‘Just to confirm: self-inflicted?’ a police dispatcher asks, to which a voice replies, ‘Self-inflicted’
After fatally shooting an unarmed Black woman who called 911 to report what she thought was a prowler outside her Illinois home, police claimed her death was in fact self-inflicted, according to the victim’s family and dispatch audio from the incident.
Police at first told hospital staff that Sonya Massey, 36, had died by suicide, Jimmie Crawford Jr., the father of Massey’s daughter, said Tuesday at a press conference organized by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. At the same time, officers told Crawford that a neighbor had been responsible for Massey’s killing, he said. Massey’s son said police told him that his mother “had been shot in the eye and it came out her neck.”
“They didn’t tell me who,” Malachi Hill Massey, 17, said on Tuesday. “They were just saying [it was] ‘somebody.’”
I’m not saying I agree with him, but this is the parafox of tolerance. If you tolerate the intolerant, intolerance wins out and the tolerant are eliminated.
I have long thought the paradox of intolerance was bullshit, largely spouted by those who don’t want to put in the effort to actually understand the humanity of the other. The easiest example I can show that pretty handily disproves the paradox of tolerance is Daryl Davis, the black blues musician who befriended and converted many KKK members, including high-ranking people, simply by talking and tolerating them.
Note that you can tolerate the human without tolerating the actions. Actions can be good or bad, people are just people, each as capable of great good as they are great evil, and the only way to actually crush intolerable ideals is by connecting with the human inside.
I don’t think anyone has an obligation to this. Be safe and true to you, but for those who CAN, hiding behind a paradox IS intolerable.
This is absolutely not equivalent to the paradox of intolerance. Taking the stance of “you’re wrong to wish such torture upon anyone for any reason” almost immediately before wishing such torture upon someone is, by even the most generous interpretation, blatant hypocrisy.
I mean the paradox basically states if you want to stay a tolerant society you should be intolerant to the intolerant, which is a paradox.
And here’s a man claiming to be tolerant, being intolerant to an intolerant person.
And yes his statement is indeed hypocritical: “noone should suffer this except you”. But you know… the tolerant society being intolerant is also hypocrisy.