Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Where I'm from, or what my background is, doesn't have any bearing on me being right.
That's true.
It has quite a bit of bearing on how you chose to compile and interpret information and which sources for said information are valuable and which sources you chose to discard because they don't fit your personal narrative.
Ok. What sources are you using then? Has it occurred to you that maybe the same applies in reverse? I'm at least looking beyond the bumper sticker slogans. How you are arriving at your position? Cause it seems like you're just joining the chanting crowd and not really engaging in any sort of thought at all.
It's just funny that I've asked several times now for you to provide an argument to support your actions. Evidence that racism by cops is the problem, would be a great start. And again, the end stats don't count, since we're trying to determine the cause of those stats. They are the result of something. Evidence of the sort of rampant racism you'd need to have in our police forces to contribute even a small amount to the stats we're seeing should be everywhere. We should be seeing cops running around using racial epithets all the time. We should be catching them on video, taking black people out of cars and beating them silly,every night, in every major city. We should be hearing reports of folks in the police departments blowing the whistle on this sort of thing. Going to the papers with stories of how the cops talk about black people when no one is around.
Racism of that scale can't exist just inside this guy, or that guy. It's a group thing. Back in the 50s and 60s, you knew where racism was rampant because people spoke openly among themselves about it. I don't see how you could possibly have such rampant racism by so many cops, and none of them mention it to any of the others? Not even a nod and a wink from time to time? Because this is the sort of thing that should be being reported if this was actually going on. Not this one time. Or once in a great while. All the time. Everywhere. Because that's the scale you'd need for racism by cops to be the source of the problem.
It's just not there. The occasional example? Sure. But nothing anywhere near enough to account for the stats we see.
Poverty, and its effect on crime, especially when in densely populated urban environments, is well documented. And there's a ton of research that strongly supports the notion that this effect alone can easily account for the difference in crime/police stats between black and white in this country. Why insist on ignoring this as the most likely explanation? There's actual data. Where's the data on the kind of widespread racism that would have to exist for it to be the explanation? Nowhere, right? Speculation. Guesses. Innuendo. That's it. It's the cause people leap to because it's the cause they want to leap to. Nothing more.
I'm serious here. How do you think "racism" can explain the stats? I'm just not seeing it. And you can sit there and call me names as long as you want, but it's not going to change the fact that I just don't see it. What might be a step in the right direction would be some kind of logical argument, maybe even backed up with some data. But I've been asking for that for the entirety of this thread, and all I've gotten is name calling in response.
Do any sort of goggle search on why blacks are killed by cops more than whites and you'll get page after page after page of hits, the vast majority of which will say the same thing I've been saying. That when you look at the crime rates, which affect the rates of interaction with police, the shooting/harming rates by police are virtually identical between white and black. And when you look at poverty rates as they related to higher crime rates, and then look at relative poverty rates between blacks and whites, the entire picture fills in and makes sense. The cops aren't the cause of this. They're just stuck in the middle. Blacks are 4 times more likely to live in a high poverty neighborhood than whites. That's your stat right there, and that's ultimately the cause of the difference in police shootings as well. And it's also the difference in literacy rates, school drop out rates, gang membership rates, drug addiction rates, employment rates, etc, etc, etc.
Let's assume for a moment that not only the existence of black life matters, but that the
quality of black lives matter. Isn't going after the cops a non-starter here? Even if you could somehow manage to artificially change the resulting death rate of blacks by cops to be identical to that of whites, you're only treating a symptom. And the rest are still going to be intact. Isn't the more important thing to look at why there's such a massive poverty difference between black and white in this country and maybe fix that instead?
Why are people, especially liberals who claim to care the most, so opposed to this? I'd think they'd be right there with me on this one. But, oddly, that's not the case.