The Radical Centrist™

Think for Yourself!

Race

Symbols

By 1 Comment

The “OK” hand gesture is among 36 new entries in the Anti-Defamation League’s “Hate on Display” database.

radcen is tragically unhip, at times, but the story you are about to read is true.

The Incident

About three months ago my wife and I were visiting friends and relatives in another state.  I was out by myself for the morning and was hungry so I stopped in a fast food drive-thru for some lunch.  The line was long and slow, apparently one car had a huge order and it hung everything up.  I finally got to the window, paid, and was given my drink.  The person working working the window was a young black gentleman.  Usually that’s completely irrelevant and I would not mention it, but for this story it is central to the issue.

Anyway, he was friendly, and I was about to be fed so I was in a good mood, so we chatted for a couple moments and everything was fine.  I was taking a drink of my soda and could not respond verbally when at one point he apologized for the wait and said the fries would be done shortly.  And here’s where it all went awry…

I inadvertently flashed him the “white supremacy” hand symbol… only I didn’t.  What I flashed him was the benign “a-ok” symbol.  The young man’s face and demeanor changed immediately and once I saw that I realized what he was probably thinking… and I became angry.  Very angry.

A Little Background

I went back to my hotel room and did a little research.  I had known the a-ok symbol had been co-opted by white supremacists, but it wasn’t on my mind this day.  To me I still think of it as “a-ok”.  In my research I checked several sources, but the Wikipedia page seemed the best in condensing it into a single place.  I also learned a few things I did not know.

  • The symbol is known pretty much the world over.  Sounds logical.
  • The symbol has a wide variety of meanings depending on what country and/or culture is using it.  In some places it can be either good or bad.  Ok, I can buy that.
  • I did know this, but wanted confirmation in my mind:  In the US the a-ok symbol had been co-opted by white supremacists in 2017, so that’s relatively recent.

How do you just take over something as common and well known and established as a hand gesture?  Well, apparently you just decide to, then do it, and everybody on both sides follows along.  That’s all I can figure here.  I’ll admit I am still shocked how easy this was to do.

Back to The Incident

So I flash the young man the “a-ok” symbol, thinking, “we’re good”.  He saw something else, and not unreasonably.  I had known the alternate meaning for about a year, but it’s generally not on my radar and it wasn’t on that day.  My anger was palpable.  Not at the young man, he was fine.  Not at me, I had no insidious intent, though I felt duped into inadvertently supporting people and values I do not support or agree with.  I was angry at two groups of people… 1, primarily) the assholes who have done this and in their own small way made society even worse and troubled than it already is, and 2) the rest of society who have so weakly accepted it, effectively endorsing it.

So here we are, and I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to apologize and explain myself and my innocent intent to the young man, but judging from his new demeanor it seemed it would be a hollow gesture and a waste of time.  The damage had been done, and he had turned away.  It bothered me the rest of the day… and I have often thought about it since (that’s why I’m up at 4am writing this, my mind was racing about it again).

Can Anything Be Done?

In reading a Los Angeles Times editorial ( Editorial: It’s not OK to let white supremacists take over the OK hand signal ) I found suggests we fight back, we take the a-ok symbol back.  And that’s what I want to do, take it back, reclaim it from these a-holes.

“…many people unknowingly make offending gestures; it’s hard to keep up”

~from the LA Times link above.

But can we reclaim it?  If you read the link it’s already become almost ubiquitous, accepted.  Too many a-holes use it for their insidious purposes and too many “woke” people just sit back and treat it as such and act self-righteously indignant whether the person’s intent was good, bad, or innocent.  There is no discussion, it’s assumed the intent was bad.  And all because some repugnant schmuck(s) decided to make it so.

I could purposely continue to flash the a-ok symbol, but that would cause a lot of unnecessary anguish and misunderstanding.  As much as I like and *want* the LA Times’ point to be valid and work, I’m not seeing it happening at this point.  In four short years it’s already become too ingrained in our collective psyche.  I could switch to a “thumbs up”.  That’s still acceptable, I think.  I could do nothing and let the pricks of the world have their way, again.  We always seem to default back to that last option.  I’m failing to come up with a viable effective option to reclaim the hand sign.  It’s done.

The Importance of it All

I know people, friends even, who will read this and think I’m making it all about me… how I am affected by it… over anything else.  They’ll even whip the “p-word” on me to justify their conclusion.  Way to miss the point.  I’m only a bit player in this.

