Former British Colony in Downward Spiral of Ethnic Violence, State Security Impunity

[Gilrandir]

I'm sure that they are. However, they are far less likely to fire their weapon when dispatched to a black neighborhood

As the accident with Floyd showed, you don't need to fire guns to cause massive protests.

Aside from blacks not being disproportionately represented in police, how can you justify your assumption that POC police won't participate in police maltreatment of POC communities?

My assumption is the contrary: if the police in general maltreats blacks, so black policemen are also held responsible for such malpractice.

Conservative white men own more guns than there are conservative white men. Plenty of "urban" black people are legal gun owners, for better or worse. There are very few states in the country with any requirement to register guns for normal possession; there are more states that ban registries than maintain them in any form.

If there is no registration for gun ownership there is no possible way to correctly gauge the number of guns owned by any race.

When actions are consistently racially-biased in practice, it can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish whether any single incident arises from this bias or from another cause. It becomes a pure distraction to try to split these hairs.

Yet when given a choice you always opt for racial explanation?

He was arrested on suspicion of intentionally submitting a counterfeit $20 bill for payment, which accusation was without any evidence known to the police at the time and in abstract sounds beneath the notice of authorities, let alone the intervention of multiple police units. The business owner went on record that he knew and liked Floyd well and that the call to police was made by a young and inexperienced employee, a call the employer would have countermanded had he been present.

So you have to be old and experienced to learn to condone submitting counterfeit money if you know the person who did it?

Who says he was an angel? The George Floyd incident was incorporated into the Movement for Black Lives - not the Movement for the Sanctified George Floyd - because it was another representation of the societal adverse treatment for which so many demand redress.

And that is why he was buried in a golden casket?

I remember you defending the character of Stepan Bandera as Ukrainian national hero and sometime-anti Nazi - but he was indisputably a much worse person than George Floyd could ever have been. If one can very charitably extend you the opportunity to sublimate a flawed person into the ideal of national liberation or identity, then you should be able to do the same with a mere reference point in a valid list of grievances.

1. I didn't defend Bandera. My point was and is that we should know all the details of any person and see both the bad and the good sides to him. And each person should be lauded for what good he did, and denounced for what bad he did. In the case of Bandera many people see only what they choose to, forgetting the opposite. I tried to show all sides of his personality. But it is a usual story with many other historical figures like Bohdan Kmelnitsky who fought to liberate Ukraine from Poland, but in this fight mass atrocities against the Polish and the Jews happened.

2. There is no criterion to judge a person to be better or worse so your claim of Floyd being better than Bandera is arbitrary.

One of my research fields now is related to the theory of possible worlds. I use it to analyze literary characters, but in fact it could be used to analyze real-life people.

Basically, any character in a book lives in several possible worlds (father, lover, husband, businessman, neighbor, son, relative, boss, employee, sportsman, etc.) and can be viewed as a collection of different personalities each of which can have a different (sometimes even polar) assessment. For example, Soames Forsyte is depicted as a very caring father and devoted son, but a very lousy husband. And dumping all his characteristics into one heap will give you an average man that abound in this world.

I believe that assessing Floyd (or any other person for that matter) we should also try to see all his possible worlds and assess them. Current obsession with him tends to ignore the shadiest aspects of his personality which makes his overall portrait lop-sided.

Give me a break, this is a poem written a hundred years ago about how children should not go to Africa because it is awful, dangerous, and full of scary animals and cannibals. The idea that someone could have written this poem, which contains so many familiar contemporary tropes about Africa and its inhabitants, about America or any place other than the "Dark Continent" is

This cultural artifact, perpetuated across generations, is exactly the kind of obscurantist prejudice absorbed by the general population of Europe at the time and even to this day. It has no other context or genealogy and your resistance to acknowledging racism puzzles me.

Do you remember that ther was no racism in the USSR and all people were proclaimed equal? Moreover, the Soviet ideology contrasted the free Soviet society where all were treated the same with capitalist countries that were grounded on oppression of other races in colonies and metropolis.
In the book "Поднятая целина" by Sholokhov one of the characters (Makar Nagulnov) was a strong partisan of interracial marriages. The whole movie "Цирк" is a story of an American circus lady who had a black son and was censured and even ostracized in the USA so she had to come to the USSR where she and her son could finally find the land of milk and honey. Soviet leaders often met with the leaders of African ex-colonies and supported them in all possible ways. African students studied in Soviet universities. So the official doctrine was anything but racist.

Thus, representing Africa as a dangerous land in a children's poem is devoid of any racial issues. Australia, Amazonia, Indochina could be used as well if it suited the metrics of the poem. As is the way with Americans, they see race and gender where there is none.

On a sidenote, I read a critic's take on feminism in Tolkien's books and the critic claimed that when Frodo and Sam went through Shelob's tunnel it was a reflection of penetration into female pudenda and the growths that were on the walls where like pubic hair.

Don't become like that in treating simple stories.

Whether he atoned for his crimes (by most accounts he was an upstanding citizen since he got out of prison) is both irrelevant and not something you seem placed to determine. The reality of it is that which cases get the most attention is a matter of timing and media coverage, not according to some private hierarchy of virtue and innocence. Your fixation on Floyd's character misses the point.

And disregarding his character makes the whole picture incomplete and biased.