Check Your Privilege
- Thread starter Gary Childress
- Start date
Narz
keeping it real
Thats a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. You should aim to keep your non-sequiturs more concise.
If you're gonna call names & make accusations (ignorant, causing damage) you need to qualify yourself or STFU.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
You've provided two things:
1. dead-end circumstantial evidence
2. appalling racism
However, this is not the tune you started out with. You said they [along with other groups I mentioned] were "gangs of assassins and drug dealers" and "terrorists." You've already downgraded to "cadre of murder[er]s," which, guess what, I already agreed they killed people, just not the specific woman you're crying over.
So what else you got then?
Rest easy in the fact that if I were looking for approval of my heroes, white supremacists would be among the last I would ask.
BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
That leaves the question as to why you would choose the BPP, an organization you know to be full of murderers, as an exemplar group for intersectional action when there are so many other, better examples. Why not, say, the interplay between the Catholic Worker Movement and the counter-culture around the issue of the Vietnam War? Or Dorothy Day and Caser Chavez around farm worker rights? Or Pax Christi marching with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at Aldermaston?
Your selection of the Black Panthers as exemplars of intersectional social action is absurd given the number of more principled examples. Huey Newton was a homicidal crackhead who surrounded himself with rapists and killers. The Black Panthers are not the people who hold up lanterns, pointing the way to contemporary understandings of Queer Theory and Third-Wave Feminism. They are the vomitus of 1960s and '70s leftist social movements.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Probably because the BPP wasn't run by a homicidal crackhead who surrounded himself with rapists and killers. Also I pretty explicitly said that 3rd wave feminism and much of Queer Theory are problematically post-modernist.
I don't organize around liberals I organize around heavy radicals. The BPP represent the foremost revolutionary communist organization in American history. Their much-slandered reputation today is a testament to the very real danger they posed to the US state. We are talking about an organization run not by "thugs and rapists" but by educated radicals (most of the famous Panthers were college-educated; Newton had a Phd. in Political Science ffs) with a political consciousness 100% in tune with their times. They provided aid to the poor not just in the form of legal aid but in medicine, education, and food, all supplied to poor communities (White, Black, and Latino!) for free. They organized community defense and patrols to displace racist police forces and police their own communities. They united across all barriers to form the beginnings of a united front riding on the heightened radicalism of the post-Civil Rights victories, the Vietnam War, and the chaos of 1968. Their inspiration was the Cultural Revolution. This is why they attracted the full attention of the US state and didn't let up on either the communist or the Afro-American community for two decades. So that now all you know of them is the slander spoon-fed to you by the white supremacists who laughed at their corpses and their fear.
I don't organize around liberals I organize around heavy radicals. The BPP represent the foremost revolutionary communist organization in American history. Their much-slandered reputation today is a testament to the very real danger they posed to the US state. We are talking about an organization run not by "thugs and rapists" but by educated radicals (most of the famous Panthers were college-educated; Newton had a Phd. in Political Science ffs) with a political consciousness 100% in tune with their times. They provided aid to the poor not just in the form of legal aid but in medicine, education, and food, all supplied to poor communities (White, Black, and Latino!) for free. They organized community defense and patrols to displace racist police forces and police their own communities. They united across all barriers to form the beginnings of a united front riding on the heightened radicalism of the post-Civil Rights victories, the Vietnam War, and the chaos of 1968. Their inspiration was the Cultural Revolution. This is why they attracted the full attention of the US state and didn't let up on either the communist or the Afro-American community for two decades. So that now all you know of them is the slander spoon-fed to you by the white supremacists who laughed at their corpses and their fear.
BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
Baloney. Newton was raging killer. The fact that he was also intelligent and had, on occasion, some good ideas merely amplifies the tragedy of his self-destructive life. He organized schools and such, for sure, but he also embezzled the school funds to fuel his drug addiction. In the end, he died bleeding out the street after coming out of a crack house in a neighborhood he once tried to help. In the end, the big bad government didn't take Newton down, his own self-indulgence did the job.
Newton and the Black Panthers lacked the balls to engage in meaningful nonviolent activism. They couldn't go the distance and petered out into a fractious band of hooligans.
Being a fringe group or otherwise plebian/underground does not make you less of a murderous ring if you commit such acts. Prior to their rise to power, the nazi party were just that, another extreme group fighting other extreme groups for dominance. Far left isn't better than far right, and they both are greatly used by the powers of the day to further cause pseudo-dilemmas and division.
Most of their members would likely fit just fine in the supposedly other end of the scale they are hateful of.
Most of their members would likely fit just fine in the supposedly other end of the scale they are hateful of.