And yes, it does annoy me, but not so much in those ways.  What I am really concerned about is people like this young man.  Was he threatened by this?  No, not right then, right there, directly.  Nobody was going to jump through the drive-thru window and slaughter the crew… well, probably not, things like do happen on occasion.  But he would be justified in interpreting it as a veiled threat, kind of a “You better watch out, we’re coming for you and will get you eventually.”, kind of thing.  He didn’t know me, I’m just some random white guy at the window.  That’s some serious shit, and is something he has to think about every day.  It’s real and it’s dark and it’s poisonous.  That’s how small things like this event over a maliciously appropriated innocent hand gesture runs deeper into our entire society.

Additional Resources

The ‘OK’ Hand Gesture Is Now Listed As A Symbol Of Hate – NPR

How did the OK sign become a symbol of white supremacy? – Independent

OK hand sign added to list of hate symbols – BBC

OK sign is under siege: How the squeaky-clean hand gesture was twisted by trolls and acquired racist undertones – Chicago Tribune (This one is especially interesting.)

SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles – NBC 7 San Diego

Who’s Doing All the Shooting?

By Leave a Comment

Inaccurate

When I first saw this meme on Facebook the person it was shared from added the caption, “Notice anything?” Sure, I notice most of them look crazy. Oh, and a lack of diversity. That’s it… they’re all white. Huh. Imagine that. That’s certainly incriminating, isn’t it?

Or is it? Is it accurate? Or, is it a lie, or at least a lie-by-omission? What was the person who created the meme trying to convey?

I saw this on Facebook and immediately thought, “There has to more to this. This must be wrong. It’s too easy, too simple.”, but didn’t think too much about it other than I could remember a few high-profile cases where minorities were mass shooters. What a rabbit hole this turned into.

Maybe the meme maker was trying to say the vast majority (if not all) of mass shootings and unnecessary violence are at the hands of white people… which let’s other races and ethnicities off-the-hook. But is that true? Let’s take a look and dig a little deeper.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation the 2018 population demographics of the United States fell thusly…

  • White: 60%
  • Hispanic: 18%
  • Black: 12%
  • Asian: 6%
  • Remaining: 4%

This is important because the above meme suggests at first glance these crimes are almost wholly white-initiated. Let’s dig deeper, still…

On-going Mother Jones research proves conclusively race is NOT a factor regarding who does mass shootings. In fact, if anything, they’re all pretty much spot on with the overall population demographics. Blacks are a bit high, whites are a bit llight, Asians are almost exact. If any group is noticeably less, it’s Hispanics.

This graph, which draws from the Mother Jones research, is a great visual (from #2 below)…

Kinda sums it up.  The breakdown is virtually identical.

Closer to the Truth

So, why would a person make the original meme? I believe to purposely mislead others and promote a desired narrative, in spite of it not being true. It was outright cherry-picking. I mean, if you were randomly picking mass shooters out of a list what are the odds all sixteen examples would come out white when the truth is barely over half that? And save the, “These are the worst of the worst.” argument, this person missed VA Tech, San Bernadino, Orlando, and others of the higher body count shootings. But hey, truth is subjective anyway, right?

Why would a person distribute this meme (presumably without fact-checking)? Two words: Conformation bias. It’s what you’ve been told by other like-minded people you respect, and it’s what you want to believe.  In this case it doesn’t help it’s also the mantra the mainstream media has led us to believe, it’s what they’ve been suggesting, also, to the exclusion of pretty much any other option.

Here’s what a closer at what a more truthful and accurate meme might look like (I couldn’t find a Hispanic shooter image, sorry)…

The bottom line remains: The… original… meme… is… not… true.

Additional Sources:

  1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/oct/06/newsweek/are-white-males-responsible-more-mass-shootings-an/
  2. https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-08-07/mass-shootings-arent-growing-more-common-and-evidence-contradicts-common

George Floyd: Ok, now what?

By 1 Comment

For something like eleven days now there have been protests and there have been “protests”*.  All over the country and in many places around the world.  Call me unsympathetic, but I’m kinda thinking any point that Floyd’s murder was racially biased and wrong has been made.  Now what?  It’s time to move to Step 2.

Things need to change, in people’s attitudes and actions and in law enforcement.  What are we going to do about it?  There are several option, some of which can run parallel, but has anyone even thought about it?

