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Go Red Sox!

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Posts posted by Go Red Sox!

  1. 20 hours ago, Krz said:

    I honestly hate the argument that this “won’t change anything”. No one is claiming that the black W or dropping redskins will solve everything. The truth of the matter is that these teams aren’t part of the government, and their actions hold no real political power. So when we argue that the actions have no value and won’t contribute to further legislation, it undercuts the real purpose of the change and leaves some mad at the team for something they can’t control.

     

    I didn't say that "the actions have no value and won't contribute to further legislation". I used the word IF. The word IF is THE keyword. Basically, you're agreeing with me, you just don't like the way I've put it. And thanks for clarfiying that sports and politics are two different fields...

     

     

    20 hours ago, Gothamite said:

     

    More than that, I think these types of actions can and sometimes do result in real change.

     

    Marriage Equality was a punchline until enough Americans said "wait, why can't gay couples get married?"  Which happened in part because lots of people and companies started normalizing it.   A whole bunch of seemingly empty gestures added up to change minds. 

     

    The more we can normalize companies and schools and individuals saying "yeah, systemic racism is a real thing", the more likely it becomes that we'll muster the political will to actually do something about it.

     

    Individually?  Yeah, probably pretty meaningless.  But taken collectively, they can literally change the world.  So I'm loath to dismiss any of them, no matter how self-serving or crass.  If entities feel pressure to do the right thing, they're still doing the right thing.

     

    I was referring to police culture and police brutality against Afro-Americans. You won't change police culture through symbolism. That's a fact. Or how do you want to involve companies in this regard? It exclusively needs some appropriate, coherent legislation in order to start solving this giant problem because these cops won't change their attitude voluntarily. A fish always rots from the head down. And if politicians decide to keep looking away for obvious reasons – which they're doing as we speak – or in the best case scenario, throwing some legislative breadcrumbs to people's feet, nothing positive will change for Afro-Americans – in terms of the big picture. But it actually could also get even worse. Meaning that symbolism will always remain just symbolism and no more than this, if politicians won't draw the right conclusions.

  2. Black W's won't improve the living conditions of Afro-Americans. Same goes for the lives of Native Americans in reservations across the U.S. just because the Washington Redskins (finally) are going to change their utterly racist nickname/identity.

     

    Don't misunderstand me: these corrections are good and necessary. But they all will eventually be just a waste of time if the political system isn't ready to change itself – and the system that it has created over the course of decades.

     

    A black W inside a crest eventually won't mean a thing if out-of-control police brutality against the Afro-American minority can continue because politicians on both sides of the aisle refuse to demilitarize police, refuse to revise qualification and training for cops (deescalation instead of escalation tactics), refuse to acknowledge that there's a basic problem with racism and misuse of power among cops. As long as there are exclusively lip service or platitudes in politics, because too much money has been involved ever since, things can only get worse.

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