80 karma · joined April 15, 2020
Dislikes: Police brutality
Sorry it's out of order.
" New HUD Report Shows Continued Discrimination Against People of Color" [10] -- "People of color looking for homes are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than their white counterparts."
"Police harassment affects half of black youth, one-third of whites, study says" [11] -- "Ever since a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old walking home from a convenience store, criticism of unfair treatment of people of color by police has been a near-constant headline.
But the issue is hardly new to young black Americans, over 50 percent of whom reported knowing a victim of police harassment or violence in 2009, well before Michael Brown or Freddy Gray were household names throughout the country."
"You really can get pulled over for driving while black, federal statistics show" [12] -- "The Justice Department statistics, based on the Police-Public Contact Survey, show that "relatively more black drivers (12.8%) than white (9.8%) and Hispanic (10.4%) drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop during their most recent contact with police." Or, to frame it another way: A black driver is about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver, or about 23 percent more likely than a Hispanic driver. "Driving while black" is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon."
"‘Walking while black’ can be dangerous too, study finds" [13] -- "Sadly, it seems, “walking while black” can have dangerous consequences.
That’s because a recent study suggests motorists are less likely to stop for an African American pedestrian in a crosswalk. A black pedestrian’s wait time at the curb was about 32 percent longer than a white person’s. Black pedestrians were about twice as likely as white pedestrians to be passed by multiple vehicles.
The small but provocative study — conducted by researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Arizona — suggests that biases just outside people’s conscious awareness can make them less likely to yield to minority pedestrians. And that could put those pedestrians at risk, said Kimberly B. Kahn, an assistant professor of social psychology at Portland State University."
If you'd like, we can discuss gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other forms of disenfranchisement of minorities, which prevents any meaningful change to systemic racism.
[9] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
[10] https://www.demos.org/blog/new-hud-report-shows-continued-di...
[11] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/1104/Police-ha...
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/09/you-r...
[13] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2015/10/2...
"Black Preschoolers Far More Likely To Be Suspended" [4] -- "Here's what the education data show: kids who are suspended or expelled from school are more likely to drop out, and those dropouts are more likely to end up with criminal records. In many places, school discipline pushes kids directly into the juvenile justice system. Take just one example: a school fight can end in an arrest for assault.
Education and civil rights groups have dubbed this phenomenon the "school-to-prison pipeline." There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that white students, even when the infractions are the same.
A new government study on discipline in the nation's public schools shows just how very early that gap is present. According to the report, black children make up 18 percent of preschoolers, but make up nearly half of all out-of-school suspensions. (We're talking mostly four-year-olds, people.)"
"CIVIL RIGHTS DATA COLLECTIONData Snapshot: School Discipline" [5] -- "Disproportionately high suspension/expulsion rates for students of color", "Disproportionate suspensions of girls of color",
"The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children" [6] -- "The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers.We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less “childlike” than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). Weexpected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being moreresponsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support forthese hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods.We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a lessessential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These datarepresent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this researchsuggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities."
"Black Crime Rates: What Happens When Numbers Aren’t Neutral" [7] -- "(1) If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person is more likely to be arrested. This is due in part to the fact that black people are more heavily policed.", "(2) When black people are arrested for a crime, they are convicted more often than white people arrested for the same crime.", "(3) When black people are convicted of a crime, they are more likely to be sentenced to incarceration compared to whites convicted of the same crime."
"Data Show Racial Disparity in Crack Sentencing" [8] -- "Speaking on the House floor last week, California Republican Rep. Dan Lungren acknowledged the potential racial effects of the old sentencing structure. "Certainly, one of the sad ironies in this entire episode is that a bill [the old sentencing structure] which was characterized by some as a response to the crack epidemic in African American communities has led to racial sentencing disparities which simply cannot be ignored in any reasoned discussion of this issue," said Lungren."
[3] https://washington.cbslocal.com/2015/12/14/study-african-ame...
[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211...
[5] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-discipl...
[6] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0035663.pdf
[7] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-crime-rates-your-st_b_8...
[8] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-ra...
"African-Americans With College Degrees Are Twice As Likely to Be Unemployed as Other Graduates" [1] -- "Schmitt pointed to a series of studies that have in recent years found that when trained sets of black and white testers with identical resumes are sent on interviews, white men with recent criminal histories are far more likely to receive calls back than black men with no criminal record at all."
"DiTomaso says the study, like other research, challenges the assumption that opportunity is available to all Americans who equip themselves with the right skills. Private-sector labor data reported to the federal government shows little change in the share of management and executive-level jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities since the 1980s, she said. In fact, in industries that offer workers the best wages, the share of white men in these jobs has actually grown.
The researchers behind the center's study of black college graduate employment patterns emphasized the role that the recession has played in dampening every worker's employment prospects. But they concluded that the long-term unemployment crisis among black college graduates ultimately could not be explained without accounting for continuing discrimination against black applicants."
"Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" [2] -- " We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market."
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-goo...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/african...
I strongly disagree with this premise. It's the claims that "systemic racism is dead" that are unfounded and easily refuted.
Now imagine that OP inspires 100 employees quit -- now Facebook has a problem that it must address, because it's threatening their bottom line.
"Liberal" and "conservative" aren't the only political flavors, either. Lots of leftist activists don't work with liberals and lots of right-wing activists don't work with conservatives, for example. It's also difficult to work with someone whose beliefs conflict too much with your own or whose views are dehumanizing (like, I wouldn't want to work with someone who regards themselves as superior because of their race).
