Dateline: Minneapolis, MN KSTP and Pointergate: not as surprising as we want to believe KSTP’s outrageous Pointergate story has caused quite the stir on the internet. Daily Kos called the most racist piece of journalism in 2014. I think it fits right in with the stories that suggest that black people are going to riot if there isn’t a grand jury indictment of Darren Wilson in the Mike Brown Jr. case. Somebody said something rather astute about this that bears paraphrasing, “you can’t sustain a belief system without some social sanction to it and without feeding it.” What belief system does this story feed? The idea that blacks are different in a sub human kind of way, in an animalistic and criminalistic kind of way. They are just not right they can’t or don’t even do the simple things right they can’t even express simple gestures of affection, And yes I know the mayor was called out for her so called gang signing as well, but keep in mind she was supposedly mimicking the young man Navell in the photo. Think about it, some folks even were tricked into asking, “can pointing be a gang sign.” And yes one can’t help but wonder if some folks would still have caught it if our lighter skinned mayor Betsy Hodges had not been targeted as well as the young man. I noticed in the comments in a Strib article about the foolishness that, when someone suggested this may indeed have been overlooked had the white mayor not been victimized as well, that someone else accused them of playing the “race card.’ Curious notion race card, centuries of racist injustice and oppression and detractors or rather deniers reduce all that ugliness to some kind of game. Shame on anyone who uses such a foolish term to denigrate or downplay something as real in Americana as Thanksgiving; racism. Truth is, folks who have resorted to gangs and gang signs ought not be excoriated as much as those who have made it necessary for gangs and gang signs to exist. And trust me it ain’t the lack of fathers in the home that caused gangs to crop up. It was the lack of real social justice or real economic opportunity that spawned gangs in the black community, much as it did in all of the European immigrant community’s. That’s right every European immigrant community has had gangs, the difference is that the need for them dissipated as more doors of opportunity swung open, as they became embraced more as “white” than immigrant. The story also reinforces another creed that has taken hold without anyone going on a philosophical or theoretical crusade and that is, “once a criminal always a criminal.” It codifies the idea that in so-called Christian America, Nevell once marked with the scarlet letter “C” can’t be redeemed. And trust me many Christians while preaching redemption don’t believe certain folks can be redeemed either, which is why the Christians (who you would expect to don’t and haven’t even considered pushing back against this rather backward doctrine) I can’t recall the stated reasons why the politicians we love so much passed laws in your state and mine that continually punished folks, even after they had done their time. But you know why they did it, it was to keep a perpetual underclass, a perpetual class of folks which could always be discriminated against, always held as second class. When the time is convenient you can scapegoat them and you can even make money off of them when they return to a life of crime which is ultimately the design of a system that does everything possible to keep ex offenders from re-integrating into society. And the KSTP yellow journalism is reinforcing all of those negative messages in simply a much cruder way. And who can blame Jay Kolls and KSTP for sticking to their story. Racism, stereotypes sell. Hell they have been doing it all along anyway. They got their message out, they put real doubt in some people’s minds. However the message has been reinforced quite well in Minneapolis. In the Twin Cities area blacks fare worse than blacks around the country in employment, in rates of incarceration, in access to healthcare and in educational success. And more recently it was revealed that the Minneapolis police were stopping black youth for minor crimes in some cases five times as often as white youth. And the mayor is a decent person, but she has done little besides talk about the need for equity in the city. Recently the chief of police Janae Harteau cancelled a planned community in which she insinuated that those planning to attend,( the community) were would- be terrorists who didn’t want to meet with her but rather planned to come and blow her legs off. So this story is, after all is said and done not really that surprising and is just a more blatant attempt to do what the big business media and other institutions that spew misinformation have attempted to do and that is keep us divided. Those uniformed geniuses that are leading the Minneapolis police department who suggested that mere pointing are gang signs were actually doing their job. They are the armed mercernaries the pitballs of the power structure, who know only one thing sic them n---rs. The mayor has tried to tell them that that isn’t no longer the acceptable way to do their job, but they only know one gear, for them criminalizing negroes is all they know, they don’t understand the new orders calling for a bit more civility as they carry out their orders to lock up as many of us as they can. The police understand their job well, as I say all the time (and this foolishness is a perfect example of it) and that is to reinforce the negative stereotypes of society, while maintaining the power relations between the classes. That is making sure that the owners of capital and private property are protected from us everyday folks. Rather than being outraged we should work to change a system that finds this kind of thing necessary and no doubt racism is a necessary part of the system we live under. I know most folks doubt that it runs that deep but then the onus is on you to explain why it never seems to go away. I have an answer! It is imperative that others ask the hard questions and then go to work putting into practice their conclusions. justice then peace
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:19:15 +0000
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