re: #207 Patricia Kayden

The police have been brutalizing and killing unarmed Black people long before Kaepernick started protesting. It’s a wonder that have been getting away with it for so long but I guess the majority is okay so nothing changes.

I’m not quite that cynical. Between the crushing of Reconstruction and the post-WW2 civil rights movement, conditions for blacks in the former Confederacy (and elsewhere, but not so much) were… no need for details at this moment. Television didn’t start the movement or keep it going, but clubs and attack dogs in every living room surely got people’s attention — and put paid to the propaganda about “happy Negroes stirred up by carpetbaggers and communists.” (Something like that happened during the Civil War, too — slaves were well-treated and contented with their lot, according to southern whites preaching slavery up north, then Union soldiers marched to the south and saw what it really looked like. And the not-very-concerned-it’s-a-long-way-away crowd turned into abolitionists.)

That’s how they got away with lies about police brutality. People knew the nice cops on the beat around their homes, so they believed other people in uniforms over their victims. (The civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests put a dent in that for a while, but people forget. Or are too young to have seen it.) But now there are cell phones and video recorders everywhere, and the lies aren’t standing up so well. It’s still not going to be easy to change things, but momentum seems to be building.