Revisiting Why don’t black lives matter?

by philg

A post from 2016, “Why don’t black lives matter?”:

I wonder if the U.S. is now simply too populated and government too centralized for us to be confident that Citizen A will care about Citizen B. As there are people suffering badly in other parts of the world and most of us don’t do much to help them it is clear that human sympathy cannot stretch to a population of 7+ billion. Thus why should we expect sympathy to stretch to 324 million (popclock)?

(in 2020, the numbers are 7.65 billion and 330 million)

Even the Black Lives Matter leaders don’t seem to care specifically about American black lives. The Guardian reports that the group is working on behalf of Palestinians (who might be surprised to learn of their “blackness”!).

Readers: What do we think? Is the U.S. population now just too large for people to genuinely care about fellow residents in the abstract?

22 thoughts on “Revisiting Why don’t black lives matter?”

  1. Quite the opposite. This has become not just a global movement but a nationwide effort particularly among “ordinary” Americans. Also, the conservative movement in this country is completely vanquished, and the Republican party has been blown to smithereens. BLM has learned all the lessons Mansbridge talked about after the failure of the ERA and many more. Your own schoolteachers in Lincoln will attest to their ongoing and permanent devotion to it, as will every school and university in this country, legislators in Washington taking a knee, sports stars taking a knee. Unstoppable. And it isn’t going to fizzle out, because most of the things that are providing the context for the movement are going exacerbate in the coming months, not diminish.

    • Also, it’s not in the abstract any longer. The internet has made everyone a direct participant and a witness, and every aspect of it is available to virtually everyone at close to zero marginal cost. During the ERA years, direct mail was a huge boon to the movement because automated data processing and carrier route sorting allowed activists to send mailers and postcards to large numbers of people (Mansbridge talks about this in the preface to her book). But even that entailed the printing costs, the postage costs, etc. Now, everyone with a phone or sitting at home can watch the burned-to-the-ground Wendy’s security camera footage of the police shooting a black man in the back as he runs away from the officers trying to arrest him. The YouTube version alone has been viewed almost a million times, and it’s been seen many more million times on Twitter and elsewhere. Cost = 0. The country may be large, but the internet is larger, and you can establish and sustain a movement like BLM much less expensively now.

      So in every school that eventually reopens, social studies teachers will be able to teach BLM with the security camera footage in their classrooms. They can assign watching it to students at home. And it’s going to be repeated for every other incident that occurs in the coming months on every televised news outlet.

    • Here’s all 43 minutes of Axon body camera footage. This isn’t in the abstract any more, it’s right there on YouTube!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhdpG2XzRXQ

      In 1982, when the deadline for ratifying the ERA expired, to have people watch a videotape supporting your cause you needed a lot of videotapes, VHS players, TVs and places to show them, etc. Say you wanted to present a half hour of disturbing video showing men discriminating against women. First you had to spend $thousands to tape it, then all the reproduction costs, editing, sending mailers out to tell people to come to an event, setting up the event, then it rains, you have to postpone the event, etc., etc. That’s all gone now. C’mon Philip – you testified in Congress about the (audio) Tape Tax, you know the economics of this stuff! 🙂

      https://philip.greenspun.com/politics/senate-testimony.text

  2. How about the bigger question has the US and world population gotten too large? It just seems harder these days to function in everyday life without a lot of wasted time.

    Many things are getting automated these days to handle the higher population. Yet these tend to effect social isolation, maybe to the detriment of knowing each other and helping to change our biases toward each other.

  3. The issue is probably not the quantity of people in America but that belief in that culture is no longer taught and in fact denigrated. Couple that with about 55 million Americans who are not native born and come from very different cultures & they do have not been integrated into a common culture. So then what binds the citizens together?

    • Revolution!

      https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/a-reading-list-on-issues-of-race/

      “This revolution we’re seeing right now is being taken up all over the country, by black people, people of color comrades, white allies, anti-racists, and new dissidents who are protesting a certain kind of ethics.” — TODNE THOMAS

      Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School
      Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

      You’re either part of the revolution or you’re a racist who will be swept aside by the revolution.

