Is it just white people who object to the protests?

[malificent7]

I am white...i support the protests...several of my white friends are horrified by them. Are any non whites against them and if so why?
Aibu to feel that the incensed are scared of loosing their white priveledge or feelings of supremacy?

@WhatWouldDominicDo

I'm all for protesting. It's rioting I don't like, and acts of vandalism such as tearing down statues and defacing cenotaphs.

Yes, Colston was a "bad man" - but he paid for most of Bristol to be built, so it's not really the statue that's the problem.

Also - there's a pandemic going on, which black people seem to be most susceptible to.

Just because he paid for most of Bristol to be built doesn’t mean that he needs a statue. Your glossing over the facts - money doesn’t cancel out what he did. Why was the statue even put up in the first place?

Not white but not black either. I don’t think the protests on balance are very constructive at this time because of pandemic.

I understand that for black people, the risk benefit balance is different, in that they come to harm from police and from society daily. However, they also are higher risk from Covid. I also do not think the protests will practically affect UK law/policy v much. I think a crowdfunder for a body to research and implement programmes to lessen discrimination against black people (eg training courses for police, govt employees) would have been better.

I support the protests that are social distancing. There was one in Tel Aviv which was done at social distancing measures and Macclesfield recently which was also done with social distancing in place
The ones in London recently And Manchester were not done with social distancing measures in place. Not to mention the vandalism of Churchill’s statue. A police horse was attacked and It’s nose broken. Is that really needed? I think if this continues the message will be lost.

If you say so WhenAllsSaidandDone 😒

@WhenAllsSaidandDone just because you prefaced your strong implication that my friend was simply toeing the line when she said she didn't agree with them with "is it possible" doesn't make it any less obvious what you were implying. And no, she wasn't "outnumbered"; she is comfortable enough around her friends to give her opinion on things. She knows fine well that whatever opinion she gave, while it may not have aligned with the status quo, it would be accepted as her opinion. Just as she does with us.

I am white. I support the right to peaceful protest. I don't like violence or looting or animals getting hurt at all.

Unfortunately a minority of attendees to any protest are just there to cause trouble.

I don't like mass gatherings happening now, not least because I'm a keyworker who is in contact with protesters in my day to day duties, though I try and keep a good distance away. A high proportion of my colleagues are BAME and it worries the hell out of me that we might lose more people to C19.

I've seen several black people online denouncing the protests. I support peaceful protests, but the rioting is wrong and will only serve to spread more hate.

As I said, go off if you wish love. Not my style to preface anything with a question if I didn't mean it to be. Sorry, not sorry I didn't spend time writing it the way you would have found as gentle. Really don't care what you think.🤷🏻‍♀️

She is a "friend" now, I see. Not how you put it before. 🤣

I am asian and support the protests. I object to the violence though, it is senseless and feeds in to the negative stereotypes of black and Asian youths. The violence detracts from the original message that black lives matter.

I understand the anger and need for protest but feel it is being hijacked by idiots.

@PlanDeRaccordement

I’m Asian and in favour of peaceful protests under normal circumstances.

But against them now due to the pandemic especially because BAME people are at higher risk of dying from it.

It is because black lives matter to me, that I am against the protests at this time. It doesn’t matter that some protesters can stay at the fringes and keep social distancing, all the large protests video and photo coverage shows thousands not social distancing.

I said this repeatedly on the thread about “being emotional about the slave trader statue” and was told to “stop fucking defending him” (the slave trader dead 300yrs now) and called a racist and a Karen and all kinds of things for pointing out that the Bristol protest was more about assuaging white guilt than black lives mattering because everyone there was gambling with black lives and tearing down a statue does nothing to help black lives or fight against systemic racism.

Well said!

I am against the removal of that and other 'slave trader' statues. As a black person has said on the news tonight, to remove the statues is to remove all history of the period. This will then make the issue invisible to us and future generations. Instead, keep the things but add information to give perspective. Though I worry that in the cuurent climate, to do so would be sign posting mobs to the next thing for tearing down or defacing.

Also, I just hate in general, mob rule and action no matter whether the cause is just or not. I liken it to public burning of books, or anything else that that the mob doesn't like or agree with. Look at what happens in some countries. It can be the beginning of a slippery slope.

