tptacek, please don't apply racist comments on this article.
When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction.
Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.
It's fascinating that you seem to find the "largely middle class white" part racist but not the "largely African American" part racist.
Also, saying the Ferguson protests were about "not paying bills" is like saying Occupy Wall Street was about "skipping work". It smacks of either absolute ignorance or some sort of deliberate agenda.
So my comment gets downvoted for pointing out racism in a y-combinator thread. The original post from the person to whom I've replied seems to have been rewritten and now my own previous answer is out of context. Great.
Maybe some people around here assume racism as characteristic of a single group, not as a human characteristic that we all share alike. Perhaps helps to quote what "racist" is described on a dictionary:
"a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
For the record, the original poster mentioned that people of a given race were not paying bills, and that another given race was enforcing punitive legislation, for that reason riots spun at some point. I just disagreed with such point of view.
Reducing a complex problem such as Ferguson (and others) to colors is not correct. But heck, just downvote the one that tries to point that out. Even the original poster corrected his comment, so I'm happy to see some reflection happening.
It's downvoted because the Fergusun protests were not "because people didn't pay their bills", and it's clear the poster simply has no understanding of what life is like when you're forced to chose between paying a bill and feeding your kids.
You feel bad writing what you wrote, because you likely have a bit more awareness of how badly everything is stacked against the poor from the moment they're born, but you prefer to focus on pointless semantic debates along the lines of "color blind" and decrying "political correctness" that are old and tiresome.
At no point did tptacek suggest that people in Ferguson were rioting because they had arrest warrants out for them. GP wildly misrepresented tptacek's points.
Sometimes, something that people are calling "political correctness" is merely "correctness", and is not political in nature at all. The statement tptacek made about Ferguson was accurate, and five minutes (or less) of Googling could have confirmed that for you.
To demand color-blind language in this circumstance is to deny the existence of systemic racism, and to make it impossible to discuss solutions. A discussion about Ferguson without acknowledgement of the racial divide in Ferguson is actively harmful to finding solutions.
When you don't pay your bills, you simply don't riot on the streets as reaction.
Likely not the fault of what you describe as "middle class white" group for enforcing municipal regulation. Likely no innocent parties on either parties involved.