  4. Finally, your quote from “On Being the Right Size” is excellent — for 1956. I don’t think it applies any longer to mass popular movements of this kind. There is no bureaucracy or “clogging” of the communication networks in a link to a YouTube video or a website. Everything is now peer-to-peer, at least at the level of awareness and exposure to relevant information. We have direct democracy in that sense. We also have mob rule, flash mobs, realtime coordination among protestors who want to frustrate the police, and cancel culture. We’re living in a science fiction movie.

    It is going to have an effect on policing, and I don’t think the Atlanta shooting was racially motivated. I think that particular cop would have shot just about anyone who turned and fired a taser back at him the way it went down. Everything was OK up until the moment they tried to arrest him. He panicked when he realized he couldn’t talk his way out of it and was going to jail on the DUI. Then in the struggle with those cops, everyone’s adrenaline took over. He was drunk, he took the taser, they were super pissed off, they just had their prisoner break away and run, and then he made the fatal misjudgment to turn back at them and fire the taser. Everything is on internet video now, and that’s going to be the norm, not the exception.

    As someone who has been arrested (a long, long, long time ago) in a situation where the police were getting a little “impatient”, I can offer the following advice: if the cops tell you to put your hands behind your back, don’t resist, even verbally. Now is not the time for arguments. Nothing you say or do can help you except compliance. I got a little wise with a couple of cops once (“I know my rights!!” heh) in a late night encounter and got slammed into the side of a police cruiser by two officers who weighed approximately 400 pounds combined. It hurt. A lot. Instant compliance from that point on, because I knew that if I tried anything else there was more pain on the way. And I’m about as white as you can get, so were they. Once things transition from Q&A to telling you to put your hands behind your back, the next steps you take could mean not seeing the sun again. At that point the police have decided to take you into custody, and you are going to GO, one way or the other. I know the cop was wrong to shoot him, but they couldn’t let him get back and the car and drive away, either. He was obviously terrified of being taken into custody. I wasn’t so afraid of that, I was just young and angry that it was happening, but at least I had the sense to realize things were going downhill fast and I shouldn’t push them.

    And I don’t think the police should be disarmed or disbanded!

  5. I am sorry but the American modern police work approach is to be more deadly and meaner than the locals and local gang members. The whole strategy is to scare everyone so they obey. We are becoming a police state where everyone is now afraid to talk to the police. This approach started in about 1980 with President Reagan’s crack down on drugs and gangs and asking the police to out gun everyone. They started training to bully suspects instead of talking to him/her. They started putting people in prison for silly small offenses. They started to carry large caliber weapons and began hitting or shooting first in many situations. They started practice monthly how to shoot people and maintain fire arms proficiency. How often did they train to talk to people and defuse situations?

    How many times have we seen a cop holding a suspect (white or black or brown) when a second/third cop runs up and hits or kicks the downed person? Or a cop chasing someone and shooting him from 20-40 feet when the guy was just running away? And later we find out the person was unarmed or MAYBE a suspect for some small crime. Why is it so important to shoot people and stop them immediately??????

    When I was young cops did not carry tasers or big pistols or attack weapons in the trunk. They did not shoot almost anyone. Ever. Yes they did beat up some crooks but not many. Those COPS made a point of talking to people of all kinds and letting dumb stupid mistakes slide a little before arresting people and shooting people. They only wanted to put real hardened crooks in jail. They were mostly beat cops who knew their locals. They had empathy and morals.

    • Bill –
      How do police catch criminals if they’re not allowed to shoot if the suspect is running away to avoid arrest? Try to talk them out of running away?

    • @Sam:

      The issues around use of deadly force are relatively clear in law, and there’s a lot of precedent. There’s a good guide available for the layman, it’s a little dated, but Massad Ayoob’s treatment is better than most. It will get you started. First, they outnumbered him. Second, he was running away. Even the taser being fired didn’t justify shooting him. The taser shot also missed the cop. In that situation, you call for backup and you pursue the suspect, you don’t draw your service weapon and smoke the guy.

