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DemocratSinceBirth

(99,710 posts) Thu Dec 31, 2015, 06:29 PM Dec 2015

How Racists Talk About Tamir Rice

A little time has passed since a grand jury in Cleveland refused to indict two white police officers responsible for the November 2014 death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was black.

One minute this child was playing in a city park with an air pellet gun. Seconds later, after a police squad car swooped up next to him, he was on the ground — alone and mortally wounded.

After 13 months of waiting for any sign of justice, the reaction from too many white people to the grand jury decision has severed me from my will for diplomacy. I am a 58-year-old white woman, and I am sickened by how many people who look like me talk about race.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/how-racists-talk-about-tamir-rice/

3 replies

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Highlight:

How Racists Talk About Tamir Rice (Original Post) DemocratSinceBirth Dec 2015 OP

The Tamar Rice case stage left Dec 2015 #1

A beautiful and sad article Nevernose Dec 2015 #2

Comments to the article are just what she is talking about !! Person 2713 Jan 2016 #3

stage left

(2,962 posts)

1. The Tamar Rice case

Reply to DemocratSinceBirth (Original post)

Thu Dec 31, 2015, 07:29 PM

Dec 2015

is the one that has convinced me that there is no such thing as equal justice under the law in this country. I really thought that this one time the police would be held accountable. That was foolish of me.

Nevernose

(13,081 posts)

2. A beautiful and sad article

Reply to DemocratSinceBirth (Original post)

Thu Dec 31, 2015, 08:38 PM

Dec 2015

I think this a lot, but she says it much better than me (which might be why she has a Pulitzer and I don't):

One of their favorite cut-and-paste missives in emails and social media posts criticizes and even mocks what they call “black English.” How they love to spew their racist rants about dialect. It makes them feel so shiny-white superior.

Their hate is couched in white English, which has nothing to do with accents. White English is a state of mind. It turns words into weapons to dehumanize an entire population of people, and it is bubbling up like pus in a dirty wound after Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty convinced a grand jury that the police were justified in killing a black child playing with an air gun.

White English casts Tamir Rice, for the first time in his short life, as an equal among men — rather than as a 12-year-old boy limited by the judgment of his years.

He “should have known better.”