It's Time to Boycott Arizona

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by BornBronson

I wouldn't like it,but I know my civil rights and do get very loud in public if my rights are violated in anyway or form in America..my mamma taught me to be like that.

Bronson:

Have you ever had a gun pulled on you by a police officer for being in the wrong neighborhood? I have. Have you ever had a cop get behind you on a surface street and then follow you for five miles even though you were obeying every traffic law and the only thing that might have gotten his notice is that you are brown-skinned with dreadlocks and driving a luxury car? I have. If you have been tailed, were you afraid--I don't mean in the "oh crap, he's going to give me a ticket" sense but in the "oh shit, let me get on the phone so at least if he pulls me over and this goes badly, there's a recording of the incident".

Serious question for you MsDemeanor,my posts are talking about protecting American borders.What do you suppose we do about illegals coming across into America and not getting themselves documented?.That's not too much to ask in my opinion.I mean,when I travel over to other countries I need to carry my 'papers' and show them on demand.When that happens,I don't feel like my civil liberties have been taken away.

You are a VISITOR in that country. We're talking about American citizens being detained and asked to show their papers. I'm sorry to tell you this, Bronson, but my wife--who is white, hazel eyed with red-hair--being stopped by the police is a completely different experience than me being stopped by the police. She is going to be treated as "Ma'am" while I'll be treated as "criminal until proven otherwise". That's just the reality of life in America for brown-skinned people. While you may be sanguine about some American citizen being stopped because she happens to share a phenotypic trait with someone from Mexico, that doesn't mean that we *should* be sanguine about that.

Do you suppose we do nothing,like maybe if we ignore all the drug killings,and rapes,kidnappings taking place it will just fix itself..go away perhaps.No,I feel we need to do something about it.

Straw man argument. Unless I was mistaken, murder, rape and kidnapping are *already* against the law in Arizona and if they are not, Federal law prohibits all of those and supercedes Arizona law. No one is saying that those crimes should not be prosecuted, but that's not what this law is about. It is about targeting a group of people who all share a particular phenotype.

I'm curious if you can answer this question for me. How is that an officer of the law is supposed to be able to tell, by looking at someone, whether or not his person's family was in Arizona for longer than whites knew that this continent existed (there's been human habitation in Arizona since *at least* 9000 BCE) and someone who is from ten miles south of the Arizona-Mexico border and who just got here last Wednesday? That's the concern. The population of the border area--the *indigenous* population--will look very similar because there's not enough of a gap for the two gene pools to have diverged. Given this reality, how do you propose the police in Arizona discern the American citizens (the descendants of the people who came across the land bridge 13K years ago, settled in Arizona around 9K years ago and have stayed put) and those who are descended from the same stock but kept going south into what became Mexico?

Cheers
Aj