George Floyd

[Neto]

None of this is terrorism. Not rioting. Not killing George Floyd.

English is a rich language that has lots of words to denote all the many kinds of bad things that people can do, and it has those words because they’re different things with nuanced and complicated definitions because they describe nuanced and complicated things. Flattening everything into “terrorism” adds no meaning and illuminates nothing.

It's not terrorism to you. The unjustified killing of a black man, by the police, is terrorism to a segment of the population. And it falls in a legacy of state sponsored terrorism and apartheid for hundreds of years.

As a linguist, I will side with Perlerin here. Words have specific areas or range of meaning, and when you use them in a more general sense, you destroy the meaning of the word, and make it relatively useless to achieve accurate communication. The police action which resulted in this man's death was very possibly murder, and almost certainly an abuse of authority. The response of the angry crowds was rioting. Both actions can be said to "strike terror" in the minds of others, but neither can be accurately described as "terrorism". (Perhaps in a symbolic way, to shock people into realizing the seriousness on the event, but not in an accurate sense. True, Jesus might use such language, but with different wording, and to do so here would require a context or signals of symbolic language that is not present here.)

An case where I WOULD say that a racist response could very possibly be considered terrorism would be the Tulsa riots in around 1920. [A white girl accused a young negro (almost certainly falsely) of attempting to molest her, and the white community responded by burning down most of the north side of Tulsa, the negro business district. Pickup loads of white men drove through the residential areas, shooting anyone they saw.]

I do know that words change in meaning, and (unfortunately) it is usually in this direction - the loss of precision. I guess it just bugs me to see a language abused like that.

One more comment here - It is often the case in situations like this that the ones doing the rioting and looting are predominantly (at least led by) people from outside the community, so it isn't really "people destroying their own neighborhoods".

[RZehr]

I'm not so sure the problem is "in the police departments." Maybe the police are just reflecting the values society holds, but not out loud. Policing is just where reality comes to the surface.

Police are in police departments, not free lancing across society. So police departments need to hire, train, and discipline better. I understand that this may be difficult in small forces. But typically we see these high profile events coming from decent sized departments that ought to have adequate resources and protocols.
These departments aren't required to hire to match the values society holds. They need to hire based on desirable qualities.

[Neto]

The strange thing about the location of this instance to me is that it happened in a city in the North. I attended Bible college on the west side of the Twin Cities, and being from the South (Oklahoma), the Northerners always got on my case about how prejudiced people were where I came from. (They were, too - I was myself until I faced up to it the year before I moved up there.) It was too far to attend there regularly, but I sometimes went to church services at The Jesus People Church, and sometimes at The Campus Church, both of which had a very interracial character. Has the racial conflict gotten worse, or was I just blind to it there? (Maybe it was just a totally different form that I had grown up with in Oklahoma?)

[Szdfan]

The strange thing about the location of this instance to me is that it happened in a city in the North. I attended Bible college on the west side of the Twin Cities, and being from the South (Oklahoma), the Northerners always got on my case about how prejudiced people were where I came from. (They were, too - I was myself until I faced up to it the year before I moved up there.) It was too far to attend there regularly, but I sometimes went to church services at The Jesus People Church, and sometimes at The Campus Church, both of which had a very interracial character. Has the racial conflict gotten worse, or was I just blind to it there? (Maybe it was just a totally different form that I had grown up with in Oklahoma?)

Northern cities didn’t have a formal system of segregation like Jim Crow, but they often had informal systems, like redlining. The North has often given itself a pass, (at least we’re not the South) but it also has a history. It may not be as open and obvious, but it’s there.

I attended a church in suburban Chicago that also was interracial and emphasized racial reconciliation, but there was conflict beneath the surface there as well. The issue of race in the US is complicated and multidimensional.

[Robert]

What happened was wrong and the courts are a check and balance, but often slow to respond. This is also a reason to be careful of a strong government/police state. When the authorities fear the populus, you have fairness. When they do not, you have abuses like this.

[Dan Z]

None of this is terrorism. Not rioting. Not killing George Floyd.

So...now that the officer with his knee of George Floyd's neck has been arrested for 3rd-degree murder, I wonder if it's OK that we call the death of George Floyd an "alleged murder"?

[Neto]

None of this is terrorism. Not rioting. Not killing George Floyd.

So...now that the officer with his knee of George Floyd's neck has been arrested for 3rd-degree murder, can we call the death of George Floyd an alleged murder?

My understanding of what he wrote was that neither the rioting nor the killing were "terrorism".

[Dan Z]

None of this is terrorism. Not rioting. Not killing George Floyd.

So...now that the officer with his knee of George Floyd's neck has been arrested for 3rd-degree murder, can we call the death of George Floyd an alleged murder?

My understanding of what he wrote was that neither the rioting nor the killing were "terrorism".

Ah...I think you are right - I initially thought from the sentence structure that Pelerin was objecting to the terms "terrorism," "rioting," and "killing." I agree by the way - the term "terrorism" doesn't fit here.

[Pelerin]

So...now that the officer with his knee of George Floyd's neck has been arrested for 3rd-degree murder, can we call the death of George Floyd an alleged murder?

My understanding of what he wrote was that neither the rioting nor the killing were "terrorism".

Ah...you may be right - I thought from the sentence structure that he was objecting to the terms "terrorism," "rioting," and "killing."

Maybe Pelerin can clear that up for us. I agree by the way - the term "terrorism" doesn't fit here.

Ah, I see the confusion now. The original post was a lot longer. I trimmed it down because I didn’t want to turn the post into a discussion about words—but I did feel the use of that one word was getting out of hand. I’ll explain some more of what I meant:

The word terrorism is a steamroller word. It’s used to flatten opposition and smuggle in a lot of gravitas that an argument hasn’t earned. It marshals all the force and emotion that word acquired on September 11th. It demands the same unity in response, suggesting there are simple solutions everyone ought to rally around—then turns its borrowed power and emotion into outrage when the unity isn’t there. It doesn’t offer solutions because it isn’t actually interested in looking at the problem.

Regardless of what you think of the War on Terror (right there is a phrase that tapped into the word’s power) and how it was conducted, who here will make the case that the rioters are of the same category as al-Qaeda? Should a SEAL team be sent in to hunt them down at all costs? Should the police who killed George Floyd be targeted in their homes with a precision bomb from a Predator drone? Does putting them (you pick which one) in the same category as al-Qaeda offer insights on how they got to where they are? Does it offer potential solutions to the problem?

[barnhart]

I am confused. What does capitalism have to do with horrible police brutality and then the backlash from those who burn their own communities down?

Maybe there is desperation at not being heard. Maybe those doing the burning (a very tiny percentage of the black community) do not feel they "have" or "own" a community since they can't be safe where they live. Maybe they feel alienated enough that nothing in this country feels like it belongs to them.