Option 1 – Police Reform

That’s been done before.  New programs, retraining, all that jazz.  Makes great headlines, but you have to change attitudes within law enforcement (LE) before police will actually follow them.

Option 2 – Public Re-education

What I mean by this is changing people’s attitudes on race across the board.  Everyone, police and citizens.  And police are really just citizens with LE jobs.  In an ideal world this is the best and correct path to take, but I personally never see it getting off the ground if for no other reason no one would ever agree on how to do it.  It would just be another example of bureaucratic infighting with a big budget.

Option 3 – Legal Reform

There are many… and I mean MANY… legal reforms that need changing, and the most significant one would be eliminating “qualified immunity” where police and other government agents pretty much have a ‘get out of jail free’ card for almost anything they do.  (Let’s not forget that Floyd’s murder would be rationalized and dismissed without the light of video.)

Where do we go from here?

I strongly suggest Option 3, at least.  Wayward police need to be held accountable for their actions, and with the real possibility of serious consequences many cops will choose to not step out of line.  It doesn’t eliminate the threat, and it doesn’t do anything regarding people’s inner attitudes, but it helps.

But how to do this?  It would require tenacious organization, dedication, time, and money… because lobbying would be involved.  And who are you going to lobby?  The lawmakers that have been in power for decades and have created and/or tolerated that laws that brought us here?  Phffft!  No, we’re also going to need a massive change in lawmaking leadership.

Regardless what is done… if anything is done, we’ve had protests and “protests” before and nothing ever changed, no one wanted to actually do the work… after people have satisfied their need for protest, serious work will need to be done.  Where does it start?  Who is going to start it?

*- “Protests” are rioting and/or looting under the guise of protesting.

How do you prioritize your outrage? It’s not always obvious.

By 2 Comments

Doh!  Another unpopular opinion.  It’s really easy to get lulled into a false sense of comfort when most of our friends and/or social media contacts are like-minded people and will agree with pretty much everything we say.  We’re simpatico, ya know, we think in lock-step.  And we’re individually intelligent people, we think these things through, and we sincerely believe we have come to the best conclusion, right?

But do we always come to the best conclusion?  Sorry to say, no we don’t.  Quite often, too often, we let emotion get in the way.  Take the graphic here, which has been seen in various forms all over social media of late, since George Floyd was murdered.  “If you are more upset seeing looting than you are by seeing a black man murdered, you are part of the problem.”  Long story short, you have been shamed by the person who posted this because you don’t prioritize tragic events the same way they do… and their conclusion is correct, of course.

They say the murder of the black man is tragic and important… and guess what, they are correct.  It IS tragic.  It never should have happened.  The man’s life was important.  There are multitudes of reason why this happened, from systemic racism to utter failings of the justice system that allows police to do this with usual impunity (qualified immunity), and many other reasons in between.  No debate from me.

The next part is comparing it to looting and rioting, which to be fair many people have condemned, including myself.  The implication here is that property is not as important as people’s lives, property can be rebuild and replaced.  Again, agree.  No debate from me… as far as that goes, but it’s incomplete.

It’s either lying-by-omission or intellectual dishonesty, or some (probably subconscious) combination of the two.  You want to talk the importance of people?  Let’s talk the importance of people, minorities, poor people, yes let’s talk about them and how looting and/or rioting affects them.

  1. When businesses burn, people who NEED these jobs for survival and to feed their families are now suddenly unemployed.  Any government safety net or charity will pale in comparison.
  2. Large corporations will usually rebuild reasonably quickly, but it will still be probably six months minimum.  That’s a huge burden to the employees.  You know, the poor people and minorities you claim to care so much about.
  3. How about “mom and pop” businesses.  There’s no guarantee they will rebuild at all.  If they can, insurance issues may take a year or more.  Mom and Pop will be out of an income in the mean time, as will what few employees they have.  And if they can’t work it out, everyone loses their livelihood permanently.
  4. More deaths.  I don’t have a source because all the numbers I’ve read vary, but as of this writing I have read between 11 and 17 people have died as a direct result of the rioting/looting.  (I suspect those are split between citizens and police.)  Are those people not important?  Equally important as George Floyd?  Less important?  You tell me.  You made the claim.
  5. Don’t forget people’s lives disrupted by injury, who now… if they still even have a job… might lose their job and/or have serious medical bill to face.

Stop.  Think to the logical conclusion.  It’s not that simple.

