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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe American Justice System Is Not Broken
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The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.
America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizensthe physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiersmight actually just be that they're more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that's OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.
Policing in America is not broken. The judicial system is not broken. American society is not broken. All are functioning perfectly, doing exactly what they have done since before some of this nation's most prosperous slave-murdering robber-barons came together to consecrate into statehood the mechanisms of their barbarism. Democracy functions. Politicians, deriving their legitimacy from the public, have discerned the will of the people and used it to design and enact policies that carry it out, among them those that govern the allowable levels of violence which state can visit upon citizen. Taken together with the myriad other indignities, thefts, and cruelties it visits upon black and brown people, and the work common white Americans do on its behalf by telling themselves bald fictions of some deep and true America of apple pies, Jesus, and people being neighborly to each other and betrayed by those few and nonrepresentative bad apples with their isolated acts of meanness, the public will demands and enables a whirring and efficient machine that does what it does for the benefit of those who own it. It processes black and brown bodies into white power.
That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it.
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-american-justice-system-is-not-broken-1666445407
Amen! That's exactly right. Thanks for the post!
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el_bryanto
(11,804 posts)malthaussen
(17,216 posts)I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that a lot of supposed grownups are living in a fantasy world. The innumerable headlines saying "Americans shocked that water is wet" are starting to convince me of this.
-- Mal
malaise
(269,158 posts)and Kent State should have been the final lesson for my generation - there the system showed white women and white men that they too would not be spared.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)MoonRiver
(36,926 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)America's first big industry was tobacco farming, done by slave labor.
One of the big causes of the Revolution is that settlers didn't like the Quebec Act banning settlement west of the Appalachians.
Also, slave-owners supported the revolution because the British said that they would free any slave who fled their masters to join the British army.
progressoid
(49,999 posts)TBF
(32,095 posts)really an extension of it. This is how the 1%er's want to run the country. And they always have (remember the voting if you were a white land owner, blacks were 3/5 of a person, women and children considered chattel). 238 years of this. The more things change the more they stay the same.
JEB
(4,748 posts)and our "preemptive" wars for profit. Working perfectly, exactly as designed. Bloody, brutal and remorseless as any empire that ever flourished across the face of the earth. I fear we are stuck with it until it collapses under its own weight.
og1
(51 posts)The problem with America is the Calvinists and their belief system all things are preordained it's Gods will! The Calvinists own the Republican Party. It is the Calvinists that promoted genocide of native Americans and they promoted slavery in the south and west and apartheid in South Africa. They are the cause of the lust of the neocons promoting destabilizing the world in order to set up gods kingdom on earth and they will stop at nothing to achieve this!
world wide wally
(21,755 posts)These "black people" stowed away on boats from Africa and entered this country illegally to begin with. Then they took our jobs and worked for less than minimum wage while we were lucky to find work just cracking the whip if we were lucky.
Then we gave them even more freedom out of the goodness of our hearts and virtually destroyed the cotton industry and the entire economy of the South in the process. They were given handouts for work they used to do for free.
Eventually, they moved to the North and once again took our jobs and even some of our neighborhoods up there too.
They practically took over the music industry and our professional sports. Thank God for hockey!
I don't know what these people expect after the way they have treated us po' white folk. They're lucky we haven't figured out how to deport them all.
I do hope you realize this is pure sarcasm.