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Comment by herdcall | Hacker News Reader

It seems publishers have figured out that injecting identity/race into every single topic gets views these days. What is the benefit of analyzing increasing pedestrian deaths by race here?

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There’s a particular political subculture dominant at most media outlets, where “by the way this is about race” is just something you’re expected to say from time to time. It’s seen as disrespectful to analyze an issue without thinking about race. Largely I think you can just read past it; you’ll note that most commenters outside this thread aren’t really mentioning race, despite how you or I would react if we encountered a racist policy.

It could be that places where minorities live have less sidewalks, less street lighting, faster posted speed limits, less traffic enforcement, and their economic status require them to walk more.

Sounds to me like you just described my rural area!

It raises questions of systemic injustice. If there is a demographic discrepancy, it is worth asking why.

Ugh. At least in the US, we already know why.

Due to a pretty dark and nasty history of race-based subjugation; race and inequality were tightly intertwined in this country and we're still untangling it to this day.

So... since finance is an integral component of pretty much every social interaction, economic inequality rears it's head everywhere. Correlation seems like causation and all that, which means that if every single issue is looked at through the lens of "is this racist?" the result is always "uh oh, maybe it is."

I dunno. Seems to me that constantly re-casting economic inequality issues as racial inequality issues is going go to make race relations worse rather than better...

Because socioeconomic status is correlated to race due to a long history of racism. That socioeconomic status impacts where people live, street designs in those areas, parking availability, whether people drive, walk, or take public transport, etc. All of these impact how often somebody is on the squishy human side of a human vs car collision.

You can't improve a problem without first measuring its impact.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to directly measure car accidents with respect to socioeconomic status, instead of proxies like race?

Possibly, though that could miss other correlations that occur with race. I would want a study that also includes location, year of most recent road renovation, local visibility at time of fatality, distance traveled per day by car/bike/foot, and visibility of clothing, just to name a few. That said, putting together a more in-depth dataset may be impossible given the level of information collected. Looking for correlations with race, which is typically recorded in police reports following collisions, is a reasonable first step that can be used to motivate and drive further research.

This is what I always wonder as well. It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.

It also just feels like pandering. Now that the problem is framed as racism, politicians can just paint a mural or something and continue to not actually fix anything.

> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.

That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.

The problem is obviously poverty and not race so it’s pointless to put it in the article except for clickbait. If black people who can afford to live in nice neighborhoods and own vehicles are still hit more often then it might actually matter.

But is killing people of any particular race somehow more or less of an issue relative to killing people of another race? That would be a pretty provocative position. One might even say racist.

Wow, I wasn't expecting to run into the "All Lives Matter" rhetoric here, but I suppose I'll take the bait. Imagine you have two shifts of workers, making the same product. One shift consistently produces more output than the other. That on its own is an observation that needs more investigation in order to figure out why. Perhaps the faster shift came up with a better method, and that method should be taught to everybody. Perhaps the faster shift is skipping a step, and needs to be retrained. The first step is figuring out why there is a difference.

In the case of pedestrian fatalities, there is clearly a difference by race. The next questions are why that difference exists, what can be learned from it, and what needs to be changed. Perhaps it is a difference by location, and sidewalks need to be set back further from the road. Perhaps it is increased miles by walking, and the solution is to have wider public transportation that doesn't need as much walking at the endpoints. No matter what the fundamental cause is, the existence of a measurable difference in fatality rates means that we can look for deeper causes to see why those differences exist, and what can be improved.

There's no racism in identifying a difference in death rates. There would absolutely be racism to ignore and allow such a difference to continue.

Sorry, but I don't understand how any of the factors you identify have any association with race. People living in those conditions may be more or less vulnerable, no matter their race. As between equivalent fatality rates, prioritizing a particular race is, of course, definitionally racist. I agree with the parent comment that focusing on race here serves no purpose other than to make a relative statement about the prioritization of races.

Is it sexist to care that men commit suicide at a higher rate than women?

What’s the point of leaving it out if it’s evident after seeing the data?

"There are no facts, only interpretations". It could just as easily be the case that people with black hair are more affected than people with white hair, if that was the taxonomy we applied to the dataset.

It must be a way to generate clicks at this point. There isn't any benefit

Wait till they look at vehicle pedestrian statistics from less developed countries and have them figure out a way to blame someone else.

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