And spare me the outright lies that change has never been achieved without violence.  Some significant examples of successful peaceful protect include the Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913, the Medals Heard Round the World, the Singing Revolution, the Conflict of Orders, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, all of which can be read in 5 Times Peaceful Protests Made a Difference in History.  You could also mention the Salt March, the Delano Grape Boycott, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and so on.  There’s plenty of examples.

Peaceful protest will not bring change tomorrow, and that’s not emotionally satisfying, but neither will violent protest.

Police Brutality: A Possibly Effective Solution

By Leave a Comment

Recap:  There was another incident of a cop killing a black man, this time in Minneapolis.  The victim was George Floyd.  While Floyd was on the handcuffed on the ground the cop, using his knee, pressed his neck into the ground for something like 7 minutes, blocking air flow and eventually causing death.  This blog post is not about this case specifically, but this case prompted my to write this.  I’ve been seeing people all over social media shouting everything from anarchists to people (looters) just wanting free stuff to organized ‘white supremacy’ to some non-thinking bonehead claiming it is George Soros wanting to hurt President Trump’s chances for re-election (seriously, where the fuck did that come from?).  No, this is a general article about the circumstances that allow incidents like this to happen continuously over and over and over again.

Racism is certainly a piece of the puzzle.  There’s more than one factor, absolutely, no question.  And racism might be the biggest piece.  Maybe.  But the other big piece of the puzzle is “qualified immunity”.

“…qualified immunity protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right.
-and-
“Qualified immunity is not immunity from having to pay money damages, but rather immunity from having to go through the costs of a trial at all.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_immunity

Problem is, it has become abused since its establishment in 1982 to the point it’s effectively an almost total immunity for any actions.  Police engage in these actions as if they have absolute immunity, because, well, in all practical reality they do.  It has historically been very rare for a police officer to be prosecuted, let alone convicted, unless public attention was so overwhelming the so-called justice system had no other choice.

You could almost call racism and immunity as “co-equal” primary influences on police brutality against minorities.  Face it, even most racists would think twice if they thought there would be serious consequences if caught, but would actually be encouraged if they thought there would be no consequences… as is the case with the current system.

Police act like laws don’t apply to them because of ‘qualified immunity.’ They’re right.

when Floyd’s family goes to court to hold the officers liable for their actions, a judge in Minnesota may very well dismiss their claims. Not because the officers didn’t do anything wrong, but because there isn’t a case from the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court specifically holding that it is unconstitutional for police to kneel on the neck of a handcuffed man for eight minutes until he loses consciousness and then dies.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/

Is that perverted, or what?  I’m sure there was no hidden insidious intent, but this is what happened anyway.

So, what can we do about it?

It helps that the Supreme Court may be reconsidering qualified immunity, but in my own humble opinion we should not hold our breath, given the recent artificial packing of the court by the Republicans, who tend to love stuff like this.

Peaceful protests do little, but they’re a start for awareness.

Looting is wholly counterproductive and only serves to hurt the neighborhood people left after the looters go home… which is usually far away.  And spare me the self-righteous defense of looting, just a month ago you were decrying the peaceful, but armed, protests at state capitols over masks (which was insanely dumb, but just shows an “us vs them” mentality).

It’s not a quick or emotionally satisfying process, but the only real solution is to get out there and vote… and by vote I mean vote SMART.  Educate yourself.  This is a result of the “tough on crime” mindset that has been so popular in the last 50 years.  “Tough on Crime” (ToC) has given us things like mandatory minimum sentences, police theft (civil asset forfeiture), and police qualified immunity… with said immunity turning the police themselves into criminals in their own way.

  • Vote out ALL your incumbent state and local politicians.  Yes, all of them, even if you like them or they’re your preferred party.  All of them.
  • Elect new politicians that are not beholden to LE and/or LE unions.
  • Elect politicians that do not play up ToC.  This may shock some people, but it is possible to be tough on crime without being “tough on crime”.  In other words, elect people who won’t make poorly conceived (yet popular) laws that cause more problems than they solve.

You can be tough on crime
without being “tough on crime”

Will this fix it?

Meh, probably not.  Why?  It would take time, people are impatient and/or have short memories.  Per step #1 people would be forced to vote against their beliefs, and that won’t happen, but I think it’s clear unless a cop has some type of meaningful consequences to fear, this stuff will continue unabated, regardless how outraged you get or how self-righteous you act or how much you try to enlighten them.  Get used to it.