About BLM

[Rev. Rye]

Generally when people are murdered we talk about the good points of their lives and praise them . This general rule seems to only be done away with when a black person is killed by the cops .Then any wrong doing of the victim is fodder or worst still implicitly used to justify what happened to them in some twisted "just world "

Our minds digest the world through narrative; events have a protagonist and an antagonist. In a typical murder the narrative is often understood to be a victim (the good guy) being killed by a criminal (the bad guy); these are true almost by definition in the interaction. However, in a police killing like Floyd's you have a situation in which the hero is the perceived villain, and the villain is the perceived hero. The roles are unclear, and people are bound to adopt the Cops and Robbers narrative by default.

It takes work to get out of the Cops and Robbers narrative and reinterpret the roles as reversed. I think this, rather than racial discriminations, explains better why the victims of police killings are viewed as criminals by default--because that is the nature of the interaction.

That may be, but bear in mind, the way Americans perceive crime is still heavily racialised. Just look at the Southern Strategy for some information about how that came to be. Linking black people to crime is just one of the dog whistles they used to help keep the South red, and it’s worked even today. The Three Arrows video I posted in page 2 of this very thread goes into a bit more detail about how this happened.