Scott said that in the course of one year as an elected official, he was stopped seven times by law enforcement. And while in some of those instances he was speeding, Scott said the “vast majority” of those encounters were the result of “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
.. During his speech, Scott also shared the story of a former staffer of his who drove a Chrysler 300, “a nice car without any question, but not a Ferrari.” The staffer wound up selling that car out of frustration after being pulled over too often in Washington D.C. “for absolutely no reason other than for driving a nice car.” He told a similar story of his brother, a command sergeant major in the army, who was pulled over by an officer suspicious that the car Scott’s brother was driving was stolen because it was a Volvo.
.. Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist,” he said. “To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”
U.S. must atone for its original sins: Slavery, guns
Public television switched to re-runs of fireworks from cloud-free July 4ths of yesteryear. It all seems a grand metaphor for a country that is in a fog, squinting for clarity and the joy of color.
.. They are America’s original sins: Slavery and guns…and they have never been washed clean.
.. The necessity of a large and unified new nation to defeat Great Britain and create a truly independent United States meant massive concessions to the plantation owners of the South, including the notorious decision to count (non-voting, of course) slaves as 3/5 of a person, to boost that region’s representation in Congress.
.. But within the new nation, fears of an all-out slave revolt only grew as the population of black people in bondage eventually swelled to 4 million. It is here that the second vine starts growing: The American romance with gun culture. Remember the 2nd Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms in the guise of “a well-regulated militia”? By the time that amendment was drafted into the Bill of Rights in 1789,militias in states such as Georgia that were essentially slave patrols with the goal of putting down any blacks who dared seek their freedom.
.. As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves and to intimidate abolitionists.”
.. As I mentioned here recently, invest two hours of your time at your local cinema to watch The Free State of Jones, which portrays how terror against freed blacks was launched in the South with virtually no gap after the war — white men trading their gray Confederate caps for the white hoods of the Klan.
.. But just as we ignore the horrors of the post-Reconstruction South, we also forget that the reaction to the civil rights era — especially when many American cities erupted into full-scale revolt — had arguably a greater impact on how we live today. Those uprisings led directly to the “law-and-order” administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to “white flight” that left urban neighborhoods devoid of services, and created separate and unequal school districts.
.. The two most important developments were this: A draconian “war on drugs” that targeted urban drug use (while ignoring, largely, illegal recreational drugs in the suburbs); this in turn paved the way for stepped-up police activity and then so-called “broken windows” policing that led to the unprecedented and shocking mass incarceration of blacks — the New Jim Crow.
.. It was in the aftermath of 1960s racial unrest that the National Rifle Association went from a sensible, moderate voice for sportsmen to become the lobbying group for lucrative merchants of death that peddled fear and promised manhood until, remarkably, there were more guns in the United States than people.
.. Police in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in other nations to be killed by a civilian with a gun. That in turn makes police more suspicious and more anxious in traffic stops
.. Then think about how Castile — a working man with a responsible job caring for children in a school cafeteria — was pulled over and cited a remarkable 52 times by the police.
..Was he profiled and harassed because he was black? If so, it would fit the pattern of so many formerly middle-class towns that balance their budget by fining and harassing their citizens,
The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas Yesterday
In America, there are 376 police officers per 100,000 citizens – or one police officer per every 266 citizens. Stop and think about that. Could every police officer in America maintain order over 266 unruly people who had no respect for him him or the badge he wields? Absolutely not. The only thing that makes the situation even a little bit tenable is that the vast majority of people never think about confronting or challenging a police officer, and instead get up each day with the commitment to live their lives peacefully and lawfully, because they believe a) that they live in a society that is basically just and b) they believe that the few policemen who do exist will be there to protect them if something goes wrong and c) they have faith, by and large, that if someone commits a crime against them, they will be caught and punished.
Think, though, about what happens when these invisible bonds that are the most important part of maintaining law and order begin to dissolve – especially within a given subcommunity.
.. The most important safety valve to prevent violence like we saw in Dallas last night is the belief that when officers do go off the rails, the legal system will punish them accordingly. If minority communities (and everyone else, for that matter) believed that, resort to reprisal killings would be either non existent or far less frequent.
But they don’t, and there’s good reason for that. And that is because a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling “the thugs” in whatever way they see fit.
.. During the course of interaction with the police, however, the police drastically escalate the confrontation using what I think any reasonable person should consider to be wildly excessive force in bringing the situation to heel, and someone ends up either seriously injured or dead. Very often, the victim of this escalation is black.
.. Here’s all you need to know: since 2000, NYPD officers have shot and killed about 180 people. Only 3 of those officers was even indicted for anything and only 1 was convicted, for a non-jail time offense.
.. But people’s willingness to act rationally and within the confines of the law and the political system is generally speaking directly proportional to their belief that the law and political system will ever punish wrongdoing. And right now, that belief is largely broken, especially in many minority communities.
Southern Trouble for Donald Trump
In many ways, he’s running a campaign that revives the old Southern strategy, practiced by Barry Goldwater and, more craftily, by Richard Nixon, of peeling disaffected white voters away from the Democratic Party with dog-whistle racism and a certain amount of sympathy for the lowered prospects of the working class. Trump is sure, naturally, that he’ll “do great” with that approach in the so-called solid South—solid for Democrats, from Reconstruction until the civil-rights era; solid for Republicans thereafter.
.. Trump declared, “People of North Carolina want strength, protection, and jobs ..
.. the South is no longer all that solid. In many places, North Carolina among them, Trump’s rummage-sale version of the Southern strategy is as likely to activate voters against him as it is to insure a G.O.P. victory.
.. An angry white man killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill last year, but the Muslim community in the area proved vibrant enough not only to survive that assault but to launch new institutions, including a scholarship at North Carolina State, programs to aid Syrian refugees, and a local thrift store whose proceeds go to charities the victims supported
.. What’s also important, though, in loosening the Republican lock on the South is what’s known as in-migration—people moving from other states, especially in the Northeast, to growing metropolitan areas of the South, like the Research Triangle in North Carolina.