"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. [...]
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
America is a very different place now than in 1946.
I googled "most popular people in America" and Google shows me pictures and out of the top ten, half are African-American including Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, MLK Jr, and Oprah Winfrey.
I looked at one page that had top ten most popular people in America in the 1940s and there were no African-Americans on the list.
> Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force
Many slavers were African, particularly the ones dragging people out of their homes, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.
>I googled "most popular people in America" and Google shows me pictures and out of the top ten, half are African-American including Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, MLK Jr, and Oprah Winfrey.
Try googling "over-represented race in incarcerations", "over-represented race in police shootings", "redlining", poverty stats, etc. too. Besides, of those popular people, Michael Jackson tried to turn himself white, MLK Jr was conveniently murdered, Muhammad Ali was persecuted by the state, and Barack Obama is routinely called racist slurs despite being the president.
Plus, it's easy to make popular idols of talented black artists and still view down on the majority of them. Louis Armstrong, boxers and other black entertainers were quite popular when the country was openly racist too.
>Many slavers were African
But none of them operated in the USA or kept slaves there.
The buyers of the millions of blacks that came to the US, those who used and abused them as slaves, and who made the trade profitable in the first place, were white Americans.
>Many slavers were African, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.
No, but the majority of them had ancestors that were racist, enforcing double standards, unfair laws (segregation, Jim Crow laws, etc.), and in some cases violence (beatings, lynchings, etc.) to the black population. And most of them were racism themselves too.
Oh, thanks. Next time I'm on business in SF and I start thinking about which cargo pocket to put my phone in to minimize my chance of being murdered by the police, I'll draw comfort from a bunch of token Negros in show-biz and politics.
And yet this text pops up on the front page of hacker news.
I assume it is because of the events in Dallas; but why discuss this text and not the actual event or a million other things related to the topic of race and racism?
Before people ask why this is relevant to Hacker News: he's a great example of how academics, scientists, and even technologists can have effects outside their field of inquiry. For a mix of reasons, hackers are both securely employable and cultural heroes right now. We may not be Einstein, but there are things we can do.
I think not only can we do things, but we are obligated to. Cheering on from the sidelines or even worse offering platitudes like "I support your goals but not your methods" while offering no help or alternatives isn't really helping. If you support change, the do something about it. Call your local officials or congressmen. Donate money to political action committees. If you make peaceful change impossible, then violent change becomes inevitable. We might feel safe today while we're sipping lattes in our gentrified neighborhoods and tisk tisk on Reddit and hacker news, but that safety might be illusory.
The wave is coming. You can either help guide it safely to shore or get drowned by it.
I believe a lot of people we now see as noble were just the right person in the right place at the right time, and the more we dig in today, in hindsight, the easier to see their personal flaws.
A few others, like Einstein, where just the right person, period. To see such a sound point of view coming from a person writing at a time where everything was pointing on the other direction... pretty amazing.
Einstein was probably better at science than at debating social racial issues. Likewise, nobody should give more weight to Einstein's opinion on God, bees [1], or the Jews [2], than on anybody else's.
1. Einstein was speaking about American slave owners, who were primarily white. I believe the term 'whites' is inclusive of Jews.
2. Einstein wrote this article in 1946... so there were likely a lot less black millionaires.
3. I think he was only making an observation that the whites around him (not necessarily all the whites around the world) still discriminated and thought less African Americans.
He goes on to explain that some of their feelings are reasonable and have been experienced in the past... but are nonetheless flawed.
I'm not sure what your arguments above are supposed to point out... but Einstein was pointing out a problem in 1946... problems which may or may not be the same today.
Given the numerous police shootings, typically of blacks, but not always, which are obviously excessive uses of force, why is absolutely nothing being done about it? The cops get off, people protest, and the cycle continues. Do we not have leaders? Has the system become so inept that no one has any responsibility? Does that mean the cops are literally "out-of-control"?
