Department of Justice Releases Details of Ferguson Investigation

I've never once disagreed that racial profiling or police brutality in general was an issue in the South. I hope the DOJ does file a lawsuit and wins the case.

Although that does lead me to a question: While it definitely exists in other areas, why is it so bad in the South, especially Ferguson?

 

Though African Americans are the worst treated.

Economically slaves were the best deal for the South. They were free labor that the white owners believed to be: "lesser beings". My mom used to tell me, (and she spent six months in Mississippi, the epicenter of the race issue in the South. She told me if you didn't have a skirt covering your ankles a priest would come to your door the next day and chew you out. I kid you not. That was before I was born.) That they tried to believe that African Americans were more like animals to make them believe they were in the right. Even when the Civil War hit, they were a huge part of the economy for the free labor, especially for the cotton fields they heavily depended on compared to the North that got industrialized.

When the Civil War ended, they lost most of, if not all, of their labor and basically most of their economy. (One general actually marched to the sea from deep inside the mainland, and burned, blew up and destroyed everything he saw along the way. Anything his soldiers couldn't carry, was burned and destroyed except the citizens.) They couldn't cope and though later they found loopholes. (Land sharing one of them, they gave them property on their land in exchange for labor.) A lot of people were pissed off about it and resentment grew especially when African American's started rising up in the ranks. There was a justice in the Supreme Court, a few politicians, and some other high-end jobs before laws were passed in the South causing segregation. Which soon grew into the KKK, which basically turned it into a manhunt for African American's.

My mom was there in the 1970's, a hundred years after the Civil War. Ten after the Civil Rights Movement ended. She said as soon as you set foot in the South, it was like stepping back a hundred years. Their beliefs, culture and views were like they were before and after the Civil War. There was a meeting every Saturday night of the KKK, it was frowned upon, (like lynched frowned upon) to have an African American man hold hands with a white woman, let alone date. A white man can date an African American woman, but not the other way around. She said it was the most uncomfortable years in her life, and she was worse off because she ran a boarding house for African Americans.

Thankfully, the South is (albeit) slowly changing with a new generation. But the prejudice is so ingrained there it'll probably take generations to get it to a level like it is in the rest of the U.S. I sadly see this not ending soon. The least amount of a fit that the South threw was when African Americans were invited to go to an all-white school. A huge angry mob screaming and throwing things at one girl who got separated, screaming obscenities, spitting on them, even with the police there as they went by.

Oh yeah, and the state Governor actually brought the state's national guard to help the people who wanted them not to be there.

All nine of them. With the army. In the hallways, escorting them to the school and back home, in the classrooms, in the cafeteria. And when they removed them, the students were assaulted in the hallways, bathroom and other places for going to the school. The white students were only punished when a teacher was in sight and saw what happened. I won't go into all the graphic details, I'm sure it wouldn't be appreciated. But if you want to see pure, unadulterated hate and bigotry by adults and children, read about the Little Rock Nine.

Btw if anyone's interested: The Ernest Green Story is the one about the only senior in the nine who went to high school as it said in the movie to partially see what a microscope looked like. He had never seen one in his all African American school his whole life. It's a great movie.

That is the South in a nutshell, sadly.

 

Pretty sure Ferguson is the mid-west but okay guys

and that report is not surprising in the least bit, especially considering police behavior I saw when I was there about two months ago

 

Missouri can be considered a part of the South. They were at least a slave state. Not saying that was the main reason why the shooting happened and the racism, I'm just pointing out it was a slave state also. I think it was all the way to Illinois at the time that all of them were divided into slave/non-slave states I can't fully understand why... Something about separating the two. I know in the Constitution for a long time a slave was considered 3/5's of a person, giving the South more power in the house. Though they couldn't vote... At all. They still wanted to have those people count so it was considered more people in the house of representatives. But Missouri was given to a slave state because anti-slavery was starting to stir in the Northern states, but the South was throwing a fit so they compromised. Making Maine a state. (My state. XD...) And Missouri a slave state though "technically" it shouldn't have been. with some strings attached about what happened during it.

Wiki is your friend. Use it wisely. XD...

Oh yeah... All these incidents remind me of the deep South during the Civil Rights movement. Luckily there's not firehoses and police dogs going after younger children in these incidents. These are bad enough.

 

Ironically, one of the the reasons native american and black slaves were so handy is that their immune systems were more suited to face the various illnesses and plagues one could come across in the new world. They were superior beings ! As mind boggling as it sounds now, at first a lot of Europeans genuinely wondered if blacks were humans. The Church reigned supreme and dogma is all these men knew, contradictory evidence be damned. Their definition of "human" wasn' t exactly scientific.

Of course, the double standard became more and more blatant as time went by, but by the time it caught on enough wind in the public debate slavery was already an economical reality you couldn' t just get rid of overnight. The Valladolid debate would be a good example of the moral dilemmas colonization flared across Europe.

 

People are racist and cops are fucked in the head. Not horrifying.

 

I wouldn't put all cops in the same mold. I met with a cop yesterday who after five years of gross harassment and abuse by a co-worker who no one ever lifted a finger against said I not only had a case, but I should file a lawsuit against because of how much he humiliated me.

And I went through dozens of agencies before that begging for help with no answer. Not all cops are horrible, just some of them and they get the press time.

Ironically enough, the British dropped slavery way sooner than the Americans. They were actually disgusted from what I heard we kept it so long.

As for your thing with religions, I agree, but the thing is, and I grew up as I mentioned before with a real religious fanatic who was in a cult when he met my mom. (One of the reasons she brought him to the South, to try and distract him from religion since he got a job there. She realized her mistake very quickly.)

Is that if you grew up in that culture, or you have the "Cult Mind". (My dad has it, so does my aunt.) Where you easily accept something as fact like the Church, or that the leader knows everything about God and his word will be the only way to heaven even if you have to eat poisonous shots of jello. (Happened near the border of Mexico, or in Mexico from what I remember.) And feed it to your children for the same results. They'll do it, some didn't and were shot.

I''m not saying everyone back then was a fanatic like that, but if you questioned it, you were a heretic. If you were lucky and threw yourself at the court for mercy, maybe you'd get jail time, that's a big maybe. The church and state were one, one of the reasons why the U.S. was formed and has the rights it has listed, though violated. But in Europe the Church ruled with an iron fist and every belief they had went or you were a heretic. So y-eah... That's probably why a lot of people didn't have science back then. Though ironically the Renaissance which religion (in mostly art) and science had the hugest improvements was considered one of the largest steps in human history.