[muuh-gnu]

> These experiences will have shaped the two men differently.

You are implying that those negative experiences are a product of racism and not of simple statistics.

Maybe, only maybe, people _dont have_ as many problems with white guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie as they have with black guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie, so they dont call the cops on the former and call the cops on the latter.

Youre implicitely ruling out the mere _possibility_ that there maybe, only maybe, _might_ be a problem with blacks, that isnt a problem with whites, asians, indians or hispanics.

[beat]

There's a basic fork in logic. Blacks are observably, measurably treated worse than whites by police and courts. There can only be two causes for this:

1. The system is unjust due to institutional racism. 2. Blacks are inherently more violent and criminal than whites.

You seem to be arguing the latter.

[bduerst]

Their entire argument is a cognitive dissonance with the facts.

Even with non-violent drug use, rates are similar across all races yet blacks are measurably discriminated against in searches, arrests, and sentencing.

[brbsix]

Rates for what? Rates for murder and violent crime are not similar across all races. They vary significantly. In order (from highest to lowest) they tend to be as follows: Black, Hispanic, White, Asian. Coincidentally (or not), IQ tends to follow the same pattern, from lowest to highest.

Just looking at murder, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008. Looking at offenders per 100,000, it is 34.4 for blacks versus 4.5 for whites. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

There have been many studies, not just from the arrest, sentencing, and imprisonment side. There are studies in which random people are polled and asked whether they have been victimized. It is not poverty alone. Homicide among impoverished whites is nowhere near the levels seen among blacks.

[bduerst]

>Rates for what?

Non-violent drug use - it's in the same sentence, come on.

Unlike drug use, violence is tied heavily to socioeconomic status and environment [1], which is only correlated with race, not caused by it [2]. You do know what cognitive dissonance is, right?

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449156/

[2] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.74.8.8...

[mazerackham]

So Eric Gardner probably deserved to get choked out because he sold cigarettes illegally on a street? And Michael Brown was probably a thug, so deserved to die?

[tzs]

It's Eric Garner, not Eric Gardner.

There was not any really good reason to try to arrest Garner at the point they tried to restrain him. Chokeholds are banned by that police department, so when they did try to arrest him they went about it in the wrong fashion.

The Garner case raises lots of questions, including whether or not he would have been treated the same way had he been white.

Brown, on the other hand, was walking down the middle of the street with goods he just stole moments ago. Police had good reason to stop him. A white kid doing the same would have been stopped.

Brown attacked the officer and tried to take his gun. A white kid doing the same would have been shot. And a white kid who fled after being shot, then turned around and continued approaching rather than obeying an order to get down would get shot more, just like Brown was.

The forensic evidence combined with the eyewitness accounts provides a pretty clear picture that Brown got what pretty much anyone would get in those circumstances, regardless of their race.

Lumping Garner in with Brown is very disrespectful to Garner and his family.

[tptacek]

In fact, a white kid in Michigan was shot, in more sympathetic circumstances, months later in Michigan.

In both cases, there was misbehavior by the suspect and misconduct by the officer, but the more important unifying circumstance was the fact that officers on routine patrol in both cases were armed with lethal weapons, so that hand-to-hand conflict was almost guaranteed to escalate instantaneously to deadly force.

[muuh-gnu]

> And Michael Brown was probably a thug, so deserved to die?

He didnt "deserve" to die, but the fact that he violently robbed a store minutes before he died, maybe, _only maybe_, contributed to his violent death, dont you agree?