And no, you can't sit there and argue that the cops aren't doing anything wrong. A young man is in police custody and ends up dead from a fractured neck and no one is responsible? A woman is in police custody, a camera is turned off, and ends up needing facial reconstruction? The list goes on and on. The police have to be a notch above the average person in conduct, not a notch below.
So I ask again, why is nothing being done about it?
Something is being done about it, lots of people are protesting and demanding change, writing letters to politicians, many are standing up to the police and refusing to let their rights be infringed, and some people are actually sacrificing their own lives and committing murder just to make their point be heard.
What specifically do you want to be done to change a increasingly militarized institution with unlimited resources and hundreds of thousands of people in it that has unwavering support of tens of millions of people that nearly all accept the myth of their infallibility?
I'm doing nothing and I don't know why. I asking myself why I don't stand up to police when they give orders I don't legally need to follow. I am asking myself why I don't fight back when police departments ask for more money, more officers, more body armor, more guns. I am asking myself why I am complicit (through non-action) in allowing culture of hero worship to circle all uniformed occupations and how this may create the very God Complex of infallibility that needs to be curtailed.
I personally believe things like this have always been happening. We're only now learning of such acts, and being forced to face it. Most people would still like to see that as isolated incidents, something that happened, a one in a million thing that you cannot prevent.
It's hard for us to accept that it is indeed a side effect of something a culture that was allowed to grow, and to understand what should be done. For people in a situation of comfort (politicians, rich people, most whites), it's easier to turn away from the Bad News than to confront it.
If anything, the increased awareness will have an impact. I want to believe we, as a society, will grow out of it. But the realist in me does not expect overnight results. It takes time to sink in with the powers that be, and for deep changes to take effect. It's not just prosecuting individual cops. It's changing a whole system of abuse.
Isn't it really "Why am I not doing anything about it?". And the little voice inside answers "because there's nothing I can do about it". So does everyone else's little voice inside. And there you go.
Right from the article:
"What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.
I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause."
Even for someone who (probably) agrees with you, this is a poor way to argue. "And no, you can't sit there and argue..."? If your own argument is strong --- and, in this case, it should be --- you should have no trouble calmly dismantling rebuttals.
It's weak arguments that demand to be propped up with bogus foreclosures like this.
It's not, however, the flimsiness of your rhetoric that compels me to respond. Rather, it's the implication that merely by reading your comment I must somehow be complicit in an argument that police violence isn't problematic. You probably didn't mean to suggest that literally everyone on this thread disagreed with you on police violence. But that's what you wrote.
A couple key points:
- More people in the US are struck each year by lightning than are killed by police. (373)
- Of the 1,491 persons that died from police use of force from 2009-2012:
915 (61.4%) were white males
481 (32.2%) were black males
48 (3.2%) were males of other races
28 (1.9%) were white females
15 (1.1%) were black females
4 (0.2%) were females of other races
- Of the 56,259 homicides from 2009-2012, 19,000 (33.8%) were killings of black males.
Comparisons by types of homicides of black males:
481 (2.5%) were the result of police use of force
152 (0.8%) were the result of a negligent accident homicides (i.e., child playing with a gun)
648 (3.4%) were the result of a justifiable homicides by private citizens acting in self-defense
17,719 (93.3%) were criminal homicides (murders)
More blacks are killed in justifiable self-defense scenarios than are killed by police. And overwhelmingly more are killed in homicides, mainly by other blacks.
Also note: According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with whites 45.3% and "Other" 2.2%. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of white victims killed by whites, and 93% of black victims killed by blacks. (Whites are being lumped in with Hispanics here.)
It's fairly clear that there isn't an epidemic of wide scale police violence against blacks. Instead, a few incidents have been blasted onto social media, and uncritical leftists have picked them up and ran with them. I see Black Lives Matter more as an expression of intergroup competition and aggression against traditionally white power structures. Other leftist groups take the same approach, e.g. with feminist fabrications about mass rapes on college campuses - college campuses are in fact among the safest places in the world, but feminists treat them as though they're some Mad Max-esque raping dystopia by claiming nonsense like 1 in 4 college girls get raped. They're mysteriously silent about places where real mass raping occurs, such as Africa and the Middle East.
