Friday, July 9, 2010

Have you noticed

...that pretty much all of the news stories out there right now on the Oscar Grant verdict focus on the rioting and looting?

I wonder
  • why there isn't more discussion about how we seem to always end up with all-white, or predominantly white juries in cases like this
  • why everyone seems to accept Mehserle's claim that he thought he had grabbed his taser rather than his gun (we're seriously supposed to accept that a big bad well-trained copman couldn't tell the difference between a pistol and a taser? for real?)
  • why nobody is asking what the fuck Mehserle was doing tasing a victim who was already restrained and lying quietly on the pavement to begin with
  • how this would have played out if Grant had been white and Mehserle had been black.
I think I can make a pretty good guess on all these questions. And it's pretty damn depressing.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous7/09/2010

    I've just been avoiding news coverage of this story altogether. It makes me feel too sad about the world.

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  2. cheesecakelover7/10/2010

    It's to be expected that the media will handle this badly. The question is just how badly.

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  3. Also, some of the news stories never even mention Grant's name. I thought that was really odd.

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  4. Anonymous7/11/2010

    I wonder what can be done to fix the all-white jury phenomenon short of putting quotas in place.

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  5. Michelle7/11/2010

    It seems like the usual "all the brown people are running wild and damaging things again" line that the media loves to whip out whenever posible. I could not believe that shit after the earthquake in Haiti. Obtaining food from a damaged grocery store when your family is starving is not looting, folks.

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