Chauvin Murder Trial

[Irreligious Atheist]

That may be the case, that stats in and of themselves aren't racist (at least assuming they're accurate and brought up in good faith.) The key question is why you're bringing it up and what you think you have to say about it. For instance, here's a statistic: "The average drunk driver drives under the influence more than 80 times before being arrested the first time." So, why am I bringing this stat up? Well, putting aside the fact that it was on the first result of my googling "random stat" (and was, indeed, the first in a list of 50), it would be reasonable to assume that, if this was being brought up in a conversation where it was actually relevant, it'd be easy to infer that I think the cops who deal with drunk drivers really need to up their game.

And as for the 13/50 (or 3/50, in your case) statistic, it's brought up quite a lot. So, 3% of the population commits 50% of the homicides. This time, the question raised is, in practice, not so much what to do but why? (Though depending on what their answer for "why" is, their answer for what to do about it is pretty easy to predict.) Ultimately, there's really only two answers for why: 1) America dropped the ball that fucking bad when they tried to re-integrate black people into society after slavery, and 2) black people (or, specifically, black males between the ages of 13 and 35) are just naturally like that. And while some people bring up the statistic and argue why #1 is the true answer, and Vaush has a pretty well-argued (if off the cuff) video about why this state of affairs happened to be:




But when it comes to bringing up the stat, voices like Vaush are very much the minority. When it's usually brought up, it's by people who think black people are just born that way. It's so well-known that it's become a fucking meme. And that meme is why the ADL has a page on it. While the Know Your Meme seems to focus more on the counter-meme about how ubiquitous the statistic is, you know, stuff like this,

It also includes a couple examples of the right-wingers who use it. And I'll post two to represent two different approaches to fixing the problem I see whenever I see right-wingers bringing it up.

The first approach: just do nothing. Maybe bring more cops in and police it even harder, but otherwise just do nothing and let the problem keep festering:

(Note, I don't know if this is a photoshop or if this is an actual thing Ben Shapiro did, but given how the mainstream right and the far-right have triangulated in recent years, I can't prove anything either way.)

Or the proactive approach, one that simply isn't pretty:


For the record, IA, I don't think it's likely you're going to endorse the "Destroy the 13% of the population" variety, but frankly, the version I think you've been endorsing (even if you do adjust it to point out that it's specifically black men of a certain age group and not the entire race) doesn't do much good and I think it helps embolden the latter. And just for the record, the ones I picked are the Milder ones.

I've seen that Vaush video. I watch a lot of his stuff. I thought it would've been obvious why I brought it up looking at the post I was responding to. Black areas are policed a lot more because of higher violent crime in those areas. This is the case because of poverty, the fathers being out of the home, growing up with bad influences and being initiated into gangs at a young age. Shit schools, and feeling like you have no other choice but to resort to crime. I don't blame people for being born into a bad situation and I want the government to help them rise up. Implement the UBI. Invest in the community and schools. These are useful reparations. You need a national heathcare system or at least Medicare for All.

The ADL may consider it a 'hate symbol', but I highly doubt the forum rules would since I doubt I'll be getting banned for posting a stat which is a supposed hate symbol. I've seen talk here that all communities should be policed the same, but that doesn't seem to be what black people want. 80 percent of black people want either the same amount of police presence in their communities or even more. Of course, there probably are many times where blacks are stopped unnecessarily by police, and I feel for them when it comes to this. It's not fair when people are pulled over like this for no reason so often. I would say interactions with police are higher than they need to be for blacks, but the likelihood of getting killed by the police, whether you're black or white, is pretty similar when you take into account police interactions.

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Scientific racists are certain they can't be racists because scientific racism is just The Truth™, and how can the truth be racist.  I always wonder how that happens.  A person is just...normal....and then they hear the bigoted bill nye say numbers at them and bingo bongo, racists?

And numbers that are only part of the story, and they don’t question whether or not they were actually representative (like perhaps white people aren’t as scrutinized by the police as heavily as black people, skewing the numbers), or, if they actually are, why this is so and maybe we might be able to fix that.

In terms of things like drugs and that, yes, there would be way more white people in jail for drugs if they were policed as heavily. There never should have been a drug war in the first place, though. At the same time, in places like Detroit, half of the murders go unsolved, so we can never really get completely accurate numbers on one side or the other. We just have to go with what we've got because that's the best we can really do.