>>8674619Riots by visible minorities have occurred because every peaceful path, from legislation to legal action basically failed. Black Americans have been trying for hundreds of years now to carve out equality for themselves, but even with movements like Civil Rights, which was supposed to put an end to the bullshit, things still slid back. It was getting marginally better over time up until the end of the 90s, when an anti-PC and – more or less – xenophobic trend crept back into American politics, manipulating the Republican party even further into an ultra-conservative white "normalcy" party. That's when you see the police brutalities start to escalate against black Americans. Yes, it always kind of existed in the background, but there was some evidence of shit getting better. Then it all kind of backslid at once. Calls for legislation had fallen on deaf ears, legal action was being treated unequally by the courts, and officers weren't being held accountable.
Guess what happens when the system fails you? You get mad as hell. Sometimes poor, really down-on-their-luck white people understand that, but even then the default is that white society has more built in systems to help white people in those situations. That's somewhat natural because white folks created those systems on the back of non-white labour (and some "less white" labour, like "ethnic" Spanish and Italians, and, at one time, the Irish). The systems default to helping people who fit white normalcy better, intentionally or otherwise, because of that.
So yeah. Backed into a corner, when the cops are killing your sons and daughters, when the judges won't listen, when the law isn't being applied equally to help you, what would you do? Lay down and fucking take it? "Behave" like people keep saying and hope it gets better when it's visibly not? Come the fuck on.
I get what Morgan Freeman is saying, and yes, black history should be taught as normal history, but you can't just not talk about racism.
