posted by like_that
They also waved american flags at that rally (more so than the blue lives matter flag). Is the american flag now a symbol of white supremacy?
Given that the incidents that occurred to spark a lot of this have been between police officers and black people, I wouldn't think so. I'm not sure I've noticed an increase in American flags of late, so it also doesn't really address what I was saying directly. If a professed Evangelical went on a murderous rampage through the Akron streets, hanging a Christian flag or an ostentatious cross from my porch might be ill-conceived at the time.
posted by iclfan2
Wouldn’t the timing be that once liberal America and BLM started attacking the credibility of cops that people started this to support them? It isn’t only blacks who stood against these police officers. I think it’s a result of media portrayal of these shootings now, plus the growing divide in our country.
The growing divide, whatever it actually is, is something that's hard to quantify, so I'd mostly just put a pin in that. There certainly does seem to be a rising amount of political unrest and angst in the US in recent years, so I'm not doubting it (though I'm not sure it's clean-cut enough to call it a divide). Just not sure what all it might affect in regard to an individual issue.
However, the notion of not trusting the police in black communities has been around for decades, so it isn't something that has just started, and moreover, there are too many examples of it taking place over the years to dismiss it out-of-hand.
Granted, the levels it reached a couple years ago and last year were particularly bad, but it had been boiling for awhile, so the timing really wasn't instigated by most of those who enabled BLM to become such a large movement, because it was a gradual thing for most of them, dating back to at least the '80s and '90s. A statistically unlikely percentage of officers involved in these shootings are found faultless, and as they continue to happen, people become less and less trusting of law enforcement. It reminds me of the movie Hot Fuzz, when the townspeople chalk a rash of deaths up to unlucky circumstances and chance, when the odds of that being true were highly doubtful.
And finally, as above, given that the officers are the "authorities" who are routinely found without fault, those who are victims of the incidents (if not those killed, at least their families, having lost a loved one) can hardly be blamed for feeling a bit raw, and raising a flag in solidarity with the one who ended their loved one's life is, as mentioned before, poorly timed. Not necessarily wrong, but probably unwise.
