Smart people saying smart things (4.17.18)

Jason Fagone, “What Bullets Do To Bodies”

And as five years stretched into 10, and 10 into 20, Goldberg built up a deep well of experience in doing the things that are necessary to save the lives of gun victims, the things that are never shown on TV or in movies, the things that stay hidden behind hospital walls and allow Americans to imagine whatever they like about the effects of bullets or not to imagine anything at all. “You think you know what happens here?” Scott Charles asked me. “Because I thought I knew. But there’s nothing that can prepare you for what bullets do to human bodies. And that’s true for pro-gun people also.”

Bryan Stevenson, “On What Well-Meaning White People Need to Know About Race”

We now have a consciousness that terrorists are really bad people. They are worse than criminals. They are people who you may have to go fight a war to eliminate. We’ll put them in prisons. We’re not even worrying about whether they get a trial or not. A terrorist, we believe, is a species of person for whom there should be no sympathy. And our consciousness about that has evolved as a result of being targeted by terrorists. And I think it’s important that we understand the way in which we accommodated terrorism in this country in so many communities where African Americans were victimized and brutalized. And if we understand our own terrorist past, our own terrorist history, it may sober us in dealing with these contemporary issues, but it also may shame us into thinking that, you know, we really haven’t said enough or done enough to recover from that.

Anthony Fowler, “Police Brutality Drove a Wedge Between Me and My Church”

As police continue to shoot and kill black Americans at disproportionate rates and with little accountability, white Christians must learn that the unjust treatment of their black brothers and sisters is not something to be waved away. Instead, churches should facilitate healthy dialog within their walls with the goal of increasing understanding. After all, addressing prejudice, injustice and systemic inequality is not a distraction from the Gospel. On the contrary, it is the heart of it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Yes, black America fears the police. Here’s why”

For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, puts it: “White people, by and large, do not know what it is like to be occupied by a police force. They don’t understand it because it is not the type of policing they experience. Because they are treated like individuals, they believe that if ‘I am not breaking the law, I will never be abused.'”

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and, with their capital, hire or buy another few to labor for them.