America's identity politics went from inclusion to division (2018) | Hacker News Reader

America's identity politics went from inclusion to division (2018)

theguardian.com

12 pointsnil-sec4 comments

> For the first time in US history, white Americans are faced with the prospect of becoming a minority in their “own country.”

I was told this was a conspiracy theory??

> When a grand jury failed to indict a white cop who was videotaped choking a black man to death, black writer Brit Bennett captured this growing mistrust in an essay entitled, “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People”:

I'm sure the author will be delighted to learn that this happens to white people as well [1]. One would also assume the rate of being killed by police would be proportional to the crime rate, as every interaction with police carries some risk, and the rate of interaction with police is proportional to the crime rate. Of course we have to be careful when measuring "crime rate", as it's easy to fudge - a cop might let a white man off with a warning for jaywalking, but give a black man a fine. So you use something very difficult to fudge - the homicide rate. We find that despite blacks being 6.3x more likely than whites (including Latinos) to commit homicide [2], they're only 3.7x more likely to be killed by police (3.5x if only killings of unarmed are examined) [3]. I.e. whites are 67% more likely to be killed by police, per homicide committed, than blacks. The conclusion is inescapable - the police are actually anti-racist!

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/yo...

[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[3] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

This is a very one-sided view of what this article is talking about. That there is systemic racism in the US is not up for debate. It's a fact. Even if your back of the envelope calculation there were correct, you have to ask yourself why there are more black people committing crimes. The reason isn't skin colour, but socio-economic factors which themselves are a result of a long history of oppression.

By turning this election into one about identity, I fear that Democrats are are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If the election was about competence and performance, it would have been a slam dunk win with coronavirus and the economy in tatters. But if it is about identity a lot of people are going to feel that this is a good way of giving a middle finger to people who are saying bad things about their group. Tribes are often very happy to cut of their nose to spite their face. Even if they know Trump is bad for them, as long as they think he might be worse for their opponents, in the privacy of the voting booth, they might just vote for him.

It seems to me that both parties, while not equivalent, are factions of elites seeking power more than anything else. Getting or keeping power means getting votes while enriching your donors and doing favors for your friends. To get voters, there is a lot of lip service and carefully choosing issues that will get certain people to vote. The thing is, you actually have to do something that helps the bulk of the population out once in a while, or at least keep them from being flushed down the toilet economically, or all the branding and marketing in the world won’t save you, even with TV news keeping the narratives going. I think the elites live in an echo chamber and are just totally out of touch at this point. They don’t even know what to say to voters to stay in power. Trump’s success is because he’s a master salesman and entertainer, and then you have Biden hanging on by a thread with the message “Trump bad,” having successfully crushed the economic progressives (including pretty much any Democrat born in the last few decades).

People are angry because they feel disempowered, across the board. Each party is just trying to deflect the anger and put it somewhere else. It’s a silly game.

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