GQStylin wrote:Harry Palmer wrote:Oh, Christ, not this ‘whites are the real victims now’ crap. Do you remember whites or christians being pulled aside for ‘random searches’ at government buildings after OKC? Do you know that when the DOJ finally categorized domestic right-wing extremism/terrorism as A domestic threat they had already in fact been behind the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the US for well over a decade, and the DOJ knew that all along? Remember any decades between 9-11 and Muslim extremists being classified as a domestic threat?
Firstly what does any of this have to do with hockey players supposedly being racist towards non-white people?
Putting that aside, 'right wing extremism' is largely a nothingburger. Not saying such extremists don't exist or that they don't at times commit crime and violence, but nothing they have supposedly done in the past 20 years can ever equal the amount of death, injures and mass destruction in major US cities that was caused during the George Floyd riots and yet somehow that's classified as being 'mostly peaceful protests'.
Can you imagine if it were tens of thousands of white people looting businesses and then burning down multiple buildings in a number of major US cities and destroying property like there's no tomorrow and taking a part of downtown Seattle and calling it their own automous zone for several weeks how vastly different the government reaction would've been? There would be A TON of these protesters sitting in jail by now instead of having all those people that committed all that violence and destruction being largely given slaps on the wrists or even completely pardoned for their crimes.
That the perpetrators of hate crimes are overwhelmingly white, and that despite whites comprising ~ 60% of the population, African Americans 12%, the latter represents ~ 50% of hate crime victims and minorities overall 84% and whites, the overwhelming majority of the population, about 16%.
This depends on what you define as a 'hate crime'. Is it someone uttering a racial slur at you or yelling at you to go back home to your country of origin? Or is it someone actually assaulting you and beating the crap out of you or even murdering you simply because of your skin color? If its the latter than yeah I can perhaps believe white people are big perpetrators of those types of 'hate crimes', but if its the latter then ABSOLUTELY NOT. No way in hell that white people are the predominate perpetrators of violent crimes against non-white people. Just look at the FBI statistics for yourself and you'll clearly see white people aren't even close to committing the most interracial murders on that list despite being the majority population in the US:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xlsSomehow white people have 5 times larger population than black Americans and yet they magically are able to commit less than half the interracial murders than black Americans do. Weird huh?
Also its laughable to me that people can say with a straight face that white people commit tons of 'hate crimes' when the vast majority of people caught on video assaulting, injuring or even killing people of a race/ethnicity different from their own is overwhelmingly black. Just ask Asian and Jewish people who commits random attacks them the most often and they sure as heck aren't going to say its white people. Hell there were several major protests in the US by Asian people in the last year or two in response to all the attacks against them and ask yourself why even then they were afraid to name the perpetrators who were committing the majority of attacks against them? Somehow I doubt they would have the same hesitancy to name their attackers if they were mostly white people, but we can see for ourselves in countless videos of Asians getting attacked who the majority of the perpetrators are and its why stories of Asians being victimized hasn't gained nearly as much media and public attention as it should have.
Also here's some stats in the US with regards to hate crimes:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/offendersI'm not a math genius, but by my rough calculations
235 million white Americans / 3200 hate crimes = 1.36 hate crimes per 100,000
47 million black Americans / 1,500 hate crimes = 3.27 hate crimes per 100,000
So white Americans commit almost two and half times FEWER hate crimes per capita compared to black Americans. So please tell me again how white people are the predominate perpetrators of hate crimes?
In much the same way that losing your job for making a racist joke is much more of an injustice than than the fact that being born black makes you 6 times more likely to end up incarcerated than if you were born white. And that being black means a 20-25% increase in sentencing length compared with whites for the exact same crime. Or the fact that you can take the median income of a black household, then raise it by a full half of that number and still be tens of thousands behind the median household income. Or that you are 1/5th more likely to be pulled over by the police if you are a black driver.Or..I could literally go on all night.
So just to be clear are you saying that black people have no agency or responsibility for their own actions that lead to the outcomes that are supposedly biased and racist against them? If black people are supposedly 6 times more like to end up in jail, is that because police and the justice system are purposely targeting them and are actively trying their best to throw them in prison or maybe, JUST MAYBE they're ending up in jail at much higher rates because they commit vastly higher rates of crime and violence?
Here check out this list of crimes that shows the number of instances by race:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43Go through the list and look especially at violent crimes and then comeback and tell me that you don't understand why some groups of people are going to prison at far higher rates than other groups are.
Just saw this. Bit nostalgic, really, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the naked implication that black people commit more crimes because they’re black. Wow.
I suppose I should have noted in my post the obvious fact that recorded crimes means crimes the police have chosen to pursue, criminals likewise. Not sure if you’ve been paying any attention the past decade or two but, er, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that the police are themselves often quite racist. In fact aside from organizations specifically devoted to racism, there aren’t many kinds of groups/congregations/organizations that routinely demonstrate active racial bias comparable with the police. Now that has been asserted since forever, possibly back to the origins of many police forces as bounty hunters for runaway slaves, but there are legion other reasons…even some slightly more sympathetic ones*, it’s complicated.
