Posted on By justworld · 2 Comments

Black Parents Deserve to Be Shot, Armed White Teens Deserve Due Process

It’s a story out of a bad Hollywood message movie:

A black man is shot in the back seven times by police, in front of his kids.

In the ensuing protests, an armed white teenager is allowed by police to freely patrol the streets until he kills people and then is allowed to get away.

If this was a movie, I’d write a scathing review of how contrived the plot is.

It’s Crash-level bad writing.

And yet, it happened.

And events like it will continue to happen.

And what’s worse, a large portion of the population of the United States seems to believe that the police were justified in shooting a man in the back…

And the police were justified in allowing an armed teenager to patrol the streets after a government curfew others were being arrested for breaking…

And a teenager was justified in killing two people.

Why is that?

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Posted on By justworld

Why We Think Protesters Are Always Violent

Whenever the television news media shows violence stemming from a protest on TV, the tacit assumption is always that the protesters started the violence: they chose to protest, they must have chosen to be violent. When the protesters come prepared for tear gas and the like, it is all the easier for the television media to look down on the protesters as instigators.

We the viewers come to these images of violent protests with the same assumptions: the protesters started it because, had they not protested, there would be no violence. Both media and audience believe that any violence by the police is justified as retaliatory. But why?

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