I Can't Breathe
blog.citigroup.com
blog.citigroup.com
As press critic Jay Rosen suggests, we are all political, especially in times like these. The trick is to be political, to advocate for our own values, without politicizing things: https://pressthink.org/2020/05/you-cannot-keep-from-getting-...
I believe this CFO agrees with you. Most of the "celebrity cause du jour" tweets are just that, tweets. At least at the end of this post he listed groups that he's donating to
[1] NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
[2] Advancement Project
[3] Color of Change
This may not mean much to you, but at least he's claiming to put his money where his mouth is.
Quit being so cynical, it's not healthy.
IMO donating to an organization seems weak. It's like outsourcing the problem to someone else, and thinking your helping them because you're giving them money. If you really want to help, get your hands dirty, and take matters into your own hands...
Giving money to good causes is never weak. It is an extraordinarily effective tool for those of us who want to help.
An effective legal advocacy or lobby group is a force multiplier - they're hands down the best "bang for your buck" in this situation.
By contrast, me spending a day working with inner city youth or building Habitat for Humanity is laudable or protesting in the streets is at best effective on a much smaller scale.
And secondly, this message is clearly aimed squarely at other well to do concerned citizens like him who are looking for ways to help.
He is effectively vetting these organizations as "acceptable by the CitiGroup C suite." As an example, I forwarded this to my parents who would never "get their hands dirty" but also are open to donating to good causes.
This will reach them in a way no celebrity tweet or protest sign possibly could.
There is a very reasonable argument that says this guy is using all the tools at his disposal. He has money, and he has influence. He is exercising both to make the world a better place. How can you possibly complain about that?
Taylor Swift for instance didn’t exactly gain fans among Trump supporters for speaking out against him. What exactly are they suppose to do besides use their platform?
You are part of the problem.
What process would this CFO need to go through to share this possibly "contentious" post on one of the world's largest and globally recognised banks' websites?
A large company doesn't release anything without a review like this, no matter how mundane. You can bet they will double down when discussing sensitive social issues.
This is a large corporation with as much a hand in perpetuating systemic inequality as any other large corporation. Moreso because it exists in the financial sector. Calling out inequality and donating funds generated from parasitic practices is not enough. Let's talk about debt forgiveness, defunding the carceral state and dismantling other structures of oppression.
(I don't believe they have learned anything, but this tiny chink in the armor suggests that at least I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on this blog post.)
The same government that wants to shut down Twitter.
But speaking of which, the government is also run by a President who actually quoted a segregationist governor about how to deal with protestors.
As far as crimes, he also was fined for both running a fake charity and a fake “university” and members of Congress basically got away with insider trading pre-Covid.
But your statement kind of demonstrates the problem. Unarmed Black people are getting killed by police and it getting covered up by corrupt government. When I have to worry about my son who has grown up all of his life in the burbs being seen as a threat because he is a big Black guy living in a predominantly White city, I really don’t give a damn about a corrupt CEO compared to a corrupt justice system.
This will be delayed until news coverage stop, then everyone can continue their life business as usual.
The cops that choked Eric Gardner to death are all free right now.
The cops that choked Eric Gardner to death are all free right now.
What progress?
This song was written in 1966. It could have been written this morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNkacckLBU
We have made technological progress, which has brought it's own benefits, but that may be more in the form of keeping us busy / distracted; pointing our genetically evolved anger and biases towards the Internet rather than the real world.
But progress within humanity itself?
There can't be progress if there are no consequences, or if the consequences are escaped too frequently, or if the blame is laid upon the symptoms and not the cause: Rioting and looting is anti-social and illegal, yes, but property destruction isn't the same ball park as murder. Focus on the cause, and the symptoms disappear.
But then it's impossible to provide any absolute answer. There's overwhelming beauty in humanity. The good ones are forgiving, and the bad ones will take advantage, and this takes us into game theory. The only way the game changes is if the rules are changed to have more / worse consequences for the bad actors; better systems to ensure the enforcement of these consequences.
Bad elements of humanity will persist despite all this; we'll be colonising Mars in parallel with children being brought up to hate anything unfamiliar, female circumcision will still be law in some countries, and there will still governments that censor and censure even minor dissent, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, holocaust deniers.
I don't know if the US is making progress in race relations. That song from 1966 says a resounding no. I don't know if the political will exists within those with the political power to change things. US politics (only because that's the current example) is like my parents' fashion sense: stuck in their favourite era and showing no signs of even the consideration of modernising.
I don't know the answer, and it's maddening and depressing. But it's ignorable, for me, and therein lies the cause of the lack of political will: the symptoms aren't bad enough warrant the cost of seeing the doctor. School shootings once a month aren't bad enough to change gun laws; one dead black man doesn't have anywhere near the political capital of a dozen dead children.
For there to be change, the symptoms have to be more extreme, and they have to persist. History says so.
Technologically, this is 2020. Sociologically this might as well be 1966.
Seeing that my parents grew up in the segregated south where racism was the law - ie Jim Crow - I wouldn’t say there is no progress. Also redlining was the law.
While the criminal justice system is just as corrupt as it ever was. It isn’t getting worse - it’s getting filmed.
Technologically, this is 2020. Sociologically this might as well be 1966.
Did you or your parents grow up in the 60s? Have they told you what life was like then?
