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I can't decide what's worse. The quote from the realtor or the golden retriever being seen essentially as a home furnishing. Or are both things equally icky?

And as a Northeast Ohio native, I have a short list of 3-4 suburbs where I think that took place.

Bakeman31092 said:

When you normalize the rate at which black people are killed by police against the rate of violent crime, it is not disproportionate.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Per capita, it's absolutely disproportionate.

...unless the claim is that the police only kill perpetrators of violent crime and that our stats about violent crime are accurate (and specifically the discrepancy in the rates between black people and white people accurately reflect the crimes being committed without bias).

BrettV said:

And as a Northeast Ohio native, I have a short list of 3-4 suburbs where I think that took place.

It usually only takes one or two guesses. I always wonder what happened to that dog...

The nation does indeed have a resource distribution problem. Poor people have less access and opportunity to the resources that are out there to be obtained, and also face myriad stressors and roadblocks to even have the means to begin down a path that so many in this country take for granted. Escaping poverty isn't impossible, but the cycle of poverty is real, and the cycle itself is colorblind. But...

We didn't enslave poor people, we enslaved black people. Dred Scott didn't make poor people non-citizens, it made (even free) black people non-citizens. We didn't say poor people couldn't marry white men or women, as late as the 1960s it was illegal for black people to marry into white families. We didn't segregate our country in vile and inhumane ways against poor people, but we sure as hell did it against black people. And we didn't redline mortgages against poor people, but we did against black people, and still do today despite its illegality. Hence, our lovely realtor didn't comfort my wife and I by reassuring us poor people wouldn't move into our town, but she did let us know no black people would be moving in...and tried to sell us a dog in the process.

Racism and discrimination against anyone who isn't white, male, christian, and heterosexual is as American as apple pie.

Not exactly, Andy. And now I feel as though I'm about the jump into shark-infested waters with a small cut on my arm, but here goes.

The Washington Post has been tracking fatal shootings by police since 2015, and the number of Americans shot and killed by cops every year is about 1000. Right off the bat, that might be a fairly striking number for some, given how much attention has been paid to this issue in that timeframe. There are tens of millions of encounters between citizens and police resulting in millions of arrests every year, so it should be apparent that the probability of any one person getting fatally shot by the police during an encounter is exceedingly low. Also, it must be the case that out the 1000 fatal shootings every year (and this number doesn't take into account what happened to George Floyd or Eric Garner, men who were killed by police by some means other than a shooting), many if not most of them are justified . There are bad people, of all races, in this country, armed with knives and pistols that mean to do harm to innocent people and police alike, and they must be dealt with. Who knows how many out of the 1000 annual fatal police shootings are what you would call unjustified, but at most it is a number in the hundreds.

If you look at that Washington Post database I linked to, you'll see that over the course of the study, which I assume is ongoing, 35 black people per one million were shot and killed by police, versus 14 white people per million. So yes, black people are killed by cops at over twice the rate of white people. But because the job of the police is to respond to and deal with crime, and because ideally we would want them devoting most of their time to violent crime, it only makes sense to look at the demographics of violent crime. Here, we see that in 2015, black people were responsible for 53% of the murders nationwide, despite only making up 13% of the U.S. population. When you factor in that males are far more likely to commit violence than females, by as much as nine to one, then it's fair to say that in 2015, you had one sixteenth of the population committing one half of the murders. Strikingly, the racial makeup of murder victims is the same number: 53% black. There is certainly going to be some amount of inaccuracy in these numbers, one way or the other. It could be the case that black people are disproportionately accused and convicted of violent crimes that they did not commit, and even of crimes that were instead committed by white people, or people of some other race. If in fact the data were wrong in substantial ways, and the truth was that the violent crime rate was not nearly as disproportionate as it seems, then I would change my opinion.

But if the gist of the data could be trusted, and the disproportionate nature of the violent crime rate between blacks and whites was more or less true, then shouldn't we expect police to generally pay more attention to the black community when investigating violent crime? This leads to a philosophical question: is profiling based on race inherently racist? Returning to the point above about the disparity in violent crime between men and women, would we call it sexist if police spent more time and energy pursuing male suspects? Do we really expect law enforcement to split their resources 50/50 to match the 50/50 gender split in the population? Of course not. The police should profile suspects for assault, robbery and homicide based on gender, because males are overwhelmingly responsible for those types of crimes.

Here's another thought experiment: what if the crime rate plummeted within the black community and skyrocketed within another minority group? Do we really think that if the that trend held for long enough, the police would continue to train their attention on the black community? Though hypothetical, that's hard to believe. After all, police have a job to do, and I'm sure the vast majority of them want to do it well.

