Sunday Funnies

How to avoid being a jackass about Ferguson

Allan Uthman, in full.

One unpleasant side effect of the unrest in Ferguson MO, and now spreading across the country, is that a lot of white people are making giant asses of themselves on social media. Amazingly, none of them are racist, as they will tell you, but that’s how they’re coming across for some reason. For these people and those poor souls who care for them, here are a few pointers on how to avoid being a huge jackass. You’re welcome, America! Let’s start with an easy one:

• If you find yourself using the word “animals” in a non-zoological context, try punching yourself in the face repeatedly until the impulse subsides.

• If you think it makes sense to judge an entire community or race based on what a few people have done, please turn yourself in for your part in whatever recent crimes white people committed in your area.

• If you feel a desire to blame the media for the simple act of covering the story, because if they didn’t, then people wouldn’t be mad, because they wouldn’t know what happened, try to understand that this makes you a proponent of censorship and that if anyone needs to shut the hell up it’s you.

• If you find yourself repeating the details of the accused murderer’s story as if it were the definitive version of the events in question, you are probably stupid. Try to keep this in mind. Even racists know enough not to trust any random white guy with a clear motivation to lie.

• If you think this was an acquittal based on a thorough examination of evidence, please make an attempt to learn what a grand jury does and how it is not a trial. Also look up how many grand juries don’t indict. Never mind; I’ll tell you: like, none. Seriously, 11 out of 162,000.

• If you found Officer Wilson’s statement that he “felt like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan” compelling, consider that Wilson is Brown’s height, nearly his weight, and that he is a goddamn trained police officer, and that you were subconsciously wondering why he didn’t just say “gorilla.”

• If you’re tempted to wonder aloud why the media didn’t cover some other shooting in which the victim was white and the assailant black, stop for a moment and remember that the shooter WAS NOT A COP and there is therefore no equivalence. Also, please don’t mention that whites didn’t riot over the OJ Simpson verdict, because OJ Simpson is arguably the first black guy who ever got away with murder and again, there is no equivalence there, you idiot. Then also try to recognize that it is you who is putting the situation in terms of race and only race. Then shut up.

• If you were led to believe erroneous reports that wildly exaggerated Officer Wilson’s injuries, and yet still rely on the same sources of information that just lied to you, you need to acknowledge that you’re not primarily interested in the truth. But then again, why would you start being honest with yourself now?

Prosecutorial misconduct certainly; most likely corruption.  A police officer without the courage or even the decency necessary for the job, now a millionaire as a result of his fame in conservative circles.  There's more than enough wrong with this fresh stain on America's moral conscience to last for a generation.

But we know it's just going to keep on happening.  Until they can be convinced to stop it.

What do you suppose it will take to do that?

Turkey Toons

The death throes of white privilege

"This country values property rights over people."

And it begins not with black rage against cops, but white rage against progress.

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

The post-Civil War period, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s, the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency.  Everyone thought this nation would improve after those things happened, but they didn't; things got worse instead.  And everybody knows why that is.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14 years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

A friend of mine wrote this.

"America is witnessing the death throes of white privilege. It's not going to be pretty -- it's been the operating principle of this continent for four centuries. The indigenous people and the imported labor and their descendants have been exceedingly polite up to this point, considering what they've endured. To my fellow Caucasians, I suggest you don't try to rub it in."