Beating a dead horse...

...Or possibly a live minority, which is the point of this post I suppose.

Ran across an article from USA today while I was having my morning constitutional, by which I mean I was sitting on the toilet. The title is Why the United Incident Sparked More Outrage Than This Alleged Police Beating, upon reading just the title I could see a major reason why, but I read it anyway, and it is pretty fucking stupid.

The keyword in the title there is "alleged". I don't know if you have seen the video, I try to avoid them mostly but I did watch a good chunk of this one, it consists of a black man(of course) talking to a cop in the street, apparently he had been jaywalking or some shit, for some reason the man takes his jacket off, I assume at the instruction of the cop but who knows, then he is thrown to the ground and gets the shit beat out of him. The video is clear, unless there was a friendly discussion about who could beat who in an impromptu streetfight, there is nothing "alleged" here, a cop beat the crap out of an unarmed man.

So that's the difference there, we give the cops the benefit of the doubt so much that even in the titles of articles about their flagrant violence they are given credit.

The remainder of the article talks about how we identify with the victim in the United incident, apparently getting stopped and beaten by the police is not a universal enough experience for people, it has to be coupled with the inconvenience of flying for us to really feel empathy. It also mentions that we all feel vulnerable when flying and this plays off of that. Again, I guess feeling vulnerable when confronted by an armed man with the power to legally do you harm basically at a whim isn't something that makes people feel vulnerable, certainly not black people.

Basically what I am saying is I hated basically every aspect of this article, and the fact that they actually sought out a psych professor for a quote, and that guy didn't answer the article title question with "racism, duh" angers me even more.

I'm taking a nap.