Thanks to United Airlines, is flying while Asian something to fear? Good read

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/11/united-airlines-flying-while-asian-fear
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After a man was violently dragged from a United Airlines flight, there will no doubt be defenses of the company along the lines of, “Well, if the man had obeyed he wouldn’t have been dragged off the plane.” In frank terms, this is bull.


The fear aboard United Express flight 3411 should alarm all thinking people about how the American mind has been trained to obey above all else. Obedience is a relentless message in the US, drilled into the populace via education, business, government – and, of course, the threat and reality of police violence.

As George Carlin put it, the American ruling class doesn’t “want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking”. Rather, it wants “obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs”.

Was this was an act of racial violence? Let’s look at what we know.

The Chicago police department identifies the passenger as a “69-year-old Asian man”. There seems to an unhealthy logic in thinking if that if he had refused to give up his seat, the appropriate response was violence. People tweeting “What would you have done?”, as if the only “choice” was unleashing law enforcement upon an elderly person, reveals how the American moral imagination dwells in what Get Out director Jordan Peele might call our collective “sunken place”.

The same logic is often applied to black men who don’t survive encounters with the police: if he’d obeyed, he’d be alive. This message is meant to instill a fear of disobedience in the living and convince Americans that violence to facilitate commerce should be our first response. The Chicago police department’s statement describes the passenger becoming “irate” when asked to disembark from the flight,then claims that he “fell”, striking an armrest and “causing injuries to his face”. That this so brazenly contradicts what we can all see on video speaks to the belief of American law enforcement that the public will obey it, regardless of what we can see with our own eyes.