It blows my mind that people honestly think a large portion of the population, one already seen as a target thanks to the color of their skin, who have to warn their children not to wear hoodies/hold wallets/move their hands lest they be considered suspicious, would all be waving guns around willy-nilly around police…

I didn’t mean my comment to tell you you’re parenting wrong, because that’s a Douchemove™. More to back up your comment about The Talk, and how young children of color are when many receive it.

I used to drive an older car that is associated with a particular ethnic group locally. I was getting pulled over about twice a month for non-infractions, and every time they found a white lady at the wheel, the police would stammer some excuse and let me on my way. This magically stopped when I got a new car. I…

Must be nice having the privilege to not “expose a six-year-old (lol on the italic emphasis) to the ugliness of the world”.

That’s the real thrust of it though...you get to have a choice about not telling her. And the way things are going in this country, maybe we should start talking to white children in age appropriate ways about what their similarly aged friends of color are already going through. Maybe we’d end up with fewer adults…

My response to that is always the same... “Do you really think that the distrust between the Black community and police is about one incident?”

It’s sad all around, you are right. I lived in an all white neighborhood with my 5 year old son and my apart ment was raided because they believed I was hiding a man who used to live at that address. Nevermind consulting the apartment complex about who currently to lives there or knocking politely. People don’t…

It breaks my heart that young people of color in this country have to have The Talk from their parents because it’s just expected that the police will mistreat them. My white six-year-old daughter comes home from school telling me that the police are her friends and they get bad guys and I don’t have the heart to tell…

The worst one I keep seeing is “You can’t believe everything protestors say” the implication being that their explanation of events is some how worse than the police’s, which is just fucking ridiculous when we’ve seen how often the police just blatantly lie and obfuscate.

This is what I keep saying. Cops lie all the time. Comments keep coming up like “well, if he was holding a gun?” OR “he was 13 he shouldn’t have held up a gun at the cops.” Do you know if that really happened. In my city a young man was shot multipe times by police and the public was told he was in a police chase and…

Video or it didn’t happen. Cops have been known to plant things on people they’ve shot and killed.

If that were true there would be more outrage for the deaths of actual humans than for the destruction of property. That is not the case. People are making a much bigger stink about some burning junk than the reason that people are protesting. They are the same assholes who make more of a stink about NFL players not…

That really does not help at all. Like I said police are no longer as honest as they once were. There are numerous possibilities before ever accepting a police account. After all “body cam footage” again not available.

Problem is no one really knows what happened. Both sides tend to lie, cops more often then civilians. Until a cop can get arrested for lying on a official document and be tried for perjury. The circle of trust will just remain broken.

It’s not obvious that people should not loot. The question is how much looting is optimal. Said better here: http://gawker.com/actually-riots…

If the lone wolf attackers organized into jurisdictional forces, were tasked by the government to protect and serve the population within that jurisdiction, were paid salaries with our tax dollars, formed incredibly powerful unions, went back in time to establish decades of oppression-based tactics, then came back to…

We can have both! Obviously people shouldn’t be looting, but it seems like the police have paid zero attention to how to respond to protests without escalating the situation (despite an ample amount examples to learn from in the past few years). All that riot gear is warranted now, but it seems likely it didn’t have…

*picture not from Charlotte, but point still stands

Given that the only reason we are discussing police violence against black people is because people can readily document it on their phones, protest selfies are entirely appropriate. Also, it seems wise to have a documented timeline of your locations and activities during a protest, in case they drag you away.

“This is disgusting on the part of Baylor. We haven’t let Joe Paterno come to a game at Beaver Stadium since he was fired for his actions.”