I could go on, but suffice to say, I believe we're in a period of mass hallucination and hysteria, with entire movements justifying their existence on statistically nonsensical claims. This has happened many times throughout history, and it's leaned to both the right and left axes of the political spectrum. This time the wind just happens to be blowing to the left.
That is one half of the problem, the other half is that the police lives in constant fear, because everybody might have a gun. And this is not being fixed because of a powerful lobby.
I think police itself is hard to fix, because the system is so federated. There is nobody, who can just say: "Alright, now the standards are a, b and c."
[+] [-] shawndumas|9 years ago|reply
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. [...]
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
[+] [-] adamnemecek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandisk5|9 years ago|reply
I googled "most popular people in America" and Google shows me pictures and out of the top ten, half are African-American including Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, MLK Jr, and Oprah Winfrey.
I looked at one page that had top ten most popular people in America in the 1940s and there were no African-Americans on the list.
> Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force
Many slavers were African, particularly the ones dragging people out of their homes, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Try googling "over-represented race in incarcerations", "over-represented race in police shootings", "redlining", poverty stats, etc. too. Besides, of those popular people, Michael Jackson tried to turn himself white, MLK Jr was conveniently murdered, Muhammad Ali was persecuted by the state, and Barack Obama is routinely called racist slurs despite being the president.
Plus, it's easy to make popular idols of talented black artists and still view down on the majority of them. Louis Armstrong, boxers and other black entertainers were quite popular when the country was openly racist too.
>Many slavers were African
But none of them operated in the USA or kept slaves there.
The buyers of the millions of blacks that came to the US, those who used and abused them as slaves, and who made the trade profitable in the first place, were white Americans.
>Many slavers were African, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.
No, but the majority of them had ancestors that were racist, enforcing double standards, unfair laws (segregation, Jim Crow laws, etc.), and in some cases violence (beatings, lynchings, etc.) to the black population. And most of them were racism themselves too.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgarfias|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chvid|9 years ago|reply
And yet this text pops up on the front page of hacker news.
I assume it is because of the events in Dallas; but why discuss this text and not the actual event or a million other things related to the topic of race and racism?
[+] [-] llamataboot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ec109685|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercuryIntox|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilk|9 years ago|reply
http://www.livescience.com/50051-albert-einstein-civil-right...
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
The wave is coming. You can either help guide it safely to shore or get drowned by it.
[+] [-] allendoerfer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nilved|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatever_dude|9 years ago|reply
A few others, like Einstein, where just the right person, period. To see such a sound point of view coming from a person writing at a time where everything was pointing on the other direction... pretty amazing.
[+] [-] putaside|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp
[2] https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYork...
[+] [-] kapitza|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwambua|9 years ago|reply
1. Einstein was speaking about American slave owners, who were primarily white. I believe the term 'whites' is inclusive of Jews.
2. Einstein wrote this article in 1946... so there were likely a lot less black millionaires.
3. I think he was only making an observation that the whites around him (not necessarily all the whites around the world) still discriminated and thought less African Americans. He goes on to explain that some of their feelings are reasonable and have been experienced in the past... but are nonetheless flawed.
I'm not sure what your arguments above are supposed to point out... but Einstein was pointing out a problem in 1946... problems which may or may not be the same today.
[+] [-] transfire|9 years ago|reply
And no, you can't sit there and argue that the cops aren't doing anything wrong. A young man is in police custody and ends up dead from a fractured neck and no one is responsible? A woman is in police custody, a camera is turned off, and ends up needing facial reconstruction? The list goes on and on. The police have to be a notch above the average person in conduct, not a notch below.
So I ask again, why is nothing being done about it?
