" Episode 65: Race, police and chokeholds"

"Adolph Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violating his constitutional rights: the right to due process under the Fifth Amendment, and the right to equal protection, under the Fourteenth Amendment. His case rose all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1982, the high court included the nation’s first African-American Justice and the grandson of slaves: Justice Thurgood Marshall. 

In this week’s DecodeDC podcast,host Andrea Seabrook and Mother Jones reporter Dave Gilson recount the case of Adolph Lyons and the legal battle over race, police and chokeholds. The case’s similarities with the case of Eric Garner are palpable and stunning. And the conclusions of Thurgood Marshall show that the issues of race, police and chokeholds struck people of conscience long before Eric Garner’s death."

http://www.decodedc.com/home/2014/12/18/episode-65-race-police-and-chokeholds.html

this is worth listening to. Most striking detail: a genuine argument in favor of continuing to use chokeholds was the idea that black people have extra muscles that let us breathe through chokeholds, so they won't kill us.

Yes.

In high school, I remember having a conversation about the belief that Africans have "extra muscles" in their ankles that let them run faster. My mother was told as a child (and believed for a while) that Native Americans were often window cleaners of the Manhattan skyscrapers because they could breathe more easily than others at high altitudes. And then like, every sitcom ever using the trope of women's periods making us emotionally incapable so that we deserve to be patronized.

It's so, so easy to justify the shittiness of the world by building another layer of shittiness

Related: Sports stuff below