[toomanybeersies]

I'm not American, so I don't really know what it's like there, but is it a race issue, or a class issue?

Would a well known/well off black person who can hire good lawyers be able to whittle down 2 counts of felony assault to a year of probation?

Here in New Zealand, the son of the Maori King (a purely ceremonial and symbolic role for our native people), who was something like 3rd in line for the throne, got off a theft and drink driving conviction because he would be ineligible to hold the throne if convicted. He was eventually convicted after public outcry.

[porpoisemonkey]

There are two separate issues.

One is the disproportionate attention minority races get from the police. It's not hard evidence but here's a CNN report discussing the profiling that wealthy blacks receive in the United States.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/14/news/economy/wealthy-blacks-...

The second is the disproportionate sentencing for similar or identical crimes. Again without any hard data this seems to be mostly a class based issue. One commonly cited example of this is the differences in mandatory minimum sentences between crack cocaine and regular cocaine. Crack cocaine is often associated with lower classes due to being cheaper to acquire than powdered cocaine. Additionally there are significant differences between the legal representation that can be afforded at different levels of income.

Coupled with issue 1 this creates a disparity in how the US justice system treats minorities.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-rac...

[rblatz]

The typical ingestion method between crack and powder cocaine are drastically different. The way the body absorbs both drugs is different and the impact the drug has on its users and society is much different.

Just because things are chemically similar doesn't mean they are the same, nor should they bet treated the same.

But I do agree that on the whole white people get cut breaks where minorities would not. I just don't think the crack/coke example is a very strong one.

[ryanlol]

>the impact the drug has on its users and society is much different.

Would you like to expand on those? I don't see why crack would be any worse than normal coke. In fact, considering the effects are significantly shorter it seems much more suitable for a productive lifestyle.

[nickff]

Crack has a much more intense, shorter high, and is much more closely associated with negative life outcomes than powder cocaine. Powder cocaine users tend to be much more high functioning than crack users.

Many of the laws tough on crack cocaine were brought in during the 80s and 90s when crack was thought (perhaps accurately) to be tearing African American communities apart, and many of the campaigners for the tough laws were African American community leaders.

[John23832]

> and is much more closely associated with negative life outcomes than powder cocaine.

Says who? You?

And even still, couldn't you say that the harsher sentencing guidelines around crack are to blame for that?

[brokenmachine]

Lol, crack is much more suitable for a productive lifestyle!!

I was under the impression (maybe untrue) that it was more intense/addictive, but maybe that's just media bias working on me.

[ryanlol]

It's a more intense high with a much shorter duration so one would have much higher control over when they're high and not high.

I don't believe it's significantly more addictive though, it's just more affordable to the most vulnerable demographics due to the smaller dosages.

[abricot]

Does the law require taking chemistry into account for sentencing? Is Crack and Cocaine different classes of drugs?

[nickff]

There are many different laws and sentencing guidelines, and many of them do differentiate between the two forms (?) of cocaine.

[stcredzero]

is it a race issue, or a class issue?

It's the unfortunate historical circumstance of race having become a fairly reliable marker for class. This is in turn a holdover from race having become a fairly reliable marker of slave status. I've come to think of many of the stickiest problems of the 21st century as holdovers from a past world that had the morality of Game of Thrones.

[dalore]

In Westeros slavery is outlawed but widespread in the East. Slavery is also a major topic in the book.

[internaut]

It's a class issue.

Americans confuse a former iconography (civil rights era) with existing circumstances. Today they have a class divide, not a racial one. That many POCs are in one class and not another is misdirecting idealism. The plight of urban blacks is so well documented that it is a television trope, but the poverty that exists in the countryside and even entire cities stagnating and evidence of decay is more or less ignored e.g. Note how the Tiny House movement is an attempt for 'middle class' poor mostly to differentiate themselves from 'those people' living in trailer parks (who in turn would be appalled if they were conflated with those living in section 9). Presiding over it all is of course the spread of the gated communities. This is all an emergent class structure similar to the one that developed in Europe centuries ago.

In my country, any time we hear of Southerners, the implication is immediately that they are red necks, racists, ignorant jesus freaks.

