http://wondermark.com/1k62/

It’s a comic about asking for evidence as a method of shutting down arguments. It’s not their responsibility to educate you. If you want to know the answer to your question, you could easily do research to understand the perspective of the author without demanding that they explain it to you in detail.

If that happens, by all means let us know. But what gets lost a lot of the time when conversations about incidents like this devolve into arguments over who’s got the facts is that, regardless of what’s ultimately provable or what’s ultimate not, we have a problem.

We’ve created a society wherein attempts to organize social groups of white people feels like a hateful action to non-white people. Yes, I know the same applies in the other direction. But the reason I and others put the emphasis on non-white communities is about relative power. Black men are being killed. Often. By police. Without provocation. On video. And those killers aren’t punished - they’re defended. And what you hear when you listen to black voices is: “This has been happening to us for hundreds of years. Welcome to our lives. Stop killing us.” The oppression and censorship feared by white folks pales in comparison to the obvious mortal threat that black people are under in this country. To spend time arguing over whether *this* group is *actually Neo-Nazi* is to get distracted from dealing with far more important issues than the possibility that we’ve maligned innocent white people.

I think it’s openly biased, angry, and certainly not an attempt at civilized discourse. I agree with the author and quite possibly would’ve done the same thing, although I tend to be cautious to the point of reticence in making public statements.

I support the decrying, defamation, and dismantling of white nationalist sentiment though, so I mean, it’s hard for me to really muster any outrage about what unfair statements are made in the context of that project. You police our guys, we’ll police yours. I’m not saying I agree with everything my guys do, but my alliance with them means that my default is going to be defending them when they act out of emotion more than reason. That’s not to say it’s right - it’s more about having the right to express anger.

Sure. I love civilized discourse and mutual respect as much as the next guy. I think what people are reacting to is the unwillingness of many white people to accept any real responsibility for the violence that is happening every day to non-white people. I think that’s justified. To me, and to a lot of people, the onus of reasonability is on the white folks. We cannot afford to fight anger with anger, nor can we afford to refuse understanding until non-white anger stops. Exactly because white people DO have the lion’s share of institutional power, it’s up to us to listen and be understanding.

So, presumed hate group, show up and talk to us, let us express our anger, and answer it with compassion and respect. Then we’ll stop tearing down your posters and calling you Nazis. It’s not fair, but neither is disproportionate violence.

I hear you. Yes, there are problems. We’re all concerned, no matter who’s getting hurt. Yes, white people get hurt by black people. In talking about the things I’m talking about, it is not my intent to deny or ignore that.

So why am I not talking about black-on-white violence? Because it’s not the specific tragedy that has my attention right now, that’s all. No matter who else is getting hurt or killed and no matter who’s doing it - we are seeing video tapes of these people dying. And there are a lot of them.

Are there more deaths here than somewhere else? I honestly don’t know. Do we only get to care about the category with biggest number? Because what I see when I watch these videos is very straightforward: people being killed by police who often were demonstrably in no immediate danger. Men pinned on the ground. Men running away. Men locked up in the back of a police van. Men reaching for their ID. And even in those situations, we have non-lethal methods of subduing people, which police are trained to use, and often do.

How can anything, even black-on-white violence, possibly excuse the sorts of things we’re seeing? Does anything ever justify killing? If we want it to stop (and we DO want it to stop, right?) then we need to talk about what the people in power, the ones holding the guns, can do to help make it better.

You’re looking for victim culpability to excuse the cops’ actions. He had a gun! He might’ve had a gun! They thought he had a gun! He made a threatening move! He had an arrest record! He was doing something illegal!

None of those things, even when they are true, warrant death. And what we’re talking about here is the fact that we’re watching police kill black men in situations that escalate quickly, and often (according to bystanders) nonsensically. Whatever else is true, we need to fix that.

Your claim is that cops are justifiably scared of black people. Justifiably enough to choke them to death for selling cigarettes? For selling CDs? Justifiably enough to shoot a twelve-year-old child without any warning? Is there a level of fear that wouldn’t be justifiable? How could we tell when we get there? What do we do about it when we get there?

By all means, let’s advocate for white safety. I don’t want ANYONE getting killed. But to stand on a soapbox and say “this is not a problem because something else is also a problem” is simply absurd.

I would be way more likely to resist arrest too if i was seeing new videos surface almost daily showing cops killing people who look like me. It’s fine that cops are scared. It’s true that violence and crime are reported disproportionately by race. But do you want to do something about that, or do you want to blame black men for the fact that they live in a world that white people wouldn’t even recognize? We arrest and kill their fathers, offer little to no support to their mothers (and demonize them as “lazy” when they accept our help), and defend police who start treating young boys as potentially dangerous criminals before they even hit puberty.

Cops are scared. Cool. They have a scary job. Black men are scared too. LIVING is a scary job, when you’re black in this country. Because people like you want everybody to believe that there’s something about black men that’s rotten, and that it’s not the faults of the rest of us who jealously guard our safety, our comfort, and our resources against any suggestion that perhaps the balance we’ve struck is systemically unfair to certain groups.

Cite all the statistics you want, but you’re advocating for continued assault on a group of people that you’re identifying by the color of their skin. It’s nice that you think it’s their fault that you and so many others are scared of them, but that doesn’t change the callousness and brutal unconcern of your attitude.

Thats not the point. The author of this article is the journalist — it’s HER job to specifically and explicitly detail if and why they are, as she claims, a white supremacy group. Even if they were, you wouldn’t know it by this article. All you’d know is that this young girl shouldn’t have graduated from journalism school.