this is an epidemic.
epidemic: endemic: I think both work. Unfortunately. I normally don't watch these types of videos, but I forced myself to watch this. It's not right that I shouldn't. I imagine its me in the drivers seat and my son in the back seat. The horror. That poor child saw his father slain. I can't imagine. For every one of these such videos there must be thousands of others, also dehumanizing, but wherein nobody dies and there are no cameras around. Fuck this. edit: I'm so sheltered. My first thought was "how could she be so calm and filming this?" Then it occurred to me that this image, this event is so foreign to me that I'm shocked in a way that perhaps she isn't because this is NOT foreign to her. This is a part of her existence. Her child consoling her in the car "I'm here with you." Dammit, if that doesn't get to you, you are a monster. This is awful stuff. Appalling stuff.a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time.
regularly found among particular people or in a certain area.
I'm a pasty-ass almost translucent old white guy and I still tense up and go full "on guard" mode around cops. When I was growing up, there were not a lot of black guys to beat the crap out of, so the dirty cops trolled through the Irish-Catholic areas looking for kids up to no good. When Rodney King happened a bunch of my friends and I all had the same thought: That looks like someone I know. We all had stories of people we knew arrested for nonsense, "contempt of cop" and "resisting arrest." Growing up I just did not have the life experience to realize that this happens everywhere that there are people with no money; shit like this don't happen in the gated communities. Some cops have always been good people and some cops have always been shit. The difference now is that everyone has a recording device on them and a lot of sheltered people are starting to realize they cannot ignore the smell of garbage. I just hope that the desire to clean this up pops up and gets traction before another set of riots.
There are some things that really make you stop and realize how different your life experience is from others. A friend of mine worked for a year in the states and driving around with a black guy who owned a nice car blew her mind. He just kept getting pulled over seemingly for no reason, like how this particular article talks about how they were pulled over for a busted tail light that wasn't busted and it just didn't click in my friends head why this was happening. Eventually when it happened again she was shocked and ask why it kept happening even though she really already knew the answer. Actually experiencing it with him though and having him point out the obvious actually cemented what was perviously just stories as real life. That's why I think what she was able to do in that moment was so great, it's as close to actually being there to experience it with somebody as many people will get.
Fuck the postcards, man. They used to hand these out to the colored folk passing through town in parts of Texas, Alabama, Georgia etc. The Green Book was a thing that NEEDED to exist. It was not until 1967 that inter-racial couples could get married in the US and have those unions recognized by states like Virginia and California and New York. That is (barely) in my lifetime.