been thinking a lot about this.
when Bloomberg was going around NYC defending SQF, he would go to Black churches to try to make his pitch – presumably bc there were people in Black churches that might be sympathetic to the practice.
nyti.ms/2wlr0no
nyti.ms/2wlr0no
it's not a baseless idea: there have always been Black folx who want *more* policing/want something to be done about The Shiftless Dudes On The Corner. (the support of those very ppl was instrumental in getting Clinton's crime bill passed.) nyti.ms/2V63Lbl
my hunch is that Black tough-on-crime types always assumed that they would not be subjected to the consequences kind of policing they were calling for — maybe they thought they were too old/too "harmless"-looking/whatever to "fit the description"?
anyway, that play never really worked in NYC for Bloomberg; he was consistently unpopular among Black folks, and SQF was a big reason why. maybe SQF was soooo disruptive for poor/working-class Black communities that everyone in those places was touched by its effects in some way?
but i wonder how much of his surging polling nationally among Black folks is animated by older folks with those "it's for their own good" inclinations who don't view Bloomberg's record on SQF as a deal-breaker necessarily and might even *like* it on some eggs-omelettes shit.
just thinking out loud.
(i think it's interesting/telling that in that @Gothamist story the minister, Calvin Butts, who has cultural capital and political connection endorses Bloomberg but the congregants don't. different calculus for the marginalized and stop-and-friskable.)
aside: was talking to the v v smart @DrMChatelain abt those Calvin commercials for McDonald's in the 1990s which, you know, were basically full of this ideology!
"it's the discipline, it's the military-like order [keeping Calvin off the streets]."
n.pr/2uO39fY
"it's the discipline, it's the military-like order [keeping Calvin off the streets]."
n.pr/2uO39fY
