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Breathing While Black

By TChris, Section Social Justice
Posted on Sat Dec 02, 2006 at 06:45:30 PM EST
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TalkLeft wrote here about the phenomenon of "contagious shooting." In an excellent essay, "Breathing While Black," Christopher Rabb argues that "contagious shooting" is "symptomatic of something larger that undoubtedly correlates to when such contagions most often occur and to what degree": institutional racism.

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    Breathing While Black | 10 comments (10 topical)

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    Very powerful (5.00 / 2) (#1)
    by aw on Sat Dec 02, 2006 at 07:26:12 PM EST
    Everybody go read it.

    Read it... (none / 0) (#2)
    by Edger on Sat Dec 02, 2006 at 07:47:00 PM EST
    More than once.

    Parent
    I've had that ni**er feeling..... (5.00 / 1) (#9)
    by kdog on Mon Dec 04, 2006 at 05:37:22 PM EST
    and I'm caucasian/middle eastern.  

    Being stopped with light skin in the "bad" neighborhhod, thrown on the hood, cops hands all in my pockets and even down my pants.  "What you doing here?", "You don't belong here.", "Where's the dope?"....questions and statements in a rapid fire confusion....guns drawn.  Utterly powerless, a horrible feeling.

    I can't imagine being African American and dealing with that crap on a near daily basis in your own neighborhood.  I'd be in a constant rage.

    I see a common cause in a lot of these shootings...an irrational fear of African Americans by police.  The fear no one wants to admit anymore, the fear that makes a woman clutch her purse a little tighter around a black man.  The split-second benefit of the doubt a white man gets is not given to the black man.  So the black man ends up dead a heckuva lot more often.

    It's been engrained in the American psyche over hundreds of years, sadly its gonna take a lot longer than 40 years to see it go away.

    Hard to imagine (none / 0) (#10)
    by squeaky on Mon Dec 04, 2006 at 05:58:43 PM EST
    Being white, and jewish it is hard to imagine not feeling safe in my own neighborhood, safe from the police.

    A close friend of mine grew up in DC in a middle class black family. When he was a child his mom taught him never to run, as children love to do, while he was in public. The reason was that there was a fair chance that he would be shot by a cop.

    When I heard that my head exploded. I was pretty hip about race and gender theory but this opened my eyes to a whole new level of how racism takes over someone's body on a daily basis.

    The post Breathing While Black, is sadly the norm, hardly the exception.  

    Parent

    What a crock a crap (1.00 / 3) (#3)
    by bx58 on Sat Dec 02, 2006 at 08:38:04 PM EST
    Christopher Rabb lost all credbility when he equates OJ Simpson with Mark Furhman. Was he one of those people jumping up and down and high fivin each other when OJ was aquitted?

    You have to think so.

    Poor Chris gets pulled over in "Alabama" by a white cop. ALABAMA...get it?

    Did he mention that most of the cops shooting at Sean Bell were not white? Of course not

    Too funny.

    And (5.00 / 1) (#6)
    by Edger on Sun Dec 03, 2006 at 03:06:03 AM EST
    you lost all credibility when you posted your comment.

    Parent
    Sorry? (1.00 / 2) (#4)
    by Officious Pedant on Sat Dec 02, 2006 at 10:55:51 PM EST
    Two white, two black, and one hispanic, and "most" were black? What is that? Reading while a goober?

    Parent
    Wrong goober (1.00 / 1) (#5)
    by bx58 on Sun Dec 03, 2006 at 12:04:41 AM EST
    Do the math.

    Parent
    Consider the training as well. (none / 0) (#7)
    by SeeEmDee on Sun Dec 03, 2006 at 07:24:31 AM EST
    One of the reasons for this kind of thing happening is training. In the 1980's I had the opportunity to undergo what was called FATS (FireArms Training System) in which you were handed a sidearm loaded with underpowered cartridges firing a wax pellet at a backlit movie screen showing various shoot/don't shoot scenarios. The goal was simple, but also unnervingly hard: size up the level of threat and decide if it warrranted shooting. The scenario would stop if the target on the screen was hit with the pellet.

    One of the scenarios involved a child pointing a pistol at you, smiling and chuckling as if it were a game. I hesitated. The child fired the weapon and ran away. I was informed by the instructor that I was "dead" because in this scenario the gun was supposed to be real.

    (This was, of course, before toy gun manufacturers began making their toys in bright fluorescent colors to prevent tragedies where police had actually killed children armed with squirt guns that looked quite real.)

    I don't know what system is being used now, but I would wager that it is a variation of the above technology...and uses the same themes.  I came away from the experience glad I was a soldier and not a cop; I could usually count on my opposition to identify themselves as such.  (Of course, all bets are off when dealing with guerilla warfare...as our troops in Iraq are.)

    This thread (none / 0) (#8)
    by aw on Sun Dec 03, 2006 at 09:34:55 AM EST
    has veered off the subject of the link:  what it's like to be made to feel like a "n*gger."  Go read it and put yourself in his shoes.

    Once upon a time, I think it was when Reagan was elected, Gloria Steinem said, "We're all n*ggers now."  In the police state that the US is becoming, that is even more true today.  

    Blacks have always live in a police state.  Go read it and get a taste of what it feels like.

    Breathing While Black | 10 comments (10 topical)

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