I've been reading tonight about how the slave trade funded lots of Britain. Barclays, Lloyds, Bearings banks all named. Cotton trade in Manchester, tobacco in Glasgow, sugar in Bristol. I'm not sure how much there'd be left if we took down everything with links to the slave trade. Totally abhorrent but was legal at the time. How it was legal I don't know. That's my next bit of research to do. Both dds have been given work to do on slavery. I like to take the opportunity to learn with them in things I know little about. We visited the Slavery Museum in Liverpool last summer. Awful. I stood there crying reading the exhibits. The American history in particular was horrendous.
Do the Portuguese get held to account over slavery? Apparently it started there with Prince Henry kidnapping African people to use as slaves. I need to read more about that.

Tbh were it not for the violence there would be less conversation, less publicity and less traction. So whilst I’ve chosen not to be involved I feel like I don’t have the luxury of opposing the protests. That is is happening during a pandemic is unfortunate but it also means people have the time and inclination to tackle social issues. In my opinion it would be worse for us to continue on what I’ve felt is almost anti BAME trajectory (disproportional police violence against black people, rise in racist incidence etc since 2015ish). Someone made a point regarding tensions with the police. Speaking for myself I do not believe the police provide adequately protection for me as a black citizen of this country, therefore, while I acknowledge it’s not nice that police are getting attacked ect I think until as an institution the police are reformed to be fair then a certain amount of tension is necessary.

I am not white and have nurse a lot of racism when young and have been on many a protest, including one about the loss of Joy Gardeners life who was suffocated by immigration officers around 25 year ago here in the UK, she was Jamaican.

I do not support any mass gathering during a global pandemic however just the cause.

2020 will be unforgettable in more ways than one. So what has protesting accomplished?

While DeeDees feelgood list is all well and good, it is also important to acknowledge the lives lost due to these protests. In just one US city, they’ve had the deadliest day in 60yrs for black people:

See:
“Chicago saw its deadliest day in at least 60 years last month, with 18 killings within a 24-hour period on 31 May. The violence occurred as protests over George Floyd's death in Minneapolis also spurred rioting and looting in the Windy City.
Over the last weekend in May - a three day holiday - 85 people were shot and 24 killed, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
Most of the victims were black.
The dead and injured include students, parents and middle-aged workers, according to the data published in the Chicago Sun-Times.”
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52984535

^This is why many of us support peaceful protests because when they get violent, its usually black or other ethnic minorities who end up murdered. Think about this if you are a person holding the opinion that violence and anger are justified in this case because to my mind, it’s never justified because it’s always paid for with innocent, mostly black lives.

Thank you neverfit, and I too hate mob rule because history has proven it never has a happy ending. Innocent people always end up dying before order is restored.

John Oliver put it really well:

If you are asking why a spontaneous, decentralised protest can't control every one of it's participants more than you are asking the same about a tax-payer funded heavily regimented paid workforce, then you can fuck off.

1 in 1000 black men is killed by the police www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793. This is what should be being discussed. Talking about the nature of the protests is a distraction, in my opinion.

Apologies for missing a key part of a factual sentence in my last post Correction below

John Oliver put it really well:

If you are asking why a spontaneous, decentralised protest can't control every one of it's participants more than you are asking the same about a tax-payer funded heavily regimented paid workforce, then you can fuck off.

1 in 1000 black men in the US is killed by the police www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793. This is what should be being discussed. Talking about the nature of the protests is a distraction, in my opinion.

I support the protests, but I worry how we will manage the next year or so with escalating BLM protests, the ongoing Corona virus, an impending economic depression, Brexit and the climate crisis.

Shocking numbers, but the study you linked did not find that 1 in 1000 black men are killed in the US by police.

What they found was
“Our models predict that about 1 in 1,000 black men and boys will be killed by police over the life course....”

