(June 1, 2020 at 8:59 pm)brokenreflector Wrote: If the answer is no to all three questions, then why are so many liberals and demagogues like Al Sharpton so certain that George Floyd's death is the result of racism?
There's a very strange habit I've noticed on this forum. People here think of the human mind as something that contains on-off switches.
So for example, belief or lack of belief is a constant topic of conversation. One either believes or doesn't. There is no middle ground. It's as if we think of the mind as a little spark of pure reason, imprisoned temporarily in a body of dross.
As a non-religious person, I don't think the mind is that way.
The mind, in my view, is the result of body processes. It contains different parts and actions. There is no reason at all to think that these actions will necessarily be consistent with one another, or that they will lack conflict. So I think that people can be fuzzy, I think they can change their beliefs depending on the circumstances, I think they can think they believe something but act in all cases as if they don't.
It's this way with racism, I think.
Most of us think that racism is bad. So we are likely to believe that we have purged it from ourselves. If racism in the mind worked with an on-off switch, I'd believe that.
But in fact I think that decisions we make that are barely conscious can add up. If asked, we'd say we're not racist, but over the long run we may have done any number of things that would disprove that if they were shown to us.
Any given policeman may be very sure that he's fair. It's the total data about incidents, though, that show constant institutionalized racism. What sentences are given out for equivalent crimes, what percentage of suspects get injured while being arrested, etc. etc. It may be impossible to say whether any given injury or incident is the result of racism. It shows in the total.
I think the statistics show that America is racist.
