wow.. hmmmm its not a lynch mob mentality or a racial issue. Look you can keep on and on, insult me because of my point of view but it won't change my mind one single bit and never have I stood more firmly on an issue. Don't even get me started on "this country" because I'd surely piss a lot of people off. lol

I'm just not going to toss this all over the place turning it into a bunch of non-constructive action. If you'd like to then have at it!

Sachita:

I have no doubt about what you say. None what-so-ever. I'm glad it's not up to you. I'm glad that the chances of my ever being in a position where you would be deciding MY fate is not up to you or a number of others here. I know that it is uncomfortable, and I’m not comfortable saying it, but I think that more than a lot of folks want to admit this is because Mr. Vick is a scary black man. I think that what members of the American majority see when they look at Mr. Vick is the nightmare monster they have been taught, from pretty much the first time someone sat them down in front of a TV until last night, is the most dangerous creature in their midst--the black man.

I'm glad it's not up to you because of your statement that if it were you would have taken illegal measures. I'm glad that it isn't 60 years ago, hell, I’m glad it isn't 50 years ago because probably as late as 1970 you could have reasonably walked up to Mr. Vick, shot him on the courthouse steps in a small Alabama town, in full-view of the local TV cameras and paid no penalty.

I know you would like to see Mr. Vick punished in perpetuity but this is why we have a legal system--flawed as it is--it is to make the system tilt toward justice and not vengeance. What you want is vengeance, what I want is punishment. Mr. Vick committed a crime. Mr. Vick served a prison sentence for his crime. Mr. Vick is now going back to doing a job he is, I presume, nominally competent at. I am not concerned about Mr. Obama's making a phone call, that concern drifted away on the tide of 'teach the black man a lesson' that I've been reading the last few days.

I'm curious, how destroyed do you think his life should be?

Cheers
Aj

It's not a lynch mob mentality? You would take illegal measures if you had access to him and could get away with it but that's NOT a lynching? What, precisely, do you think a lynching WAS if not illegal measures taken with impunity?

It's called my vigilante fantasy. Sorry but I can't change how I think or feel on this. It's not up to me, you're right and glad, thats cool. Now why not respect my viewpoint as I have yours? Because its based on a personal agenda or what "this country" allows?

Still not changing my mind. Nor would I change my mind about a predator that abuses children. To me they are almost the same or at least the emotion it invokes and its truly how I feel. But don't worry, I'm not running for office. lol

oh AJ also you keep wanting to make this a black issue and for me it has nothing to do with that at all. I don't care what color or sex a person is. If they committed the crimes he cleared did against helpless animals I'd feel exactly the same way.

Of course it's a race issue, FFS we all know that men of color do not get tried the same as white men. Vick is a money maker, he serves the man a purpose, the cash cow privilege allowed him that second chance. Your fantasies are one step from the good ol boy hang 'em mentality that I truly believe would happen if people could get away with it. As passionate as you are about dogs, I've that same passion when it comes to our men being given a chance and not incarcerated.

I wish we could ask the dogs.

I was going back and forth on this matter until I read this (highlighted). He could have been purple, for all I care. What he did was wrong. And then I think, 'he paid for his crime, he did his time'. And then I think, I wonder how those dogs are fairing? But never once did I think, "I wonder how those dogs are fairing because of that big, scary black man."

Oh for the next time you may wanna say race issue

We aren't crayons.

P.O.C. works well too.

Oh and there are no purple people.

I know that it's a deflective statement used often when we discuss issues regarding race. That's where my post came from. We are at a point where it seems people are not happy with the punishment given.

What would you all want done to him so you all feel happy. He went to jail, prison is NO trip to the spa.

Curious - Sincere question, for the folks who think that Michael Vick should not be forgiven for what he did. Are you pro-abortion or anti-abortion?
How do you feel about the death penalty?

You know what breaks mine, that I'm a mom if a man of color. God help him he ever fuck up, cause seeing the lynch mentality in this very thread is a clear view of what and how he would be looked down upon if not killed if left up to some.

That hurts my heart, too.

Look, I'm not trying to change your mind. I don't think I can and I wouldn't bother to try. I'm glad you are willing to own that it's your vigilante fantasy. I'm not going to pretend, however, that what I'm reading from you does not have real-world consequences NOR am I going to pretend that you aren't a citizen, capable of serving on a jury. As I said the other day, the fact that if a black man and a white man are convicted for the same crime and you hold every other single factor constant, the black man is much more likely to get death than the white man, is based upon a pre-existing conception that is present in the minds of participants in the judicial system LONG before they see the inside of a courtroom. I am sure you are passionate about this subject and I’m equally certain that if it were my son and he stood accused--not convicted but accused--and even if the evidence was flimsy that you would have no problems voting to convict him and would sleep the sleep of the righteous that very evening. That doesn't mean I think you are a bad person, it means I think you are an white American who, if you were born 10 - 15 years either side of me, were trained in ways overt and subtle to fear the following in more or less this order:

Black men
Nuclear weapons
Communists
Russians
Arabs
Muslims

If you were born anywhere between the late 50's and mid 70's, we grew up with about the same media. I remember that media and I cannot get out of my head all the images of black man as threat.