In their methods, they state that 9% of fatal encounters had no race data, so they guessed based on the surname of the victim:
“Between 2013 and 2018, about 9% of FE cases are missing data on race–ethnicity (SI Appendix, Table S1). We use multiple imputation by chained equations (48) to address missing data for observations between 2013 and 2018. Imputation models include victim age, sex, race, cause of death, and the racial/ethnic composition of the county in which a death occurred. We also include surname-specific estimates of the probability of racial/ethnic group identification on the US Census compiled by Imai and Khanna”

They then took their “guesses” aka “imputed data” and assumed that the 6 years of data of fatal encounters would apply for an entire lifetime (ignoring long term trends of declining police force deaths and decreasing inequality in deaths between races see below):
“We use these imputed data to construct multilevel Bayesian count models of mortality risk that allow us to directly estimate uncertainty driven by small annual age–race–sex-specific death counts for some groups, by variation in underlying risk over the 6 y of FE data, and by missing data...Because we lack sufficient data to track a birth cohort over the life course, we rely on synthetic cohorts to estimate lifetime risk (31). Period life tables allow us to estimate deaths over the life course within a compressed period by tracking age-specific mortality risk over hypothetical cohorts”

Also
“Also note that while black people remain disproportionately more likely than white people to be killed by police, the share of white deaths has been increasing in recent years...Prior research suggests that despite high contemporary rates, the risk of being killed by police was higher in decades past.”

So, interesting study. However, I think the journalist who reported it didn’t really understand what it meant...which is:

If US police violence that has happened over the past 6 years remains the unchanged, a black man born today will have a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by the police; give or take over the course of his life.

@PlanDeRaccordement

Fair points (as an aside, I should have used quotation marks around the first paragraph. The second was my own).

However, your points don't mean the situation is a whole lot better. 1 in 1000 is awful, but even if it were 1 in 2000 it's still awful. It's far, far higher than I had thought. I naively assumed that the names we hear in the news are a significant proportion of the black people killed by US police, but they really aren't.

And yes, it's promising that the US police force appears to be killing fewer black people over time (I mean, it's origins were based quite openly around "controlling the negroes"),. But when the bar starts so low, it needs to be raised very very fast to be OK.

Solidaritea,

However, your points don't mean the situation is a whole lot better. 1 in 1000 is awful,

Yes, completely agree, that is obvious that changes must happen now to prevent 1 in 1000 dying. Police brutality is in epidemic proportions in the US. The Root has a good article on fatal encounters where they publish the death toll each year. It’s For 2019, they reported
“The total number of people who died during encounters with police, according to Fatal Encounters, totaled 1,777. When we removed suicides, the number fell to 1,531—forty-four fewer deaths than 2018.”

The victims races was broken down as 44.9% White, 31.7% Black, 18.5% Latino/Hispanic, 3.1% Asian, and 1.3% Native American.

So that’s 485 black people killed by police in 2019 alone....

Proportional to population, Blacks/Native Americans tied for first place, Latinos/Hispanics came second, Whites third and Asians last in terms of likeliness to be killed by police.

Everyone always compares likelihood with White as the baseline. Not sure why? But doing so understates the impact on black people in my opinion. The baseline should be whoever is least likely, in this case Asians. But anyway, the Root calculated Blacks risk vs, White risk (not the even lower Asian risk) and stated:
“A black person was three-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cop than a white person.
A Hispanic person was one-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person
An unarmed black person was three times more likely to be killed by police than a white person with no weapon
An unarmed black person fleeing the scene was six times more likely than a white person to be killed by a police officer.”

Sorry
Forgot the link!
www.theroot.com/here-s-how-many-people-police-killed-in-2019-we-think-1841183889

I don't fear losing supremacy - I fear losing my parents to Covid. Mass gatherings during a pandemic are fucking stupid and the govt/police ought never to have allowed it. It's only a couple of weeks ago that people were getting fined for sitting down in a park, but somehow mass protests are okay?
I'm in Wales - I can't legally drive more that 5 miles away but people gathered in Cardiff with no consequences. Either we are in lockdown or we aren't.

Also anyone who fires a flare at a horse should be hung by their bollocks in a town square. That was a disgusting thing to do!

My sympathy is with the 77 year old retired black policeman, who spent 30 years serving his community and who bled to death on the street, having been shot while defending a shop from looters.
Violence and looting is not protest, it's thuggery.

Well said MrsHuntGene

David Dorn was murdered trying to protect his friend's business from looters. In 2015, President Obama described looters as thugs and criminals after protests triggered by another police killing. In America, looting is destroying black businesses and livelihoods. Like the one David Dorn tried to protect. Why isn't David Dorn's name being sprayed over London monuments?

www.kmov.com/news/david-dorn-murder-hundreds-wait-in-line-at-public-visitation/article_5eb01460-a7e3-11ea-b58e-d71455217e75.html