I had a discussion about BLM today (I'm not from US) with some of my friends and I feel like I haven't been able to convince them that those protests have a point. Basically it's not a mainstream issue in my country and I feel like it only pops up on local news and websites when there are acts of vandalism, or if someone on BLM's side says some stupid shit (like Lebron's tweet recently).

Basically I know that there are studies that showed that black people are searched at disproportionate rates or that black drivers are a lot more likely to be stopped when driving the car if a cop can identify their race. So if anyone has any resources that aggregate such things it would be great.

  • acealeam [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    This isn't quite what you're asking for, but one I love to bring up is that Nixon's aides later admitted that the war on drugs was just an excuse to harass black people, and the left. Of course, the war on drugs is very much still impacting today.

    “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

    “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html