[+] [-] hermannj314|9 years ago|reply
What specifically do you want to be done to change a increasingly militarized institution with unlimited resources and hundreds of thousands of people in it that has unwavering support of tens of millions of people that nearly all accept the myth of their infallibility?
I'm doing nothing and I don't know why. I asking myself why I don't stand up to police when they give orders I don't legally need to follow. I am asking myself why I don't fight back when police departments ask for more money, more officers, more body armor, more guns. I am asking myself why I am complicit (through non-action) in allowing culture of hero worship to circle all uniformed occupations and how this may create the very God Complex of infallibility that needs to be curtailed.
What are you doing?
[+] [-] whatever_dude|9 years ago|reply
It's hard for us to accept that it is indeed a side effect of something a culture that was allowed to grow, and to understand what should be done. For people in a situation of comfort (politicians, rich people, most whites), it's easier to turn away from the Bad News than to confront it.
If anything, the increased awareness will have an impact. I want to believe we, as a society, will grow out of it. But the realist in me does not expect overnight results. It takes time to sink in with the powers that be, and for deep changes to take effect. It's not just prosecuting individual cops. It's changing a whole system of abuse.
[+] [-] noonespecial|9 years ago|reply
Right from the article:
"What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.
I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed. But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause."
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
It's weak arguments that demand to be propped up with bogus foreclosures like this.
It's not, however, the flimsiness of your rhetoric that compels me to respond. Rather, it's the implication that merely by reading your comment I must somehow be complicit in an argument that police violence isn't problematic. You probably didn't mean to suggest that literally everyone on this thread disagreed with you on police violence. But that's what you wrote.
I object.
[+] [-] Humjob|9 years ago|reply
Here are some statistics: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3ADqQNf...
A couple key points: - More people in the US are struck each year by lightning than are killed by police. (373)
- Of the 1,491 persons that died from police use of force from 2009-2012: 915 (61.4%) were white males 481 (32.2%) were black males 48 (3.2%) were males of other races 28 (1.9%) were white females 15 (1.1%) were black females 4 (0.2%) were females of other races
- Of the 56,259 homicides from 2009-2012, 19,000 (33.8%) were killings of black males. Comparisons by types of homicides of black males: 481 (2.5%) were the result of police use of force 152 (0.8%) were the result of a negligent accident homicides (i.e., child playing with a gun) 648 (3.4%) were the result of a justifiable homicides by private citizens acting in self-defense 17,719 (93.3%) were criminal homicides (murders)
More blacks are killed in justifiable self-defense scenarios than are killed by police. And overwhelmingly more are killed in homicides, mainly by other blacks.
Also note: According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008, with whites 45.3% and "Other" 2.2%. The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most homicides were intraracial, with 84% of white victims killed by whites, and 93% of black victims killed by blacks. (Whites are being lumped in with Hispanics here.)
It's fairly clear that there isn't an epidemic of wide scale police violence against blacks. Instead, a few incidents have been blasted onto social media, and uncritical leftists have picked them up and ran with them. I see Black Lives Matter more as an expression of intergroup competition and aggression against traditionally white power structures. Other leftist groups take the same approach, e.g. with feminist fabrications about mass rapes on college campuses - college campuses are in fact among the safest places in the world, but feminists treat them as though they're some Mad Max-esque raping dystopia by claiming nonsense like 1 in 4 college girls get raped. They're mysteriously silent about places where real mass raping occurs, such as Africa and the Middle East.
I could go on, but suffice to say, I believe we're in a period of mass hallucination and hysteria, with entire movements justifying their existence on statistically nonsensical claims. This has happened many times throughout history, and it's leaned to both the right and left axes of the political spectrum. This time the wind just happens to be blowing to the left.
[+] [-] allendoerfer|9 years ago|reply
I think police itself is hard to fix, because the system is so federated. There is nobody, who can just say: "Alright, now the standards are a, b and c."
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]