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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

While I’m white, I have heard enough shocking anecdotes from my friends of color that confirms that if you’re not white you have a different relationship with authority.

For example, one of my friends is African and high up at Google. He tells me he get stopped monthly driving his Lexus SUV while driving around Silicon Valley. They always ask him if that’s his car, and when he says yes, they will follow with “are you sure?” I would never get such a question.

While I appreciate trying to dig into stats, but the question is what statistic is exactly relevant here? If you live in the US long enough I think the inequality of treatment and prejudice in society should become pretty self evident without needing various surveys for evidence, as those all will take a different slice rather than look at the whole pie.

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I'd like to offer two thoughts.

The first is that poor whites have much the same relationship with authority as people of color, but are almost completely excluded when it comes to any kind of social advocacy.

This is the essence of racism: it separates people. Those poor white people would be great allies, but no one dealing with issue of race cares about them or enough about their allegiance to approach them in a way that does not alienate them.

The second thought is on the nature of white privilege. All white people have privilege, but the privilege is this: We do not wear our status on our skin. So a black person can have high status but remain effectively low status while a low status white person can earn high status and be treated the way we should be treating everyone.

But, people being people, we show our status in many other ways, and so for a lot of white people, white privilege is irrelevant because they have no capacity to capitalize on it.

Hence, we get a bifurcated low status populace half of which believes prejudice==racism and that is the root cause of the issues; and a second half which believes those prejudices do not exist because they experience the same issues and incorrectly conclude that racism==prejudice does not exist (or is overblown) and/or feel oppressed themselves (which, of course, they are, but not by the people they think are oppressing them).

Sadly, the reality is that racism is this system of bifurcation. As long as they are disunited, the system will not change. At best, the system will flip; and it is this flip that people like the GP seem to fear.

"All white people have privilege".

Thanks for that -- I'll tell you what I tell anyone who tells me that. Move to SA.

"Flag me" -- um... hold on. The comment I replied to was rac ist. That was the most polite response. Now, please dang, or whoever, delete my account. Thanks in advance. I am out.

Poor whites do not in fact have much the same relationship with "authority" as poor blacks. There is abundant evidence that the criminal justice system treats black people more harshly than it does white people. It is also not the case that concern about this disparity has to be abandoned in favor of "unity" with poor whites in order to rectify it.

If you tell people constantly that they are being oppressed, they will start seeing it everywhere. When a white person is treated badly by cops, which happens all the time, they will just assume the cops were general assholes. When a minority gets treated bad by cops they assume it's racism. Do you know anyone that DOESN'T have some kind of bad story about cops?

And then comments that show statistics critical of the oppression narrative will get downvoted. And told "we don't need evidence to support our beliefs."

I know my father started to get pulled over a lot after the push against drunk driving. Because he worked late hours. And the cops were on edge looking for drunks driving home from bars. And cop to car ratio was much higher at that time.

For every crime category we have data on, blacks are about as likely as whites to be arrested. In some cases like robbery, much less likely. https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... The traffic stop data is anomalous if true. And may very well be explainable by other factors.

In fact, black people are way, way more likely to be incarcerated, and get harsher prison sentences, than white people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black...

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/18/mass-incarce...

http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

Because they commit more and worse crimes. They are not more likely to be arrested and convicted than a white person. And we know this because of surveys of victims and crime reports that record the race. Like that chart I posted.

The only part of the system that shows any possible racial bias at all is sentencing. And it's only 19%, much smaller than claimed elsewhere. It's well within the margin of error in this stuff as well, given they can't possibly control for every relevant factor (e.g. if their crimes actually are 20% worse. In fact I can't see in this study they even controlled for region, and some states have harsher sentencing than others.)

It's worth noting that ugly people get sentences twice as long as attractive people (but are also not more likely to be convicted.) That's 10 times the disparity observed for blacks. Judges give much harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungry.

Sentencing is just a shitty system that should be replaced. Some states have tried to replace it with statistical algorithms that predict recidivism. And people like you are the first to protest that.

It's a shame you're being downvoted. I fear people get married to their preferred explanations about causes, even when you basically agree about the effects.

And my comment has been flagged too. The political censorship on HN is ridiculous.

both can be true. you can have discrimination and also have people who think every negative outcome is due to racism when it is not.

Brietbart/Buzzfeed actively push not looking at actual complex reasons in favor of inflammatory headlines that lead to clicks. For them it is race 100% of the time. If you see this everyday it isn't surprising that people start to believe everything is due to race.

From the personal experience of being harassed by campus police as a The Black CS student, in addition to all the straight racist traffic pullovers, I can affirm that it really really sucks. I can also state that having the first hand accounts of uncles and aunts and parents and grandparents subject to the state sponsored racialized attacks of the US South West North and MidWest that yes, it was a thing, it continues to be a thing. When you’ve heard officers with weapons issue racial insults , you don’t need articles with stats to be convinced.

I grew up in a place where the racial bias narrative of policing was just something I knew to be true. It took a long time, and a lot of statistics from a ton of sources to realize that aside from sentencing, it’s mostly that the system as a whole sucks. The problem is the correlation between race and poverty, and poverty and crime. It’s fair to point to the history of mistreatment of black people in the US as a root driver of poverty, and therefore crime, but that’s often lost in the noise.

Take the recent shooting of a young black man in his grandmother’s yard. The narrative is now that he was unarmed, and shot in the back. While true, both points are deceptive. He was unarmed, but he ran from the cops, at night, didn’t follow commands, and had a metallic object in his hands when he turned to face the officers. This was all caught on FLIR. He was shot in the back, after the first shot to his front spun him around. Don’t run. Don’t resist. Comply with commands and argue your case in court. Your odds of being shot go down to near zero when you’re not running away or acting like a lunatic. Even in cases of obvious abuse like that poor bastardized NYPD cops strangled to death, were predicated on resisting arrest.

As long as people fleeing and resisting gets conflated with cases of compliant people being abused, not much will change. As long as cases of disproportionate arrests rates are conflated with wrongful arrests and convictions, not much will change. The two major predictors of have a bad time in the system are socioeconomic class, and how you act with officers. Race is a factor in sentencing, but that seems to rarely be the issue talked about in popular cases.

WThe narrative is that an unarmed young black man was shot in his grandmother's yard because the police did, in fact, shoot an unarmed young black man in his grandmother's yard. That narrative isn't "deceptive". It is what in fact happened.

People of African descent are rarely found high up at google. When I worked there a decade ago, you wouldn't notice a black engineer roaming around for months on end. Not counting the chefs or the security staff of-course.

While you can blame America for the inequality, you can hardly blame the cops or society for the prejudice your friend experienced. How often would the cop stop a black engineer in a lexus who didn't turn out to be a carjacker?

Yes, you can. You can literally blame the cops. If they want to verify the ownership of the car, they can easily check the papers. It’s also about making the driver aware of the fact that they don’t think he could possibly be driving this car.

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