So America is obsessed with race and religion even tho FREEDOM of religion and NO discrimination are already things in the constitution? Why obsess on such issues and worsen the liberties they both enjoy? Sure if Blacks are murdered, imprisoned and are victims of injustice you need to point it out, but as an outsider from the country I do not get WHY the race issue is so big? All this division has caused Ferguson and rioting and at some areas America is on the verge of race war. Why fuel this rhetoric into the political mainstream when thus far I have seen nothing good come out of it. Beginning with Trumps comments on immigrants to the whole BLM movement interrupting Sanders.
The constitution is not the zeitgeist, nor are African Americans Albanians. There are completely different histories leading to the situations you're comparing. How is it that people standing up and demanding to be treated equally under the law are somehow "dividing people?" Is it not the unequal treatment itself that is divisive? Pointing out injustice and demanding it be remedied neither directly nor indirectly "divides" people.
The ones who ACTUALLY divide people are the powerful political operatives/lobbies/media entities who manipulate the public with spurious wedge issues to the extent that there are now famous people who have shamelessly built lucrative careers on "strategizing" with such tactics. People like the US' Karl Rove or Australia's Lynton Crosby (just hired by the Conservative party's political campaign here in Canada to help them "
dog whistle" their way into saving Harper's sorry butt before our election next month). In this age of PR politics, those kinds of tactics are both specifically *intended* to and *do* divide people. This goes right back through history. Lee Atwater, for example, admitted his part in using race to turn reactionary white people against black people in the US South in
a certain infamous interview.
Where is the public outrage and popular condemnation of them intentionally and successfully dividing people? You never hear the average person talk about what it means that such tactics have become mainstream, yet people are so very quick to go after those with far less relative power for daring to stand up against injustice. And all struggles for human rights face this kind of uphill battle against public opinion,
including that of their historical predecessor, Martin Luther King Jr.
I do not remember MLK fighting just for Blacks, he was more cosmopolitan than that. Does America want to turn into a reverse Apartheid?
What? How on earth does anything BLM has said or done even marginally resemble support for Apartheid? The name "Black Lives Matter" is drawing attention to an issue which none of them have said stops with black people. I heard a pretty good analogy for this on a podcast a while ago, but I don't remember where the quote I'm paraphrasing originally came from: Imagine if you sat down to dinner with your family and everyone except you got their plate filled. So you say "I should get some," but your father says "No,
everybody should get some," and that's that. Your empty plate is ignored and you go hungry. Obviously the
"I should get some" had an implicit
too. No reasonable person would assume that someone in that situation is saying nobody else should have the dinner just because you're asking for some of it. The same is the case with "black lives matter." Another analogy: When animal rights activists or environmentalists talk of saving the whales, does anybody assume they're saying dolphins and sharks should die? Of course not. If policies for policing and police training are improved as a result of BLM efforts, it won't only benefit black people, nor even just people of colour. It will benefit
all people who face harassment by police officers held to few standards of accountability. Literally everyone stands to benefit from what they are doing.
Special rights to whites, blacks, Christians, Muslims can never end well, people need to unite under one idea in order to persevere.
Considering we are all still living the global legacy of a looooong history of special rights to white people, I totally agree. We haven't managed it yet, but I hope we achieve equality sooner rather than later.
