Welcome to the Police Brutality Club, Occupy: You're Late

Even now, the ugly underbelly of democracy is visible to all only when it happens to white people.

David Atkins "thereisnospoon" at Hullabaloo:

Karoli of Crooks and Liars has a reminder of what communities of color have been dealing with for generations now:

Earlier this week, Elon James tweeted this:

"Oh? The NYPD are treating you badly? Violent for no reason? Weird.” – Black People

You can buy the T-shirt here.

You might think this is snark but it’s not. I spent some time tonight looking at police brutality in the pre-Occupy Wall Street days. You know. The stuff that doesn’t make the national news because it’s sort of icky and ugly and people don’t really want to know that in this day and age, police are still brutal. That pepper-spraying children as young as 9, killing 7-year olds in police raids, and beating special needs students in the school hallway with no provocation still happens in this country. It does, and I’m hearing a whole lot of stories about it because the outrage doesn’t ever seem to begin until, well…it’s not black or hispanic people in front of the billy clubs.

Those of us who were born into white privilege have the benefit in many cases of only recently being directly exposed to the problem of police brutality via Occupy Wall Street.

Zandar nails it:

I think a lot of it, at least from my perspective, goes back to my discussion on white liberals and privilege. Folks getting pepper sprayed and tasered, treated as criminals, portrayed in the media as nothing more than thugs and gangsters, all for no good reason?

Welcome to our world, folks. It's not pretty. We've been saying this nonsense has been going on for years, but the rise of Occupy Wall Street has, to many darker-skinned folks like myself, only exposed the ugly rift in America that has always been there. Remember, in just four years or so, the financial crisis and the proceeding bailout devastated what little wealth the African-American community had. The racial wealth gap right now is staggering in the US.

It took for the wealth gap to get this bad for some people to notice that for some of us, it's been this awful for generations. It's great that people can camp out in parks when you don't have to, and then proceed to say "Hey this wealth disparity is awful!"

Where have you guys been for the last 30 years, huh? Nice to have you finally join us on the same page. Now, what exactly do you plan to do about it other than cleverly photoshopping Pepper Spray Cop into artwork?

When some of us say "Hey, you guys have a leaderless movement and it's being marginalized, maybe you should take some pointers from the civil rights movement" we're not saying it because we want to co-opt anything, we're saying it because we've friggin' been there.

Does this mean we're all finally ready to at least have this discussion now?

In other words, what BlackCanseco said. Every word of it.