🇺🇸America's Protests: It's Time to Think Differently
Hello. Welcome to Inside The Newsroom where today we’ll address the events that have taken place over the past couple of weeks in the U.S., and around the world in countries including the UK, Germany, Brazil and all the way down under in New Zealand. As a white dude from the UK, I know there are countless better voices to comment than me, but I’ll do my best to capture all the different emotions involved, while also dissecting how we can channel the anger into fundamentally altering the landscape for the future. I know I won’t catch everything, that’s impossible. So please write to me so I can learn more for next time. And a quick mention of our scheduled Q&A on the future of journalism with friend of the podcast Francesco Marconi, which was supposed to be held today, but we’ve had to postpone. With that, here we go…
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Barack Obama Weighs In
Each time an event like this encapsulates national and international attention, public pressure forces politicians and corporations to release statements condemning, in this case, the violence and looting associated with genuine protests against racial injustice. They’re often empty with no real substance. The NFL, for example, released a statement saying how “there remains much more to do as a country and as a league” and how “these tragedies inform the NFL’s commitment and our ongoing efforts”. This comes after the NFL largely ignored and distanced itself from Colin Kaepernick when he originally knelt during the U.S. National Anthem in 2016 to raise awareness of police brutality. And if you’re Jim Dolan of the New York Knicks, even a vague statement has proven too much.
Then you have Barack Obama whose post on Medium actually offered ways to funnel the anger and emotion people are feeling into solutions to enact real change. He states that protesting should be used as a vehicle to raise awareness of the biases and injustices black people and all minorities face every single day, but that can’t be all that’s done. A small silver lining to recent events is that the U.S. general election is five months away and offers a massive opportunity to put an end to all of this.
But we can’t just look at the federal level. There’s of course going to be a heightened focus on the presidential race, especially after it’s thought that Donald Trump ordered police to use teargas on peaceful protestors so he could take a picture in front of a church in D.C. But there’s only so much the president, Congress, Justice Department and a federal judiciary can do. Elected officials at the state level, mayors and county executives who appoint police chiefs responsible for the strategy and tactics of each police force, the district and state attorneys who decide whether or not to charge those involved in police misconduct, those are the people that can create change more directly than any president will. So if you find yourself feeling completely helpless recently, get out and vote for your local candidates in November.
Why Do Police Use Force If It Doesn’t Work?
Watching events unfold from afar has been heartbreaking. Chilling reports of journalists being attacked more than 130 times have surfaced and is an affront to the First Amendment. Opportunist rioters and looters have taken advantage of towns and cities we’ve all lived in and visited. And a video of NYPD SUVs driving into a crowd in Brooklyn has left many struggling to understand why some police officers are doing this. But what’s left me most upset is the fact that it doesn’t have to be like this. Officers marching with protestors in New Jersey prove there’s another way. And there’s decades of evidence to support this notion.
FiveThirtyEight recently shed light on how researchers have spent 50 years studying how protestors and police behave when they interact. Among their conclusions is that when police respond by escalating force, i.e. wearing riot gear from the start and using tear gas to disperse peaceful protests, the situation only becomes worse. Between 1967 and 1970, three federal commissions were set up to study this very issue, and all three concluded the tactics police use to deter protestors from exercising their right to protest seldom works. Knowing this will hopefully deter police chiefs from using such methods, but I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face, the most immediate solution to escaping the infinite feedback loop we’re in is to vote for local and statewide candidates who’ll install different ideas. November 3.
Nuance in a World That Only Sees Black and White
Amid everything that’s happened and will continue to happen, there are valuable lessons we must learn if we’re to get everyone to truly understand what’s at hand. Who are the protestors? Why are they protesting? How do we stop this from happening again? These are all questions that don’t have a single answer and cannot be simplified for convenience. Contrary to common belief, those protesting are not just black, and come from many different races, ages and genders. There are of course different reasons why people are protesting and multiple ways people are going about it. And as we discussed earlier, there are several ways to prevent the infinite feedback loop of injustice. A big first step is, as my buddy Evan Cobb so eloquently put it to me last night, to acknowledge that humans have an obsession with not being wrong, and must learn to accept that it’s okay to not know all the answers. There’s so much more under the hood that simply cannot be put into one box or another. It’s time to think differently.
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