[Barrin92]

"There were some old style editors who were still at the Post when I was there. One of them said, 'We don't cover black murders because those are cheap deaths,[..]Inside the newsroom some of them would say hello or nod or even speak to me but if they saw me outside the building they would pretend they didn't know me."

I honestly can't even imagine what it's like to live like that. Not just the callousness but also just having to deal with it every single day, and probably the indifference by everyone else. Pushing through that over years and decades is really astonishing, I'd have probably given up anything a week in.

[LeifCarrotson]

What I can't imagine is what it was like to be that person. I wasn't alive (much less socially or politically active) in the time period being described. I'm alive now, when we have similar but different attitudes towards racism and sexism. However, people who I know and respect, who taught me the fundamentals of morality as a child, were those same people in the 60s. What goes on inside the head of a person in this kind of environment? Are they oblivious? Do they rationalize it? Are they conflicted or confused but pressured? How is this cultural attitude maintained in adults or taught in childhood?

I'm aware of some similar externally confusing contradictions in my own life - I eat beef and pork at family gatherings, though I believe those animals to be nearly as complex and intelligent as my own beloved dog; my home, vehicles, and lifestyle contribute fewer greenhouse gasses than my neighbors' might but still far more than they must if we're going to reverse climate change; I worry about erosion of privacy and corporate overreach but find the utility of Google's communication and navigation tools and Amazon's low-friction product delivery too compelling to avoid the appalling privacy implications...

Will my children and grandchildren look back in horror at how I used to live? Did my parents and grandparents have the same questions and rationalizations about about their own lives? I've asked a few of them, but never gotten an answer that allows me to intuit their perspective.

[chrismcb]

Rationalisation mostly. It is fairly easy to rationalize almost anything.

[InitialLastName]

> One of them said, 'We don't cover black murders because those are cheap deaths,'

If anyone ever wondered what attitude triggered the slogan "Black Lives Matter"...

[will4274]

Your comment hides a lot of depth and comes off as a bit flippant to me. BLM was largely triggered by cop-on-black killings. Civilian black-on-black killings (like those referred to in the quote) continue to get fairly little attention, even from the BLM organizations themselves. Indeed, this is a fairly common conservative criticism of BLM - that it's an anti-police movement, not an anti-black murder movement. (This is not to express an opinion on the criticism, merely to state it's existence.)

[InitialLastName]

The two issues (police violence targeting the black community and internal violence in the black community) are closely coupled, though. Broadly speaking, communities that don't have reliable and safe access to state-empowered law enforcement (say, if there's a threat or history of law enforcement applying violence unjustly or indiscriminately or simply an absence of law enforcement) will turn to resolving disputes internally, and that "resolution" tends to be more brutal than what is applied by a modern police force. Historical examples include the US old west, Scottish highlands and many versions of organized crime (notably the Sicilian and NYC mafias and the Central American cartels).

When the news media, being (for better or worse) a driver of public opinion and thus electoral policy especially at the local level, ignores both issues (as they have a long-standing habit of doing) while playing up (or even fabricating) reports of black-on-white violence, it exacerbates both issues as well as strengthening the feedback loop between them by driving support in the broader community for more hard-line policing.

[vmception]

The primary thing that seems to change news media is a change in ownership

Alot of public opinion on things can shift as local news media is bought away from various families

[jolux]

The fact that police often threaten underpolicing of black communities in response to protests goes a long way to explaining why cops killing black people and people who aren’t cops killing black people are related. I wouldn’t say the movement is ignorant of this connection at all, it’s a big part of the argument. To oversimplify, black communities are faced with a Hobson’s choice of violence at the hands of police or violence at the hands of criminals. White communities for the most part can trust that the police will fight crime in their communities without subjecting them to violence in the course of it.

[FactolSarin]

Holding police accountable for unreasonable killings is not being anti-police.

[jaywalk]

And if that's all BLM did, far fewer people would have any issue with them. But you're simply ignoring reality if you really think that they limit themselves to unreasonable killings.

[kbenson]

Like any and every popular movement, there will people that attach themselves to it to serve their own agenda, sometimes fully self serving, sometimes because they see a platform to advance something they see as extremely important for society, even if many other people disagree on the fundamentals or just the methodology. While missteps of the BLM movement deserve to be called out and criticized, it's also important to remember that great many people are more interested with the original core tenets of the movement and so it's not accurate to paint them all because of the actions of a few.

The same goes for the Democratic and Republican parties. I'm sure everyone here could point to bad actions that people have taken in the name of those groups and/or organizations, but that doesn't mean we should assume those negative instances represent the wishes of all the others in that group, or apply the criticism across the entire group when it doesn't reflect a majority of their views.

And before people come back with their perceptions of how much of a group believes in and supports the actions of some, it's worth considering that opposition groups will always latch onto the problem people and subgroups and play them up as larger than they are, so the media will almost always either misrepresent them as a larger or smaller portion of that group than they actually are.

[burnished]

Yeah like that person who lit a cop car in Seattle on fire! Oh, they were white? And from Texas? And didn't appear to believe that black lives mattered at all? The point I'm trying to get here is that you're arguing with what should be an unimpeachable central thesis "black lives matter". Also, you are kidding yourself. The US is still painfully racist. People were gonna get mad no matter what because it was about black people.

[refenestrator]

There's nutpicking and then there's having your movement taken over by nuts.

The public face of BLM at its peak, for better or worse, featured a large number of nuts. Like your bro in Seattle there. Or those CHAZ people, also Seattle, who actually killed 3 black guys in as many weeks as part of their black lives matter protest. In the mainstream, anyone who acknowledged black-on-black crime or said that rioting might be a bad PR look was called a fifth column or concern troll.

Mob mentality is a thing, I'm not perfect either but a lot of people got carried away.

[vmception]

“reasonable” and “justified” are arbitrary standards created randomly across every jurisdiction

getting the “perfect case” is not really possible when the “rulings” simply match your pre existing appeal to authority or not

people are therefore pushing as many cases as possible into the national spotlight to make it more obvious that uniform accountability standards republic-wide are necessary. if you feel some other killings need more attention then do that

[vmception]

Can you explain that criticism? Why, to them, is that related?

I've seen it before, and I've seen talk show pundits that they watch say it, but whatever is clicking in their head is not clicking in mine.

I am not exactly understanding the train of thought which is being used to invalidate calls for police accountability. I am not seeing it related at all.

I guess a stretch would be "black lives don't matter to them so why are they trying to convince us", or maybe its not a stretch to the people that would think that, but its also hard for me to relate to because I don't really get the segregation mentality, it seems dated

[watwut]

Majority of murders are among people of same race and demographic. People kill those that are nearby and those they know.

So you have white on white killings too, despite that term being literally never used. Majority of murders are male on male killing, males both being same race. Then you have domestic murders and those are also people living close to each other.

Black on black murders don't get little attention. They are the kind of murder mentioned fairly often, most often when someone argue that cop violence is not issue.

[mensetmanusman]

This is still the case today, you can tell by which murders get covered in the press.

[imacerealkiller]

It's sad that we know we would have given up, but for them it's not even an option.