We don't get that from our television or radio. We get it from your movies, television and radio.

Many europeans don't realize they are inadvertently being drawn into (one side of) a culture war on a different Continent e.g. see BLM protests in London.

[Throwaway23412]

"iconography"? Dr. MLK, Jr. literally died 48 years ago. There are people who marched with him still alive today. I don't really get this fantasy that what MLK was protesting just magically went away in less than five decades. We've had wars last longer than that.

People who say "It's a class issue" seem to miss that it's much easier to recognize race than class.

People discriminated through redlining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) would disagree that "It's a class issue":

>For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.

People who read the stats showing the differences in sentencing between black males and white males, even when controlled for income, would hardly say "It's a class issue."

[internaut]

I didn't claim racism does not exist. I'm aware of the things you mentioned.

I am saying it mostly does not matter. I'm also aware this is not a popular view, but put that down to conditioning by the media. Their specialty is to draw attention to some things and not others depending on their bias after all. If the media people don't know, then you won't know, they only see the visible things and the death of investigative journalism and lack of serious big-picture reporting not in service to a paymaster has given them tunnel vision.

Suppose you 'solved' racism.

You would still have all the problems you have today. None of the education, poverty issues are going away just because of a lack of discrimination. Economics is tied up with class in a way it is not with race. The good news is that solving economic problems can solve for social issues like class conflict. Many migrants to America were from the bottom classes of Europe and they did very well for themselves when out from under the thumb of the old system.

Europeans have been dealing with class issues for centuries and we know what they look like. You don't have our history, yet, but you're going to. Social mobility in Europe is higher in Europe than in the US now, although perceptions have that in reverse.

If you believe otherwise then you believe that the US is following a different trajectory than nations before it, and I see no evidence for that belief.

[exclusiv]

5 decades is a long time. Look how far Japan and Germany went 50 yrs from WWII.

[porpoisemonkey]

I don't think the conclusion that it's solely, or even mostly, class based is correct.

Up until the 1965 there was open discrimination towards minorities enshrined in law. That's a mere 51 years ago from today - well within the lifespan of Americans living now. The United States also has a well-documented history of active disenfranchisement of different races.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_legislation_in_th... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Just about every crime statistic you'll come across also shows higher incarceration rates for minorities however the number of impoverished Americans of caucasian ancestry dwarfs any other minority group.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf

My own personal experience growing up in the American Midwest is that racism is alive and well in those areas. I vividly remember open and profane discussions about blacks amongst the local population being spouted by both adolescents and adults. This included the gratuitous use of what is colloquially referred to as the N-word (in the offensive fashion).

[internaut]

I believe you. It is just that there exist black communities outside of the US, both in majority white countries and in Africa, which have managed to improve their circumstances radically (sometimes from a very low point, but that definitely counts). The experience of stagnation is acute in American society despite overall higher levels of wealth. If one supposes the lower branches of the social mobility tree have been lopped off then it makes sense.

None of this is to say racism does not exist. I've heard plenty of talk about niggers and kikes before also. Plenty of racism in black and white communities is extant. I believe affirmative action is an example of, and an encouragement to, racism.

It is that class dwarfs all other issues in relation to inequality.

If you have the wrong accent, ghetto or southern, you aren't going anywhere in society. Getting elocution lessons and changing your name are tactics that would further your status in American society.

To put it in this way: perhaps at most hundreds of thousands to low millions are badly discriminated against on racial bias but anywhere from ten to hundred million people are affected by classism. Scale matters!

Look at how Hulk Hogan needed the backing of a billionaire, to get his lawsuit funded against Gawker. This is evidence of wealth discrimination (a big proxy for class), and we're talking about the justice system discriminating against a millionaire here! From here it can only get worse the poorer or lower your status is.

[acjohnson55]

People said the same thing 100 years ago. "Black folks are free, what's their excuse now?" Looking back, it's pretty obvious. 50 years ago, Jim Crow was officially over, yet many extremely racist policies persisted. To this day, we have racist policies, even if not as brutally as in the past.

[John23832]

Sadly, in America race often defines your class.

[miller_joe]

OJ Simpson