      They knew who he was. They had his ID, and his car. He’s wasn’t going to get away. Not a justified shooting.

    • @Bill: I can say as an informed observer that there are police officers out there who do not know or understand the law regarding the use of deadly force *themselves*. Then they find themselves in a bad situation with a resistant suspect, someone drunk or high, and it’s a bad, bad scene. It’s either inadequate training or willful disregard, they think they will be protected somehow, and yeah, there are cops out there who have never even watched one of Ayoob’s videos or been otherwise adequately trained.

      I still believe that 90% of these incidents could be stopped cold if more cops spent the time getting good, current training on the use of deadly force.

    • Alex-
      “He was running away” then “he wasn’t going to get away.” “They outnumbered him.”

      How does he not get away if he can run faster than the officer? What if he can run faster than the backup officers, too? Is the answer to keep letting him run away until he gets tired and can’t run fast anymore? Or wait until later when maybe the officers will be faster or have a better angle of attack?

  6. Sam,
    A couple of rounds in the air? LETHAL force as an opener is literally overkill. And if the perp in this case runs away, they have his car and his license, they can pick him up at home.
    The UK has a reasonable police approach; beat cops are unarmed and everybody knows it. If you get violent, armed police will eventually get you. I’m not enamored of surveillance-everywhere, and not sure the model works among hundreds of millions of guns.

    • @philg: And if you doubt that, put aside for the moment the fact that Britain is an almost complete surveillance society and realize that Brexit still has not occurred – and probably cannot without the assistance of Merkel and Germany – despite having been voted for in two national elections by the majority of the British people.

      Merkel is apparently “Britian’s best hope” because she ***chooses to believe*** those votes were a legitimate expression of the will of the British people, as opposed to everyone else who just doesn’t care:

      https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/16/brexit-deals-last-hope-germany-325153

      “Angela Merkel has historically shown herself to be a pragmatist and less doctrinaire than, for example, [French President Emmanuel] Macron,”

      In other words, if Macron was running things, people in Britain could vote all they wanted and it wouldn’t matter.

      “If Prime Minister Boris Johnson is most likely to trust a foreign head of government, it is Merkel. She has always respected the vote of the British people, even if she thinks it is wrong,”

      In other words, Merkel is one of the few people who actually think that people’s votes in Britain actually mean anything at all!

      Everything in this world is going to be this way, from now on. The only freedoms you have are the ones the government allows you to have, in every sphere of human life.

      And you know this. You’re a lucky man: your an MIT educated engineer who runs his own server and website. If you tried to publish this blog anywhere else right now, you’d be deplatformed and silenced. I’m surprised you haven’t been already, even running your own shop here. The doors of the cage are swinging shut, and for the last time.

    • @the other Donald:

      >I’m not enamored of surveillance-everywhere, and not sure the model works among hundreds of millions of guns.

      That’s why they will be taken away. Piece by piece, bit by bit, state by state and town by town if necessary, and then house to house. The people who own them are going to continue to become criminals, caught in a tighter and tigher noose until everyone who doesn’t comply is a criminal, and then they will all be rounded up or surrender.

      When the Supreme Court decided to deny certiorari on all 10 cases before it recently, it signaled unequivocally that it was going to allow the 2nd Amendment to continue to be killed off, and it will be.

  7. Philip: In the United States, I would suspect that the legacy of slavery, and ongoing segregation between white and black neighborhoods, is also a major issue. See this discussion of Trounstine’s “Segregation by Design.” https://urbanaffairsreview.com/2019/06/24/segregation-by-design/

    In Canada, schools are funded at the provincial level, from provincial taxes. In the US, they’re typically funded from local taxes, and so wealthier neighborhoods have much better schools than poorer neighborhoods. Following Trounstine’s analysis, one reason for this is that poorer neighborhoods are more likely to be black, and wealthier neighborhoods are more likely to be white. The same applies to a whole range of local services, like roads, sewers, and policing: segregation reinforces inequality through inequality in provision of services. Libertarianism takes this even further, idealizing purchase of services at the household level. https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-dead-end-of-small-government/

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