2 ms·

>only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see. The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Your whole post is an inacc

>only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see. The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Your whole post is an inaccurate depiction of awareness of race relations pre-internet. Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Because the alternative is admitting that they knew damn well but didn't care about it as much. Which would be the truth, but is too uncomfortable to admit.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Sure, but it was portrayable as an isolated, extreme incident because similar events captured on video rather than by word of mouth and the mass violence resulting from the media attention to it made it less, rather than more, likely that similar incidence, even if similarly captured, would get similar attention from the oligopoly establishment media while it had no mass grassroots alternative. So, unless you mean that to support GPs point, I’m not sure why you point it out. > Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment and violence experienced by Blacks in the US before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute and virally redistribute recordings made the aggregate of individual instances that would have largely never been recorded previously and most of which, even if they had been recorded would have either been individually too minor for the news to cover at all or to inflammatory to cover in an unfiltered way.
- dogleash 5y ago
  >before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute Back then people used to actually talk to eachother instead making some small talk in between stretches of staring at their phones all day. >Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment I've never had a conversation with an old timer about what it was like back in their day where they weren't extremely in tune with race relations in their hometown with the kind of specificity and subtleties that twitter and other media today just don't have the capacity for.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I've never had a conversation with an old timer about what it was like back in their day where they weren't extremely in tune with race relations in their hometown with the kind of specificity and subtleties that twitter and other media today just don't have the capacity for. I’ve had plenty with white oldtimers that weren't, even oldtimers who clearly think (or thought at the time) that they were. Oh, sure, they'd have a detailed narrative of race relations, but the details in the narrative would often have as much to do with reality as a Baghdad Bob press briefing. Because, see, I am a bit of an oldtimer, and not-white (but also raised by educated middle class white parents), so not only could I hear the detailed narratives with their convenient stories about rsce relations and all the narratives around culture, education, etc. that painted a rosy picture of race qua race, I also was kind of optimally positioned to see through the B.S. of many of those narratives. Yeah, people told stories, but they told them within their in-group, and selected and embellished them to fit their own worldview and the image they wanted to project of themselves and their identity group. Of course, in a sense that's still the same now, but there is a lot more spread of unfiltered recordings of events outside a narrow oligopolistic media system and unfiltered escape of messages sent within one group to those outside of the group.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Sure, but it was portrayable as an isolated, extreme incident because similar events captured on video rather than by word of mouth and the mass violence resulting from the media attention to it made it less, rather than more, likely that similar incidence, even if similarly captured, would get similar attention from the oligopoly establishment media while it had no mass grassroots alternative. So, unless you mean that to support GPs point, I’m not sure why you point it out. > Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment and violence experienced by Blacks in the US before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute and virally redistribute recordings made the aggregate of individual instances that would have largely never been recorded previously and most of which, even if they had been recorded would have either been individually too minor for the news to cover at all or to inflammatory to cover in an unfiltered way.

dogleash 5y ago
>before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute Back then people used to actually talk to eachother instead making some small talk in between stretches of staring at their phones all day. >Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment I've never had a conversation with an old timer about what it was like back in their day where they weren't extremely in tune with race relations in their hometown with the kind of specificity and subtleties that twitter and other media today just don't have the capacity for.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I've never had a conversation with an old timer about what it was like back in their day where they weren't extremely in tune with race relations in their hometown with the kind of specificity and subtleties that twitter and other media today just don't have the capacity for. I’ve had plenty with white oldtimers that weren't, even oldtimers who clearly think (or thought at the time) that they were. Oh, sure, they'd have a detailed narrative of race relations, but the details in the narrative would often have as much to do with reality as a Baghdad Bob press briefing. Because, see, I am a bit of an oldtimer, and not-white (but also raised by educated middle class white parents), so not only could I hear the detailed narratives with their convenient stories about rsce relations and all the narratives around culture, education, etc. that painted a rosy picture of race qua race, I also was kind of optimally positioned to see through the B.S. of many of those narratives. Yeah, people told stories, but they told them within their in-group, and selected and embellished them to fit their own worldview and the image they wanted to project of themselves and their identity group. Of course, in a sense that's still the same now, but there is a lot more spread of unfiltered recordings of events outside a narrow oligopolistic media system and unfiltered escape of messages sent within one group to those outside of the group.