Hacker News Reader

Comment by themeek | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the insightful comment.

I found your thesis about the racist nature of police abuse interesting, especially how you tie it to mass surveillance.

I think you are probably right that this plays a large role in which communities and majorities will support or excuse this behavior.

I don't want to draw it too far, though. We should recognize that Muslim Americans get far more surveillance - more targeted surveillance - for merely being Muslim or having Muslim community respect. It's also true that people can and are fooled into believing and supporting principles, spurred by things like nationalism or political party identity, that actively harm or target their own minority groups.

This caveat I don't think invalidates your misgivings, which I think are good. If mass incarcernation and police abuse were as widely practiced on the wealthy or the majority there would be far more outcry.

View on HN

That's a good point about Muslim Americans. And the American authorities were savvy enough to know that if they wanted to install a system of mass surveillance, the could limit push-back by selling the effort in racially coded terms that would appeal to the reactionary right. In the ensuing "debate" about surveillance, the government could spin clear violations of the 4th Amendment into "a compromise that balances liberty and security."

A note to foreign readers of HN: In America, "terrorism" is an ethnically coded term. Mass shootings by white people - a depressingly frequent occurrence - are almost always described in other terms. In the rare cases where this dodge becomes impossible to pull off (e.g., the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh), the attack will be described as an act of "domestic" terrorism, thereby preserving the clear ethnic subtext that is carried by the unmodified term.

The notable exception to this rule is made for environmental activists, who are branded "eco-terrorists", or left-leaning people protesting economic injustices (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). In these cases, the deliberate use of a term with a strongly xenophobic component is a thinly veiled accusation of treason, which is a line of attack long-favored by the more belligerent critics of the American left (e.g., Joseph McCarthy, who provides the canonical example).

Another really nice contribution. Well phrased.

In the McVeigh case the FBI pronounced (and media reverberated) that the OK City bombings were a Muslim terrorist attack until it was shown, in fact, to be definitively not the case.

The language used to describe McVeigh's crimes and intentions was then continually watered down.

I remember that, do you remember that OKC was only a couple years after Osama bin Laden tried to bomb the World Trade Center and was during a time which Al Qaeda was attacking US-affiliates overseas on a regular basis?

I didn't. I looked it up and found that it was indeed close to the first WTC bombing (though also close to other bombings like the Unabomber campaign).

Yeah, the mask really doesn't have very far to slip.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com