“It is a common myth that police officers approach conflicts with a feeling of power — after all, they are armed, they represent the state, they are specially trained and backed by an ‘army.’ In reality, an officer’s gun is almost always a liability … because a suspect may grab it in a scuffle.
.. A blind spot is race. Only 1 in 20 white officers believe that blacks and other minorities receive unequal treatment from the police. But 57 percent of black officers are convinced the treatment of minorities is unfair.
Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?
Michael Tomasky, the liberal journalist, says the Party should “dump Dixie” and concentrate its electoral efforts on other parts of the country. “Practically the whole region,” Tomasky writes, “has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment…. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise.”
.. During the hundred years after the Civil War, the Democrats’ monopolistic grip on the region was at least partly based on its tacit, and in some places explicit, support for a racist power structure. Once the Party’s Southern hierarchy, in the personage of Lyndon Johnson and his supporters on Capitol Hill, endorsed the civil-rights movement, its fortunes suffered—just as L.B.J. predicted. Today, however, almost all Democrats would regard any effort to repudiate the Party’s post-L.B.J. history, or even to tweak it in a direction more amenable to reactionary Southerners, as morally abhorrent. As Tomasky puts it, “Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats.”
.. He quotes Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Memphis, as saying “a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”
Versions of the American Dream: Identity Politics
Ultimately, being optimistic about race requires being optimistic about the ability of our political coalitions to offer colorblind visions of the American dream — the left’s vision stressing economics more heavily, the right leaning more on family and community, but both promising gains and goods and benefits that can be shared by Americans of every racial background.
In the Obama era, though, neither coalition has done a very good job selling such a vision, because neither knows how to deliver on it. (The left doesn’t know how to get wages rising again; the right doesn’t know how to shore up the two-parent family, etc.) Which has left both parties increasingly dependent on identity-politics appeals, with the left mobilizing along lines of race, ethnicity and gender and the right mobilizing around white-Christian-heartland cultural anxieties.
Steve Biko: Forbidden to Speak and be Quoted
He was banned by the apartheid government in February 1973, meaning that he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time nor to speak in public, was restricted to the King William’s Town magisterial district, and could not write publicly or speak with the media. It was also forbidden to quote anything he said, including speeches or simple conversations.