> "WTF is the impulse behind changing #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter. Do you crash strangers' funerals shouting I TOO HAVE FELT LOSS" - @arthur_affect on Twitter
For brevity's sake, I'm also ignoring a lot of other serious issues related to police relations with the citizens of LA (e.g., Watts riots in '65, Rodney King in '92), which should be considered to paint a full picture of the antagonisms that have led us to where we are today. The drug war didn't create gangs (they existed before), but it poured fuel on the fire which led to a lot of the violence in that area in the 80s/90s.
I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree?
> No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.
Now we're getting somewhere. By itself, no, it didn't. Institutionalized racism in the forms of employment, education, and housing discrimination carried from the 1960s caused largely-minority communities to remain segregated and poor while at the same time, white flight took money from the inner cities and moved it to the suburbs, leaving behind an underfunded and broken education system [0]. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act are relatively recent developments: 1964 and 1968, respectively -- just a little over 10 years before your father got to LA. By the 80s, increased class stratification and tough-on-crime initiatives from the federal government meant minorities and the poor faced even more disproportionately aggressive policing and incarceration. With little hope of achieving the same success as their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs, many individuals turned to crime as a mode of survival. Then came Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and gangs.
Of course, if you're talking about true gangs in the US during this time, we can also discuss the American mafia, white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, or even the gangs depicted in the film, "Gangs of New York" in the "Five Points" area of NY (but this is an example of some of the first gangs in the US, around the late 1700s -- thought some historical context would be interesting). These gangs, however, have faced less scrutiny because of their close connections with law enforcement and government.
[0] For a heartbreaking account of the devastating long term effects of this, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"
You were speaking about crime in the 70s and 80s. That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?), brought to you by the same administration who gave us Iran-Contra [1], which largely introduced the US (LA specifically) to crack cocaine [2]. I believe every single person involved with that scandal was pardoned. Oliver North even had his own show on Fox News and became president of the NRA!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#CIA_and_Contra_co...
We spend so much time defending the rights of police to use military-grade weaponry on individual citizens that we forget that the people who are actually looting this country and committing its most grievous crimes are largely ignored.
> I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.
It takes a lot of investment in the community, but it works: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
Yes, I agree that the portrayal of minorities in the mass media in the Western world is incredibly racist. Part of the reason for this is the racism inherent in the US justice system -- you're currently witnessing worldwide protests over it.
However, I also see many representations of non-minorities portrayed in negative light -- why is it that only minorities are forced to atone for fictionalized representations of themselves and are not regarded as individuals with their own agency, lives, dreams, hopes, pains, and instead must be lumped into the same group and called to account for the actions of someone that happens to have the same skin color?
> By the way, this is not limited to race, but also for example applies to people with tattoos. If all tattooed people you see are criminals, you are scared by tattooed people as well. It works with every property of people that's easily visible.
People choose to be tattooed.
"Be more visibly obedient to the cultural norms of racists" is not a valid suggestion for addressing systemic racism.
And why isn't it that the non-minorities shouldn't be the ones who are groveling and seeking to be model citizens? Remember that if a white police officer hadn't killed a black man in the street, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. By your logic, shouldn't all white people now be tainted by his actions and forced to acquiesce to cultural standards set by non-whites?
If I disparaged your race, would you say the onus is on you to prove me wrong?
> "To see this - traffic blocking the main intersection of a level 1 trauma centre, blocking the entrance and exit to our hospital. Blocking patients from receiving care that they need, makes me angry. It hurts. It hurts a lot," said one healthcare worker on Facebook.
> WLNS reports another posting: "You are currently blocking ambulances, physicians and caregivers from making it to work to care for the sick and relieve the exhausted workers.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Quotes a local news story: https://www.wlns.com/news/health/coronavirus/capitol-protest...
> By allowing gay marriage, you are forcing your views on everyone
This is a straw man. People don't choose to be gay, and conservatives are depriving people of their rights for something they can't choose. Allowing individuals the right of self determination is nowhere near allowing a sitting president to incite violence against American citizens.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I believe that the justice system in the US is inextricably tied to systematic, institutionalized racism, and that the justice system and its roots cannot be divorced from those who are enforcing its laws. Minorities in this country are arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced differently from their white counterparts because of that institutionalized racism.
> Why should I choose? I oppose violence (or even excessive force) by police officers, and I oppose arson by rioters. And I oppose both for the same reason.
Fair enough.
> And, "it hasn't kill anyone yet" is a pretty weak counter to the claim that arson can be violence. In fact, people do die from arson. The fact that nobody has - yet - in these protests does not change that whatsoever.
Okay, but then people are more likely to be killed by a police officer than by arson. So why don't we focus on the actual violent catalyst for all the protesting (and the ones playing out all over the country), which actually happened? Why are we so focused on the potential of the protestors to accidentally kill someone, rather than the very real threat of police actually killing unarmed US citizens?
One of these types of supposed violence is actually much more deadly than the other, with ample evidence.
I still haven't seen any evidence whatsoever that any homes have been looted or burned by protestors, or that anyone has been killed by protestors. Only "what if"s, like "what if the fire killed someone?" It didn't, but we have a very real case of a police officer killing someone -- shouldn't that be the most important thing we're focusing on here?
I need evidence here.
> and businesses
Businesses like Target, who come into small communities, push out the mom-and-pops, then raise prices?
> there are plenty of assaults and murders if you're not convinced
I'm not convinced, and I need evidence that a) the shootings that you're about to link to are in fact linked to the protests (because in one case it seems like a drive-by) and b) the assaults were not self-defense from e.g., someone pointing a weapon at a crowd of people or e.g., a truck driver attempting to plow through a crowd of peaceful protestors.
You are not engaging in earnest debate. You are attempting to deflect and discredit, as in this post. I’m not new to this place or these tactics.