CompassionateRebel writes:
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>> CecilQ writes:
I have been at one event were a similar young black advocacy group appeared and, putting their ostensible purpose to the side, I found them repellent.
They were presumptuous, discourteous, loud and irrational, and implied repeatedly that the local police (who had arranged the community meeting for the purpose of community outreach) were guilty of crimes against blacks BECAUSE they were police ("just like" the Ferguson, Mo. police) [and in the absolute absence of evidence of any such behavior.]) Then, after about a fifteen-minute performance where their leader called out elliptical slogans (in between imputations that the local cops were guilty of murder and systematic brutalization of blacks) and his compatriots chanted responses, they all got up and left with the meeting not half over, without troubling to stay and attend on the comments of the rest of the assembly (as
WE had on
THEIRS.)
Demonstrations such as this are nothing more than stereotypical egomania in action. All they say is, "Hey! Look at me!", and their effect is to put off people who are sympathetic to blacks' feelings of oppression by the police and to turn others dead against them. If someone in the black community doesn't urge these boneheads to introspection, they may cost the Democrats the presidential election. The last thing that the Democrats need is large numbers of blacks behaving in a way that reinforces prejudicial stereotypes of black stupidity and rudeness.
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Last time anyone checked, stupidity and rudeness are not confined to any ethnic group. Ascribing a particular negative behavior to a minority group would be an error at best, racially bias at worst. All activist movements are by nature disruptive, hence the name activist. How conveniently we forget the white, old middle class "decent" folks members of the tea party movement up in arms disrupting every other congressional meeting to demand their country back. I shudder to think how would these honorable people have reacted if their children and neighbors had been executed without due process. I'm sure the niceties would have gone out the proverbial window. So, barring any double standards, the disruptions and protest of political, civil gatherings are as old as our democracy. Why condone one particular group and condemn the other?
It's a question of
realpolitik. If this behavior continues, the result will be the election of people who will
NOT be sympathetic to the interests of the demonstrators. Acting out may make the demonstrators feel good, but their behavior is pragmatically antithetical to their cause.
As an object lesson, look at the California. Until the Free Speech demonstrations of the '60s, the University of California master planned envisioned a college education for every graduating high school senior at a modest cost.
After the demonstrations, and the consequential election of Reagan as governor, the plan was scrapped and other anti-populist policies (e.g Prop. 13 that limited the property tax) destroyed the state school system entirely. Now California, which once graduated students at the top of the national percentiles, ranks 49th of 50 states in achievement tests scores of graduating high school seniors.
One might speculate what the state would be like today if the Free Speech demonstrators had just ****.