2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: "Interrupting Bernie: Exposing the White Supremacy of the American Left" [View all]arithia
(455 posts)I see now why that person was ignoring you- your reply is rude and includes personal attacks/assumptive fallacies. Blind? When you make assumptions about "blindness" and the other person's knowledge base, you are falling back on logical fallacy instead of reasoned argument.
When someone beats their intimate partner, they are violating that person's right to safety and security as defined by law. When the law itself is defined in such a way to allow government actors to violate a person's right to safety and security, it's far more problematic. An abuser cannot personally strip you of your rights under the law. A government agent can.
An abuser cannot personally throw you in jail (unless they are a government actor themselves). Due process under the law is something we are all afforded by the 14th amendment, but that right is stripped away through discriminatory practices such as stop and frisk. Skin color is not an indication of criminality, yet it is used by various government agencies to target minority demographics for disparate treatment and prosecution. (See also Sherrif Joe Arpaio and his department's treatment of hispanics for a non-black example. Another can be found in the Indian Adoption Project, which took native children away from their homes without cause or recourse for raising by white families.)
While an abuser can control your freedom through threats and violence, victims of domestic abuse can seek protection from their abusers through government actors and agencies (ie, the police). When it is the police controlling your freedoms through threats and violence, individuals have limited access to resources that can help them escape that threat. They can report it to the agent's superiors and hope they do not simply protect their own, which often the case even in the face of video evidence of abuse. They can sue the government agent/agency and hope that the behavior changes from the top down... and that's frequently *it*.
If you look at the history of women in the US, you can see examples of overreach by government actors- particularly in the faces of suffragettes. Women were locked up against their will in jails and insane asylums because they advocated women's voting rights. While many individuals were opposed to giving women the right to vote when the movement started, it was ultimately the government body preventing them from exercising that right. It was the government locking them up for freedom of speech and assembly. It was the government force feeding them in jails.
Because it was the government doing so, only the government could enact a change. When women were granted the rights to own property, open lines of credit in their name and other important bits of women's lib- it came from the government granting that right. Yes, women fought for those rights just as people fought for an end to slavery. Both groups were chattel under US law, only one still is. (Slavery never really ended. We just freed slaves on paper and then filled our jails with non-whites using soft racism and then forced them to work. It's kinda like how child labor is illegal on the books yet we have 10 year old migrant kids legally picking our veggies.)
What's happening to blacks, latinos, Native Americans, the mentally ill (over half of all killed by the police this year were mentally ill and intimate partner violence disproportionately impacts that group) and other groups lacking political power is abuse on a bigger scale. I'm not talking in terms of numbers. I'm not talking in terms of ubiquity. I'm talking about scale and sphere of influence. I'm talking recourse and opportunities to escape the abuse.
Big Brother has longer arms than a domestic abuser. What color or form Big Brother takes when he's doing the swinging is irrelevant to the fact that it's happening. No one here is trying to downplay the horrors of domestic abuse, but you are in fact trying to downplay another group's trauma by saying it's not as important or widespread as another problem. I hope you are at least on some level cognizant of that fact.
What you are doing is akin to saying violence against women doesn't matter in countries where women are allowed to vote, own property and choose their husbands.