I can hear some of you thinking: okay, but George Floyd wasn't a violent criminal, and yet he was callously murdered by a white cop, and it's obvious that this act was racially motivated given this country's history of hostility against black people by law enforcement. It fits neatly alongside the video of Eric Garner's killing, and other incidents just like it. Well for starters, it should be apparent that not every killing of a black person by a white police officer is an example of racism. That's certainly true for justified shootings, but it can also be true for other situations that are less than clear or are even crystal clear--that the cop basically murdered someone. The reason for this is that for every familiar video or reported incident between a white cop and black victim, there's a corresponding video of a white person being killed under very similar, dubious circumstances.

Let's try something: read the following list of names and see which ones you recognize and which ones you don't.

George Floyd

Kelly Thomas

Daniel Shaver

Jacob Blake

Michael Brown

Tony Timpa

Alton Sterling

Dylan Noble

Eric Garner

The circumstances around the deaths of these men at the hands of police would be largely indistinguishable from one another, and yet the names you recognize are all black, and the ones you don't are white. John McWhorter illustrates this in his Time Magazine piece from 2016. Don't get me wrong: none of this is acceptable. Police should be held accountable for any and all wrongful killings, yet sadly they routinely get off with a slap on the wrist. But selectively focusing on the cases where the cop(s) is white and the victim is black is failing to paint an accurate picture of the situation, and it assumes that racism is the motivating factor when in fact it may not be (granted, it still absolutely could be in some case).

The killing of Tony Timpa is eerily similar to what happened to Eric Garner and George Floyd. In Tony's case, he was handcuffed, rolled onto his stomach and held down for several minutes by a police officer applying his weight to Tony's back. His frantic pleading that he couldn't breathe eventually quieted down, until he was taken to an ambulance, where the paramedic informed the cops that he was dead.

I have much more to say on this topic but I've been at this for too long, so I'm going to awkwardly stop here. I hope to finish my thoughts sometime soon.

I'm glad that you hashed our your argument in a well reasoned, evidenced way.

Just the hits:

a) I don't believe we should profile in most circumstances. It's an interesting point about men and women, but the power dynamic is flipped there. Men have historically and systemically been given power and law enforcement's targeting of them does not reinforce centuries of oppression. More importantly, though, it's not like there are male neighborhoods and female neighborhoods, so it's not like there's a reasonable way to distribute those resources. I don't think police should focus their random stops on males because I don't think they should be doing random stops in the first place. But if there were an easy way to distribute the resources, then I think it's okay to target males because they are the demographic that's been in power. Policing isn't just about stopping crime. It's has a huge role of creating norms and culture in American society and I think it needs to take responsibility for that.

b) I don't believe police would divert their attention, even if crime was disproportionately in white neighborhoods. It wasn't 50 years ago that lynch mobs were stringing up black people and the police were turning a blind eye or even participating. Just like every aspect of American society (including church, which is obviously very dear to my heart), there's an ingrained culture in there which has been designed from the beginning to deny opportunity and justice to people of color. Traffic stops for "driving while black" are a real thing. I can't imagine some motivation for that based on preventing crime. I don't doubt that some police violence has occurred against white people because there are "bad apple" police officers. I just don't think there's a culture of targeting white people, whereas I do think there is a culture or targeting black people. Either that or all my black friends are delusional. (I know, anecdotal "my black friends" evidence).

In both of your points a) and b) you made an appeal to history, and I get it--those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and history can often inform what is happening in society today. The problem I have is that because you cannot change your history, it will always be there as an explanation. What if it were the case that this country's history of racism had nothing to do with the current problem of police use of deadly force against African Americans? How would you know? You can always look at the two to one discrepancy between black and white victims of police violence and say of course, it is just more of the same manifestation of racist policies that are part of this nation's historical bedrock. Okay, so what? What part of that is actionable? I see a lot of appeals to history without a clear link to what it has to do with today, and especially what specifically can be done about it.

Earlier I posed a hypothetical where the rate of violent crime drops significantly within the black community and rises within some other minority community, and I posited that the rate of African American killings at the hands of police would steadily drop--notwithstanding truly racist cops that I'm sure are out there, probably in higher numbers than we can imagine--as their attention naturally shifts to the group that is committing the crime. Now let's reverse that scenario. Say the crime rate remains the same, but you are somehow able to scrub all racist cops from the ranks, leaving only honorable officers who are as color blind as you could hope for. Do we not think that their attention will naturally be drawn to the group that commits the most crime, and as a result, members from that group will suffer a higher proportion of police use of force?

