Faith writes:
Looked it over, subbie. The problem with this whole subject is that any way race can be shown to be a factor in such a profile or any social situation it is assumed to be racism and unjust. I can't make that assumption. If it is known that blacks and Hispanics are more often involved in criminal activities of certain kinds than, say, whites or Asians, then it is simply common sense, realistic judgment of the probabilities, to suspect them. I'd want to see the statistics compared to the rate of criminal activities in Chicago by those races before I concluded racism is involved. I'd also ask how many Asians there are in the city and what proportion of them are stopped under the same circumstances.
You are focused on the tree and missing the forest here Faith. You want to focus on these three individual cases, when the majority of the problem is caused by systemic racism, which is allowed because of unconscious biases that we all have. This is why we need to fight these biases and more importantly, learn when we ourselves have these biases. Are minorities more prone to crime because of their race, or is it the fact that opportunities are not as available for a majority of them as they would be for white individuals. In the gun thread, I mentioned the wealth gap between Arizona and Philly which shows an average salary difference of 10,000 dollars between those two cities. When more opportunities are afforded to minority populations, the homicide rates tend to drop within these groups because crime is not the only option that pays well. In Philly, individuals average low 30,000 in pay and has a high homicide rate, with a minority population of approximately 30-40%. In Phoenix, there is 10,000 more dollars in the average pay, which coincides with a reduction in the overall homicide rate. Plus, there is a minority population nearly identical to the percentage found in Philly. The systemic racism is the area that needs to stop and we are seeing examples of this happening finally. The removal of stop and frisk, the attempts to gut Arizona's SB1070 (Nothing but a huge bill filled with systemic racism), the education system moving away from standardized testing...all of these items remove some of the institutionalized racism that is prevalent in this country. Stop focusing on single trees and see if your life would have had exactly identical opportunities if you had been born black or Mexican. I'm not saying the individuals were racist for sure, what I am saying is that the system is designed to provide opportunities where racism can thrive and create negative effects. The incident with Tamir is one I think where underlying racism trained a cop to assume the child was a danger because of his color. This has been discussed in this thread already with the discussion of the Super Predator myth.
I'm not saying any of these incidents are guaranteed to be racist, but focusing only on these three cases, instead of the institutional system that leaves many minorities with crime as the only option to get ahead in America is what I mean by losing the forest by staring at trees.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. - Richard Dawkins
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. - Issac Asimov
If you removed all the arteries, veins, & capillaries from a person’s body, and tied them end-to-endthe person will die. - Neil Degrasse Tyson
What would Buddha do? Nothing! What does the Buddhist terrorist do? Goes into the middle of the street, takes the gas, *pfft*, Self-Barbecue. The Christian and the Muslim on either side are yelling, "What the Fuck are you doing?" The Buddhist says, "Making you deal with your shit. - Robin Williams
™ Version 4.2
(1)