Good on Citi for taking a firm stand and calling on some organizations people can donate to, which I personally hadn’t heard of until I read the post.
The rioting is a mistake. It will not change hearts and minds. It will not undo the problems endemic to police forces. In fact, it may very well exacerbate them.
The problematic archetype is the bigoted cop who's drunk with power and behaves more like an animal operating on instinct than a thinking human. These people, in the collective, are irrational, aggressive, and reactionary. They also hide behind authority and a convenient veneer in the "rule of law". We also are now seeing that there may be many of more of them (and many more enablers of them still) than we thought.
And it is exactly these people who will feel vindicated and emboldened in the face of the rioting currently underway. If we're not careful, it may also give them a pretext to resort to even more horrible tactics in the future. Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'.
The current trajectory is not the way. We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal.
I know there's a whole bunch of galaxy-brain takes on this about how counterproductive the rioting is, but it's not like cops have needed any pretext to resort to "more horrible tactics" already.
Incidentally, the overuse of "virtue signalling" to describe other people taking positions that they presumably sincerely believe in and wish to share with each other is incredibly snide, and if you don't want to come off like an asshole, you should stop. It's become one of those phrases that seems more like a pointless tribal "tic" (like "political correctness").
Moreover, I think focusing too much on the property destruction is missing the point. As MLK says, "Riot is the language of the unheard." White people have had a couple hundred years to "use the system of governance" to fix this. We haven't.
I get why you'd want to call for patience, for peaceful pursuit through the law and courts. But you should read "A Call for Unity", an open letter 8 pastors wrote to MLK in 1963:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.ti...
his response to this is the famous Letter From Birmingham Jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail
Like you, the white pastors wanted patience, wanted people to trust the system to eventually provide justice. MLK eloquently explained why that was wrong. And little in the nearly 60 years since makes the case any more persuasive.
But violent revolution is also not, in the aggregate, a net benefit in the immediate term. Not even for black people. Believing otherwise represents a failure to anticipate 2nd/3rd order consequences and beyond. In the best case, you might experience a lot of suffering today to benefit people in the far future. I don't think we'll see that best case play out with the current rioting. We've been here before, many times (e.g. Rodney King). It doesn't work.
Take a look at Hong Kong. They got rid of Carrie Lam and just a few days ago lost their special trading status with the United States. Stay tuned for more consequences.
The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions (where do stereotypes come from? vivid, sticky ideas that trigger fear, like violent crime; where does violent crime come from? economic disenfranchisment) and the glacial pace of cultural change (relatedly, the 'hearts and minds problem'; sometimes you just need to wait for enough bigots to be better educated, achieve empathy by actually knowing black people personally, or die out).
The reason why things have gotten violent is as I mentioned in a prior post is self-defense. People don't trust the police at all, and why should they? We've seen them attack journalists multiple times, we've seen them assault people who were protesting peacefully and increasingly it looks like they're employing agent provocateurs to give themselves a reason to get violent. Who is going to hold them accountable when the system refuses to hold them accountable?
You should naturally expect some amount of badness in almost any sample of humans, including the police. It might also help to empathize with a cop on the ground in this situation when police stations have literally been blown up.
First, I didn't realize blue was a race now. Or are we not allowed to criticize the police state? Does your 'sweeping generalization' rule also apply when we criticize things like the Chinese government because 'I'm sure some of the politicians are good people'?
Second, you don't say. The problem is that the police have zero accountability. They get away with murder and assault like in [1] or [2] or [3] and for what? Can you tell me what laws they violated? Are you personally going to go out there and hold those cops accountable for what they did? It sounds like you should go outside and get the real view of what's happening on the ground.
[1] https://twitter.com/imactuallynina/status/126691262719377408...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/nypd-officer-shoves-woman-ge...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...
You should naturally expect some amount of badness in almost any sample of humans, including the police.
And the “badness” seems to only affect people who look like me...
But as Chris Rock said...
Well, it’s not most cops. It’s just a few bad apples. It’s just a few bad apples.” Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing....But some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, “Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.”
It caused an overhaul of the LAPD. Do you really think the Bush administration would have charged the cops otherwise?
The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions
The Poor People’s Campaign.
> the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later
The reason that black people encounter systemic mistreatment is white racism. Full stop. It's not due to a "flaw in MLK's logic".
Also, MLK was not advocating "violent revolution", so I think the flawed logic here is yours. Especially your notion that we just have to keep waiting for bigots to improve. It's two full generations since MLK walked the earth. Waiting doesn't work.
It is not working. People are being murdered by our government, and the murderers are not punished. There could not be a stronger argument against your position.
But yes rioting does change things. It forces people to pay attention.
Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'.
Because those types of things never happened in during the peaceful marches in the 60s...
We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal.
We don’t have that system at our disposal when the majority prioritizes the life of a fetus (or for that matter a dog) over the life of minorities.
We don't need more rappers, we need more politicians, doctors, engineers. People in positions of power so that the status quo can change.
Until then nothing's going to change, and IMHO that would take more than a couple generations
https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-ma...
The Black doctor who got shot by a policeman while helping his patient?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey
A title doesn’t give you power in America if you are a minority. You will still be seen as a threat. I live in the most affluent county in my state, and our household is above the median household income, my son and his (Black) friend still gets stares walking around unless they are hanging out with their larger group of White friends.