I know it's how I feel which is why I'm glad that it is vanishingly improbable I will ever have to rely on your tender mercies and the ability to keep your vigilante fantasies and/or other feelings in check.


Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't. The fact of the matter, Sachita, is that the same crime committed by a black man is ROUTINELY treated as being far more severe than one committed by a white man. It goes farther than that. If I had paddled my son in public, I'd be an abusive mother. If my wife paddled my son in public, she'd be a strict disciplinarian. We could do the *precise* same action but the downstream consequences would be highly disparate. She would most likely not have a visit from CPS, I would almost certainly wind up in a courtroom and ordered to take parenting classes. What's more, given your statements, I have every reason to believe that if you were sitting in that jury box you would, without hesitation, vote to convict me of child abuse and then, when talking about why you did, state (and believe) that race NEVER entered your mind. Again, I'm not calling you a racist, I'm calling you a white American raised in a particular time with a particular media zeitgeist. In that zeitgeist, blacks--male and female--are just this side of untamed creatures who sometimes need harsh discipline so that we'll act right. We are incorrigible by assumption.

The assumptions that I am trying to shine a bright light are just *there*, Sachita. They are in the background, it is the substrate upon which we have discussions of crime and punishment, law and order in this society. Most people will no more notice them than a fish notices water. They would be conspicuous ONLY in their absence. This is why I keep reiterating that I do not think you are a racist, simply an American. I am willing to bet that if you did a survey of every DA, every judge, every juror who has EVER been in the courtroom and part of the process that sent a black man to prison or to death row, you would not find one in a hundred who would say that race had ANYTHING to do with it. I'm sure that every single one of those people would say they were colorblind and didn't see color. I'm sure that every one of those people would invoke their black friends, neighbors or coworkers as proof of their commitment to racial harmony. I'm absolutely certain that every single one of those people would claim, swearing on the graves of their parents, the lives of their children and their own honor, that if the defendant had been a white man their voting behavior would have been PRECISELY the same.

And then, when the next case came to court, and it was similar but the defendant was white and he was given life or a long sentence with the possibility of parole and you asked them to explain how they could come up with such wildly disparate outcomes given the similarities of the case not a one of them would be able to explain it satisfactorily. There would be some hemming and hawing about some minor point of forensic or circumstantial trivia but at the end of the day, what we would have is an outcome that LOOKS based upon race and which no one involved in the process would be able to ever satisfactorily explain.

For the last two days, Sachita, that is the point I have been trying to get people to really grapple with here. I do not think that this is going to change your mind much less your feelings about this. But I cannot just sit by while this conversation goes on and pretend, for the rhetorical convenience of those that disagree with me, that there is not something deep in the American psyche that says that a black man who commits a crime is FAR MORE dangerous than a white man who commits a crime and is thus deserving of MUCH harsher and longer penalties. I can't because it's not true. When I want to pretend, I will put in a game in my Xbox, play D&D, watch some sci-fi movie or do something else to take my mind into the land of the fantastic. This isn't a time or subject where I think that maintaining pretense is reasonable.

And again, I'm not trying to change your mind or your feelings about this. I'm just trying to point out and shine a light on what I see happening. It has nothing to do with disrespect, in fact, it is BECAUSE I respect your opinion enough to take what you are saying seriously, to assume that this is a well-thought out position that you would be unlikely to hold, and to presume that your thoughts have actual consequences in the real world if the circumstances are right. I assume that you have meant every word that you have posted on this thread. I assume that you have thought about them before you clicked "submit reply" and that, therefore, there is nothing that you have posted that you do not mean.


Cheers
Aj

From Bill Burton:

Also, did anybody hear Melissa Harris-Perry's comments on msnbc last night? She clarified later through twitter that she thought she had 3 more minutes to talk. I couldn't find a YouTube, but here is her blog post about it:


Last night I had one of those awful television moments that sometimes afflict those of us who spend part of our life in classroom where we have 90 minutes to discuss a topic and the other part of our life on television where we are constrained to four-minute analyses.* On Wednesday evening I joined The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the current flap surrounding Michael Vick and President Obama.

