someproteinguy wrote:
Which is great, but in this case I think they're one in the same to the people who are the victims. So if you're perhaps wondering about why people might be protesting in the streets, angry about police & racism, it's very much relevant.
Sure. And that's close to the point I'm trying to make. IMO, the anger currently leveled at the police is misplaced anger derived from the environmental conditions they live in. It should be leveled at the processes that maintain that poverty instead. And yes, I totally get that the police are always going to be seen as a convenient symbol of that environment. It's much easier to point the finger at the cop who arrested your cousin for dealing drugs than it is to point it at a wide assortment of more ephemeral factors that resulted in your cousin dealing drugs on that street corner in the first place. I do get this.
But there's a point between where "the people" point their anger, and where we as "a people" direct our efforts. And it seems as though what's happening is that certain groups have latched onto that anger as a means of self promotion, and use that to feed more anger at the police, and then use that to push for changes to police procedures and other more or less surface level stuff as a means of appeasing the very crowd they just got riled up in the first place. Which, I suppose, may make them look like heroes in the minds of the participants of the angry mob in the short term, but for those of us looking at the issue more objectively, it should be apparent that this isn't actually going to change anything in the long run.
Which is why I see the whole thing as social opportunism at its worst. And the people who suffer are the people whose neighborhoods, already suffering from poverty and crime, become the new war zones in this struggle. A struggle for what really amounts to nothing at all. There's no victory condition in the direction this is headed. Just more violence, death, and tears.
Quote:
Ironically I was just reading
this Saturday...
Sadly, that's just one in a long list of examples of this sort of thing. Quite often "helping" isn't actually helpful to the person you help. I think I mentioned upthread somewhere the extension of the classic "feed a man a fish" concept that by feeding a man a fish each day, you tend to reduce the odds that he'll ever learn how to fish for himself. So it may seem charitable at first, but once that charity become institutionalized (or viewed in the context of entitlement), it becomes harmful to the recipient. And that's before even considering the degree of control one gains over the recipient, who is now dependent on you providing for him.
Our current welfare state was founded right at the moment in our history where blacks had just earned civil rights and most of the legal blocks to black prosperity in the US were removed, but they were still disproportionately poor because they had not yet had time to take advantage of that new freedom. We can speculate whether it was done deliberately to trap blacks in poverty, or was implemented by well meaning social thinkers who honestly believed they were "helping", but the end result kinda can't be ignored. Over the last 50 years we should have seen a significant narrowing of the social and economic gaps between black and white. But we haven't.
Some insist on arguing that it's "racism" that causes this, but it's hard to logically accept that racism has increased since the 1960s, much less increased to such a degree that it could make up for the elimination of all of the overt laws and rules and social restrictions that were in place in our society back then. The idea that we removed those things and somehow magically filled it up with a form of racism that we can't see or quantify, that is in no way overt and broad, but it's somehow able to perform the same social and economic role that segregation, Jim Crow, and a host of other mechanisms used to? Sorry, I just don't buy that. Not when there's a much more direct and logical and frankly measurable explanation at hand.
Quote:
From what I can tell I'm just grabbing the first few links on the page, ignoring the ones that aren't about guns/shooting/etc or are behind paywalls and can't really be read. Those three were all on the first 2 pages. Of course I can't comment to the degree the search program tailors search results based on my previous searches, hence the request for a direct link, given the fuzziness of what may be being returned.
Fair enough. Again though, even reading through some of the links you provided, it's clear (to me at least), that the authors tend to be measuring police actions within the context of a broader socio-economic condition. I'm not seeing anything that attempts to claim that racism by police is the "cause" of those disparate stats. Um... But you do kinda have to get into the whole difference between "racism" and "racial bias". They're not one and the same. A cop may be more suspicious of a couple of black men standing on the corner than a couple of white men doing the same thing. But if that increased suspicion is the result of past statistical probability vis-a-vis likelihood of each pair of men being involved in criminal behavior, is his bias because of "racism", or the result of existing socio-economic conditions?
And that statistical effect gets even more muddied when we're dealing with neighborhoods that are themselves strongly racially segregated. Which I've touched on previously in this topic.
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
But if we're actually looking at the root cause, and searching for things to fix, we should be looking at poverty instead?
You mean racism? Because we really aren't going to solve one without solving the other.
Perhaps. But my argument is that if we can figure out how to fix the disparate poverty rates, then 99% of racism and racial bias disappear as well. The example above kinda illustrates this. If poverty rates were the same for black and white, the it's likely that crime rates would be similar as well. Which means that people would not associate "black" with "crime/violence/poverty/etc". Which would dramatically reduce racial bias, and certainly put a massive dent in racism as well (it's a lot easier for someone to believe that their race is innately superior to another when there are such differences in crime and poverty stats between the two).
On the flip side, I believe that no amount of "fighting racism" will be effective if the underlying socio-economic stats don't change. We've kinda gone as far as we can go in this area. You can only "treat people the same regardless of race" to the point where you run into hard differences that aren't your own unfounded biases. It's not my unfounded bias that makes me avoid hanging out in the predominately black neighborhoods in my area late at night. But that's pretty much where we're at now. That's the "problem" that needs to be solved. And it's not racism on my part that is the problem here, it's the socio-economic fact that predominately black neighborhoods are also predominately high crime neighborhoods that most people who can avoid will avoid.
Hence, my argument that we should focus on that poverty difference. Fix that, and a whole lot of other things are fixed along the way.
Quote:
No worries. In the end I don't think we're actually as far apart on this as the rhetoric would make it out to be. Some portion of this seems to be just talking past each other, and using different words to address the same issues. I don't mean to discount the other problems either, mostly just trying to tease out an understanding of your position.
I'm trying to explain it, but it's difficult sometimes. As I said earlier, it's really easy to point to the last link in the chain and point the finger at it. It's a lot harder to point out that that link is the result of the one before it, which was the result of the one before it, etc, and to argue that we should maybe look further up that chain for root causes, and certainly maybe try to find the one that gives us the most bang for the buck.
Quote:
Get well and stuff.
Oddly, while I felt awful Friday, I just took some cold stuff when I got home, and right before going to bed, and woke up Saturday feeling more or less fine. So yay!
Edited, Aug 23rd 2016 6:16pm by gbaji