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Your definition of racial prejudice is not the same as racism AgentApple Send a noteboard - 12/06/2020 02:49:04 PM

Or at the very least, I don't think it is the same as what protesters are claiming with regards to police racism. I think the protesters are claiming the police hate black people. Hate is not the same as assuming someone is less.


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It concludes, as you say, that black people don't seem to be more likely to be shot to death by police than white ones, all else being equal - though of course it's very difficult to have enough data to actually compare on a 'all else being equal' basis. Even if the data is there, all sides involved in the encounter may have their own incentives to lie or misrepresent what actually happened, especially if there is no video evidence. And when you aggregate data, you inevitably have to use categories, such as 'armed' and 'unarmed' in the stats you quote - but what counts as armed?

Anyway, the same study also concludes that black people are significantly more likely, again ceteris paribus to the extent that can be determined, to be subjected to non-lethal (or non-shooting, anyway) force by the police. Which is probably more relevant for the George Floyd case, as well as Eric Garner and some others, since those involved supposedly non-lethal force that ended up being lethal after all.


View original postBlacks are disproportionately the victims of, and perpetrators of, violent crimes. Fact.

Certainly.
View original postBlacks killed by police comprise 0.1% of black homicide victims. Fact.

On this one you seem to use some funny mathematics though. Using your numbers above, 235 is about 3 percent of 7407.
View original postA police officer is 18.5x more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. Fact.

On this one I'm going to need sources, as it's a far more complicated calculation. A list I found showed that in 2018, 52 police officers were shot to death and another 13 killed by other forms of 'assault'.
View original postCONCLUSION: The police aren't racist. We as a society are seeing race where the real cause is likely the poverty in black communities. There is an element of residual racism there, but anyone who has read any of Thomas Sowell's phenomenal work on trends in the black community can see that it's not all about racism, but rather, also about victim mentality. After all, you don't really fail until you blame someone else for your failure. It's about the breakdown of families and traditional values, it's about government programs that made black males feel useless, it's about a whole host of problems, and generally throwing money at the problem and hoping it goes away hasn't helped.

I agree that the police, taken as a whole, is certainly nowhere near as racist as some are currently making them out to be - some of the posts I'm seeing about how there aren't any good cops and the police should be abolished are pretty far out there. Still, it may be a step too far to conclude that the police and their policies are not racist at all.

In my view this is really a conflation of two separate issues. One, excessive use of force by the police in general, both in the sense of using any force at all where none was required, and in the sense of using more dangerous/lethal force than necessary. Which has a lot to do with the equipment they're given and some of the work they are being asked to do - basically the 'if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' problem. And then when it goes wrong, their superiors have to walk a fine line between punishing wrongdoing without demotivating their officers and weakening their hand in situations that do actually require lethal force.

And two, obviously, structural racism where being black is a disadvantage in all sorts of aspects of life. I think cops in general are no more racially prejudiced, maybe even less so, than the communities they serve - the difference is just that with them, racial prejudice may come to play in life or death situations. There is much more than just an 'element of residual racism' in American (and other western) societies. And just because a racial prejudice is based on real statistics showing higher crime rates, higher single parenthood rates, etc., among black Americans, doesn't stop it from being a racial prejudice: an assumption about people you don't know based on the single data point of the colour of their skin.

It's a very difficult matter, how to redress the crimes and injustices committed against black people in American history and move into a new reality where opportunities are truly equal, because even when there is full legal equality and explicit racism is frowned upon in society, there are still the knock-on effects of the past. Especially considering the economic evolutions of the past decades, the American dream being essentially dead, with strongly reduced social mobility, no real wage growth for the vast majority of Americans and very limited opportunities for poor people of any colour to become rich. There may be something to what you say about victim mentality, but certainly the suggestion that if black people just improved their mentality, all problems would get resolved without any need for other changes, is pretty absurd and offensive.


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I did indeed. - 09/06/2020 08:50:04 AM 320 Views
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Maybe the term isn't right - 05/06/2020 05:41:59 AM 325 Views
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and another point - 06/06/2020 03:37:45 AM 304 Views
A modest proposal *NM* - 05/06/2020 07:14:50 AM 179 Views
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Your definition of racial prejudice is not the same as racism - 12/06/2020 02:49:04 PM 292 Views
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Re: Soooo, it turns out that George Floyd had drugs in his system - 05/06/2020 04:45:41 PM 317 Views
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