What isn’t complicated is this: imagine I really don’t like you…in fact I despise you. I despise all people with your hair colour, in fact, I think you’re dirty and dangerous and I’d really prefer that you didn’t live in my neighbourhood. And I know I’m right because my property value goes down when your kind move in. I look back wistfully to the times where we could protect ourselves from your kind by not allowing you to move into our neighborhoods, and even earlier when I could safely take my family out to dinner without having to worry about them being exposed to your kind. Because back then most people felt like I do about people like you, so we created safe spaces where we could eat or shop or swim or play or read or work without fear of looking up and seeing hair like yours, and all that means. The good old days, you know, back when this country was great. And though most of us felt that way, eventually politicians figured out that if they helped people like you force themselves in where you were not wanted, they suddenly had a lot more votes. So things began to change…not naturally the way change is supposed to work, but shoved down our throats so unscrupulous politicians could get more power for themselves.
It got worse and worse. Next thing you know they were saying your kind could marry our sisters and brothers, daughters and sons. Year by year, decade by decade it all fell apart and, well, look at the state of the world now. I am no longer allowed to protect my family, my friends, my neighbours, my way of life. Had to let your kids into the schools we built for OUR children. Everywhere I look now I see your hair colour where it doesn’t belong. It’s so unfair…we never pushed ourselves into your lives, we didn’t overrun your neighborhoods, we didn’t go into your restaurants…no, we were innocent of anything except protecting and preserving our way of life, but that didn’t matter to your kind. So, yeah, we’re left having to watch everything turn to **** because politicians (who you can bet didn’t let your kind into THEIR swimming pools) dictate to us how we have to live and they never have to deal with the consequences day in and day out. But we do. So, yeah, we’re angry. Who wouldn’t be? In fact I despise your kind even more because you forced your way into our world and turned it into yours, with all the crime and violence and gangs and drugs. And my boss feels the same. And many of my co-workers.
Not great for you, I guess, but why should you care?
Because I’m the local police, and you are not.
What do you think happens to the odds of arrest when I’m confronted by someone like you?
Most of the stats we both provided are not records of criminal behaviour, they are records of police and judicial behaviour. Of course there is a significant amount of overlap, but there’s also a lot of room for discretion, let’s call it. One piece of information provided is outside that, however, because it only exists as public knowledge: the final result. And that result is that p.o.c. get much longer sentences for the exact same crimes than whites do. That can’t be hidden, that can’t be injured resisting arrest. How do you account for it other than systemic racism in the judicial system? I’m interested.
Lastly, there are really only two ways to explain the exceptional degree to which some races are charged and convicted of crimes more than others. Either there’s a problem with the people, or the people who do the charging and convicting have a bias. Forget for a moment thar study after study, investigation after investigation has established the latter as beyond dispute (to say nothing of how police are majorly over represented in white supremacist groups, etc.) and just tell me how it works in your mind. Like how or why are they so much worse people? Phrenology? The Mark of Cain? What? And don’t say poverty or culture, as the former raises the bar across the board and still poor black people get sent to prison at higher rates and for longer sentences than poor white people.
And if there is overwhelming evidence that the first explanation does exist, why would you need another? It’s always been true, in fact it used to be a lot more true. Do you know how law enforcement perceived civil rights leaders/workers/protesters back in the day? If not, great for you, there’s a ton of material that has past it’s protection date and can be read…with some redactions, of course. Heard of COINTELPRO? Fred Hampton? And on and on. It’s better now, but it’s still there and, thanks to phone cams and finally body cams on cops we can see how it plays out time after time.
Unless we look away because we’ve already decided who’s at fault and we don’t want anything to contradict that. Because if we have been this wrong about something this big…what does that make us?
*thought out of fairness I should list a couple.
1) police tend strongly to be conservative. Studies have shown that conservatives are primarily motivated by fear, liberals by anger. Yes, of course both groups share both motives, but there’s an appreciable tendency in the directions as stated. Now, fear. Do you know why systemic prejudices tend to have the suffix ‘phobia’? Worth some reading if you’re interested.
2) The nature of the job, similarly with soldiers in the field, is that you are often required to make really quick judgment calls in really dangerous situations. People in those fields develop a kind of shorthand, call it stereotyping, call it what you will, they often need to decide who is and who is not a danger based on very little information. (Another reason people went into battle wearing very clear COLOUR distinctions so they could tell friend from foe back when you had to do most of that hand to hand and without any cover or distancing to allow for more data input. You swung at the other colour. Though to be fair armies were rarely as absolutely uniform in dress as is often perceived, and another quick visual cue was banners.)
Otherwise they can be prone to something akin to target confusion. Can you see how having to do that day after day, having your life often depend on that…can you see how people living that life might become more prone to ascribing a lot of meaning to very superficial cues? How do you turn that off?
3) But it’s also a big part of the culture. Which is actually built less around racism and more around Us vs. Them, with Them being anyone not on the job or in a related field. And that’s drilled into you from day one. I had a few HS who became cops. They had never, to my knowledge, been even slightly racist (one was black himself) but over time it became impossible to ignore their growing hostile bigotry. I think it’s one reason cops mostly hang out with cops, or soldiers, or criminals.
