wandering until they decide to follow the crowd again. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZq7KsMXYaI[/media] they passed by some national guard soldiers and the crowd chanted "hands up don't shoot". "there will not be a game here sunday." they say, claiming they'll surround the stadium. ok. edit: they've now settled somewhere to sit and lay down.
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