----- Original Message ----- From: Stannard67 at aol.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2001 5:44 PM Subject: Re: cinncinati
>>In a message dated 4/12/01 6:00:25 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
>>noamish at home.com writes:
>>I'd say the resulting double standard is racist, but the individual police
>>officers who directly perform the actions that lead to these double
>>standards usually are not.
>The results of inquiries into police behavior in LA, NYC, Des Moines,
>Chicago, and most southern cities seem to answer this assertion.
Which results? (ie, please send me a reference or something)
>>A police officer may, off-duty, be a full-on social materialist and
realize
>>that blacks commit more crimes because of the parralellism of race and
>>class.
>What, exactly, are the odds of this? The odds that a materialist would
ever
>become a cop, or that a cop would ever become a materialist?
Slim (though not impossible). And that's the point. *Even* if he were a materialist off-duty, he would still have to act out his role as cop.
>>That doesn't mean that on duty he will treat a potential danger as
>>"the exploited." That's not his job. The very fact that blacks are the
>>exploited class makes them, from a police officer's standpoint, more
>>dangerous. One of the deeper hip-hop expressions goes "don't hate the
>>player, hate the game." Only by discussing and destroying the causes of
>>racial inequality can you eliminate this double standard.
>I have heard anarchists, trotskyists, and liberals debate this question in
>bars, meeting halls, and while running from the cops. The idea that we can
>divorce our feelings or strategies from the racist attitudes of cops is
>overly optimistic and ignores the fact that cops are taught a very specific
>ideology, in training and through cultural initiation. Even non-white cops
>are taught to be white supremacists.
I think that if you are a materialist who wants to change the world, you should at least make an honest effort to not make things personal. Sometimes I find that lacking among fellow radicals.
We don't like it when right-wingers say "well, that homeless guy over there can pick himself up by his bootstraps." I understand and accept human feelings of anger and frustration, but ultimately, getting mad at the cop is as futile as getting mad at the gun he fires. The gun inevitably performs its task, and so does the cop. If the "gun-cleaning fluid" of the day is racism, its important to know that, but we musn't over-exert our energies on the symptoms of the greater problem.