My goal was to offer some historical context for understanding the vastly different responses to Vick’s crime, to the severity of his punishment, and to the sense that he should be given a second chance to earn a living as a professional football player. I believe that to understand these different public responses we need to know how the Vick case evokes often unspoken, but nonetheless powerful, and deeply emotional interconnections between the rights of black Americans and of animals. Instead, having vastly underestimated the allotted time for the segment I instead seemed to argue that Vick’s acts were justified by the history of American racism.* This touched off quite a flood of hate mail to my email inbox last night. So I’ve decided to make one more effort to discuss this complicated issue.

Last year I was teaching an introductory politics course at Princeton University when a campus animal rights group brought to campus a fascinating and provocative exhibit that linked animal cruelty to human degradation, imprisonment and slavery. The images in the exhibit were part of a larger international PETA effort. They were disturbing, but also very powerful.

Many African American students on campus were deeply offended, hurt and angry about the exhibit's comparison of animal suffering to the realities of the slave trade and lynching. The Organization of Black Students organized a protest and boycott. *The campus animal rights group organized a teach-in. *I had leaders from both student organizations in my class that semester. The tension, emotion, and analytic challenges raised by the exhibit became an important aspect of the class. A group of students even made a film about the issue for the final class project. As I sought to help guide my students through these interactions I opened up a new line of research on the politics of race and animal rights.*

Recall that North American slavery of the 17th and 18th century is distinguished by its "chattel" element. *New World slavery did not consider enslaved Africans to be conquered persons, but to be chattel, beast of burden, fully subhuman and therefore not requiring the basic rights of humans. By defining slaves as animals and then abusing them horribly the American slave system degraded both black people and animals. By equating black people to animals it both asserted the superiority of humans to animals, arrayed some humans (black people) as closer to animals and therefore less human, and implied that all subjugated persons and all animals could be used and abused at the will of those who were *more powerful. The effects were pernicious for both black people and for animals.*

Equating black people to animals was a practice that continued after emancipation.*Consider the image below. *It is a picture of an Alabama store during the Jim Crow era. The sign reads: No Negro or Ape Allowed in the Building.*

When the abuse and oppression of an entire group of people is justified as acceptable because they are defined as animals, then it stands to reason the society is suggesting that abuse and oppression are acceptable ways to treat animals. Michael Vick committed horrendous acts of cruelty. I have had dogs as pets for my entire life. I am sickened by his actions. At the same time I recognize that he is one indivudal in a larger society that is profoundly complicit in the abuse and mistreatment of animals. *Ideologies of white supremacy have particular culpability in that attitude toward animals because it was part of the governing ideologiy of slavery and segregation.*

Givent this history we might think that African Americans would be particulalry strident animal rights activists, seeing their interests as profoundly linked. But the relationship between races, right and and animals is more complicated. Dogs, for example, were used by enslavers to catch, trap and return those who were trying to escape to freedom. Dogs were used to terrorize Civil Rights demonstrators. In short, animals have been weapons used against black bodies and black interests in ways that have deep historical ressonace.

Not only have animals been used as weapons against black people, but many African Americans feel that the suffering of animals evokes more empathy and concern among whites than does the suffering of black people. *For example, in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina dozens of people sent me a link to an image of pets being evacuated on an air conditioned bus. This image was a sickening juxtaposition to the conditions faced by tens of thousands of black residents trapped by the storm and it provoked great anger and pain for those who sent it to me.

I sensed that same outrage in the responses of many black people who heard Tucker Carlson call for Vick's execution as punishment for his crimes. *It was a contrast made more raw by the recent decision to give relatively light sentences to the men responsible for the death of Oscar Grant. *Despite agreeing that Vick's acts were horrendous, somehow the Carlson's moral outrage seemed misplaced. It also seemed profoundly racialized. For example, Carlson did not call for the execution of BP executives despite their culpability in the devastation of Gulf wildlife. He did not denounce the Supreme Court for their decision in*US v. Stevens (April 2010) which overturned a portion of the 1999 Act Punishing Depictions of Animal Cruelty. After all with this "crush" decision the Court seems to have validated a marketplace for exactly the kinds of crimes Vick was convicted of committing. *For many observers, the decision to demonize Vick seems motivated by something more pernicious than concern for animal welfare. It seems to be about race.*

It is into this murky racial history that President Obama inadvertently waded this week. Whatever the quality (or lack thereof)*of his argument about incarceration and its lifelong effects on those who serve time, I suspect President could not be heard over the din of emotion, anxiety, and history around race and animals in this country. Last night I found myself similarly unable to articulate the difficult and complex relationships that can make it so difficult to hear one another across this divide. My goal was not to defend Vick nor to condemn him, but to try to understand our very different national reactions to him.*

Ok yes, I see what you mean, really. Thank you for taking the time to post all that. I can see where some people would take issue. For me it really is just about the animals and the degree of cruelty. But I do see your point.