On 6/3/21 8:27 PM, Curtis P wrote:
"The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more
“racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South.
In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in
the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of
poverty and more of the white population is very poor."
https://gasoline-and-grits.org/2021/06/03/the-surprising-geography-of-police-killings-back-of-the-napkin-calculations-on-race-region-and-violence/
I had big problems with this article by Christian Parenti. He writes:
Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of
racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern
slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American
policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR
banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid”
Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck
vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas.
BLM activists are under no such illusions. They have seen the pattern of
killings and interpret it likely as consistent with Malcolm X's
observation that everything south of Canada is "the south".
He tries to apply a class analysis to why cops kill Blacks more
proportionately in the north, writing about this phenomenon in pure
statistical terms: "Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at
three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent
of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops." Etc., etc.
However, the fury driving the BLM protests is not based on pure
statistics based on demographics. Instead, it is about who is being
killed, namely unarmed Black people like George Floyd being arrested for
petty crimes. Or even a kid like Tamir Rice running around with a toy
gun in a playground. Black activists are trying to build a movement that
is in effect an anti-lynching movement updated for our era.
I can't say I am surprised that Parenti's article appeared on Nonsite,
Adolph Reed Jr's journal. It is consistent with his emphasis on the need
to prioritize "class" rather than "identity", a false dichotomy.
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