2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Dear white progressives: Stop telling black people how to vote [View all]calimary
(88,831 posts)Last edited Wed Jul 22, 2015, 06:40 PM - Edit history (2)
that word slipped out. Seems to me something like "race-nagging" is just cutting it WAY too close. Disrespectful. And rather reckless, seems to me. It's just such a big mistake to go there, or even hint around, being cute by half, about going there. Seems to me as though African Americans have plenty of reasons to object.
The one thing I try to do is to ATTEMPT to imagine how I'd feel in that situation. Granted, I'm white. Sandra Bland was black. But we're both women. So I've been watching all this newly released video of her encounter with that cop. And while I hear the conversation between them escalate, I keep wondering WHY he tailed her for so long, in the first place. She didn't use her blinker to signal - and she gets PULLED OVER??? Seriously???? She was not speeding. Not driving erratically as though she'd been drinking or something. Not cutting a pedestrian off mid-step or anything. Not running a red light or a stop sign. Do you know how many lane changes I see in ANY freeway trip around here on ANY day, where people don't signal first? Same thing for surface streets. AND there are cops around, too. So I kept coming back to wondering why he pulled her over to begin with, and why he began to escalate things? She sure didn't seem to be a threat to him. I'd be upset, too, if I'd been pulled over. I WAS, recently. And I had to talk to myself to keep cool about it before the officer even approached my car!
One word that's often applied to us women is "uppity." It's a VERY broad-based stereotype. I wonder if that cop immediately, unconsciously just lapsed into that with his encounter. A woman speaks up in her own defense, and she's automatically "uppity." Not allowed to stand HER ground. And on top of that, the woman here was black. Now, that makes TWO strikes against her, automatically.