Hm. That's much more consistent, but I very much disagree with the metaphor of an occupying army - not least because it justifies, and outright calls for, the indiscriminate killing of police officers. It's an oversimplification: some of them are racist, classist and whatever you want to say, and enough of those, in one place, can make the whole organisation into a means of oppression. However, most police officers are not: most are decent people, who give up their comfort and risk their safety on a regular basis for precisely the people you say they oppress. Where the police have acted outside the law - which enshrines, by the way, that they should not act like an army of occupation - they should be dealt with, but also remembered as exceptions, as anything other than what their institution is designed to be. These people are not fair game in some great war between the classes.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
FWIW it's not my term; it's a term that comes from the Ghettoes themselves, since before the Civil Rights Movement even began. The satisfaction of immediate political rights in 64-65 is what prompted the radicalization of the movement to confront social equality; thus the Watts Riot, the BPP, and Black Power.
Personally I think it's accurate. The way the police behave in Black, Latino, and Native American districts and neighborhoods is parallel to how, for example, the IDF behaves in the West Bank. Where poverty is racialized, there are two concerns for the police: the protection of "the law," which means above all the protection of property (and who has the property?), and their other concern is the keeping of the peace. That means quieting any people upset about the law protecting the propertied. If you're not white, it makes you suspect in a situation like this. And there are two Laws being upheld: the law for the whites, and the law for everyone else. Punishment for the police for breaking the former is much, much worse than the latter, where police can kill with basic impunity, treat people like animals, rape them and beat them, and always excuse it because they "felt threatened by him/her." This situation has not changed in the past 50 years.
You're pushing things together that are totally different orders of magnitude. The rate at which black people are unfairly accused of crimes, still less killed by police officers, is dramatically lower than that at which Palestinian civilians are killed by Israeli soldiers. The NYPD (as far as I know) have never responded to gunfire by calling artillery. The vast majority of interactions between police and black, Latino and Native American people involve the police acting in the interests of some of those groups: responding to, or preventing, crimes against them. I agree with you that the police, particularly the American police, have a problem with racism. I disagree that this justifies killing them.
On the same token, I'm not sure that 'it's worth' very much: when you say something, you take ownership of it, even if you weren't the first to say it. As you said earlier, a person's precise intentions when using the word 'thug' have to be read alongside how that word has taken meaning from being used by other people.
On the same token, I'm not sure that 'it's worth' very much: when you say something, you take ownership of it, even if you weren't the first to say it. As you said earlier, a person's precise intentions when using the word 'thug' have to be read alongside how that word has taken meaning from being used by other people.
Manfred Belheim
Moaner Lisa
- Joined
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- Messages
- 8,656
To not only assume but INSIST that anyone who uses the phrase "degenerate thugs" is quoting Nazi racial theory and is therefore a "white supremacist" is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order. It must have got through to you by now that the majority of people do not use the unusual definitions and jargon that you use, so to insist that they are not only using language "incorrectly", but are KNOWINGLY espousing the opinions you would be espousing if you used those words, can only be a deliberate act of beligerence on your part. What an absolutely disgusting attempt to derail the conversation yet again. I really don't know why people seem to let you get away with it so often instead of just dismissing your ludicrous insinuations and insults out of hand. You should be ashamed frankly.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
No, "the degenerate races" is a pretty par-for-the-course term of white supremacy, adopted from the same social darwinism used to justify European imperialism, and both American and Nazi racial hierarchies. Your ignorance of that fact is not my fault.
Ok maybe I'm missing the context of who said "degenerate thugs" here. If we're talking just anyone who uses that phrase I don't think it's automatically racist. People can use the term degenerate when not taking about race and also thug.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Yes the IDF is more brutal, because Israel's situation is more dire; but that doesn't change the fact that it's still the same relationship: an occupying army that has its way with its subjects. If you knew how American police behave in communities of color you wouldn't dispute this.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820/why-did-we-forget-the-move-bombing
http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/davis.html
Like hell. "For their own good" is some White Man's Burden horsecrap. Police kill Black people at a higher rate today than they were lynched during Jim Crow. Again, an ounce of research into this phenomenon would demonstrate that.
I pointed out that I wasn't the one who coined the term because it's a favorite past-time of this forum to pretend that radical or different ideas are all the unique creation of the person voicing them, and it's extremely common to resort to the mental abuse tactic of "it's all in your head" in trying to dispute it.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Then maybe you should go back and look at the context. When referring to someone of a race subjugated by racism, if you call them "degenerates" then you're saying that they're less-evolved beings than "normal, fully-evolved beings," aka White People, are.
The context is going to vary depending on who said it under what circumstances. It's not always about race.
If we're going to split hairs, degenerate strictly refers to something that has become other than its kind: rather than less-evolved beings, who were never 'proper' people to begin with, it better fits someone who has, through their actions, lost the right to be considered human. It works best with a natural assumption that all people are born equal, but do not stay that way.
Ryika
Lazy Wannabe Artista
- Joined
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A thug ("a violent person, especially a criminal.") is by definition a degenerate ("Having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline.") person. Don't see how that's supposed to be racist just because that thug happens to be black; seems to be a nonsensical argument to me.
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