I have no doubt that former and current laws and policies are contributing to the black struggle. A President Baker would probably start with the drug war, then move on to sweeping criminal justice reform. Unfortunately, that’s not the only part of the story, yet woke liberals often seem more interested in flogging themselves than in speaking honestly about complex issues and offering practical solutions. My worry is that focusing on history to the exclusion of other pertinent factors makes the problem harder to solve.

yet woke liberals often seem more interested in flogging themselves than in speaking honestly about complex issues and offering practical solutions.

I think you made some interesting points in your two posts, but I honestly can't remember them because the only thing that stuck with me is the above. Insulting people seems like a poor tactic if you're trying to change their minds.

Yeah sorry, I did wrestle over that sentence. I opted to try and break up the monotony with colorful language, wasn’t trying to insult or offend (nor was I targeting anyone specific on this forum). My apologies. I do however stand by the point I was trying to make.

The focus on history is there because, seriously, how do we go hundreds of years and still not correct for it? I'm guilty myself of thinking, "Finally, we elected a Black president, that's progress," only to see emboldened racism come out of the shadows under Trumpism.

And to be honest, not everyone knows some of the important parts of history.

This will sound like an odd mix, but in a class with freshmen I do a critical thinking exercise using a famous alien abduction case (Betty and Barney Hill) and Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Betty and Barney Hill were a married black/white couple in the 1960's, and Barney was a civil rights leader in their town.

Long story short, we use Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" to dissect the case to the inevitable conclusion; they weren't attacked by aliens, but by racists.

The catch? For the past 2 years not one of my freshmen were aware that black/white marriage was illegal in this country. I guess they don't like teaching the all dark parts of our country's past in American History classes around here.

The positive? By and large the majority of the students seem oblivious to the fact that they are a black/white married couple; it doesn't even register to them as a piece of "evidence" to help solve the case. I literally have to point it out to a bunch of...."oh yea....I didn't even notice that".

I don't think they teach the old anti-witch laws either.

There isn't time enough in the day to teach about laws that do not apply any more.

The music teacher at the school I work at (county MR/DD) had a lesson for the older students that are more academically abled where she had them compare the Jackson 5 to The Partridge Family and of all the differences any of the kids came up with the obvious that one family was black and one was white was not mentioned even once across all the classrooms.

Jeff said:
The focus on history is there because, seriously, how do we go hundreds of years and still not correct for it? I'm guilty myself of thinking, "Finally, we elected a Black president, that's progress," only to see emboldened racism come out of the shadows under Trumpism.

The real progress is when we elect a black President and nobody cares that he's black.

Obama certainly tried to be that President, but in the trying managed to irritate the racists on both sides: racist white America first of all didn't like him on principle, and mostly thought he was paying too much attention to black issues. Meanwhile racist black America was disappointed because he didn't do enough for them. President Obama was held to certain expectations about how he would conduct himself in office that were based entirely on his race, expectations which, to his credit, he tried very hard to ignore or even to subvert. I think he didn't really want to be thought of as The United States' First Black President, but rather as The United States' 44th President. He tried to be a 'post-racial' President, but much of the country was, and still is, unprepared to think of him that way.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Shades said:

I don't think they teach the old anti-witch laws either.

There isn't time enough in the day to teach about laws that do not apply any more.

About 6 months ago I had an older couple in the therapy room who wanted me to convince their granddaughter (whom she lived with) that marrying a "colored boy" would bring irreparable harm to their family. It was "against God's plan".

I did weigh the granddaughter on a scale with a duck, however; luckily she weighed more so she passed the witch test.

But you're right; those old laws have no application in today's modern society...

Its fascinating that you believe in witches, at least enough to check to see if the grand daughter was one. I guess I have to blame my piss poor education system on not teaching me those laws. I would not have even thought to check for that. I wonder how many witches I am around and I don't even know it. But then again, if the grand daughter was a witch wouldn't she have used her powers or cast a spell on her grand parents so that they would accept her boyfriend?

How would knowing that there was a no longer in place law against bi-racial marriages have changed the situation that you laid out? If anything it would have bolstered the grand parents "belief" - "See, it used to be against the law but those stupid hippies got it changed. They have no idea what they are doing. They are going to ruin this country I tell you!"

Did you tell them the earth wasn't flat or did you save that for the 2nd session?

Shades said:

But then again, if the grand daughter was a witch wouldn't she have used her powers or cast a spell on her grand parents so that they would accept her boyfriend?

No, she would've turned them in to a newt.

Not sure if Monty Python believed in witches.

The White House apparently had a part in making competitors be friends for the sake of scaling production. And while a billion doses sounds like a lot, we sure need to get the rest of the world vaccinated or this becomes a constant battle.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/02/world/covid-19-coronavirus/...ns-vaccine