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by pjc50 2193 days ago
If there aren't very many white supremacists, where is all the racism coming from?

> I don’t understand how people think there’s a white supremacist base that has a ton of power in this country.

The police can shoot people dead, lie about the circumstances, and not even face trial or suspension? Have you missed all the protests and the wall to wall news coverage of the past few weeks?

2 comments

> If there aren't very many white supremacists, where is all the racism coming from?

Where is the ubiquitous racism being seen? I am in no way trying to be facetious, but we need to be accurate here. Only reason I ask is because I see racism being thrown around at people who aren't racist, and only because they disagree with a narrative. That word doesn't really mean anything anymore.

I haven't missed it, I just don't think police brutality is purely a race issue. I think it comes down to poor training and not enough vetting so psychopaths like Chauvin don't get the job. There's also not enough accountability for those in charge to fire these cops after multiple civilian complaints are filed against them.

There are people with LE background who have ideas for how to improve it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23429390

(my current theory as to why the US military is more enlightened than US police is (a) they normally operate in situations where they have to win hearts and minds, and (b) "up or out" gets rid of bad apples)

For what it's worth, I have colleagues who have gone through police academy. It's 2 years here, which may correlate with the <1 per 10mm rate on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

I agree (being an amateur crowd counter) that there is a wide difference in the observed popular support for white supremacist and for anti-lynching demonstrations.

(How well people in the streets translates into political representation, we'll discover at the end of this year. For a while after 2016 there was a cottage industry of german TV reporters going to the US to interview Trump voters, and finding they often had strong views on minorities despite not having known any themselves. That may or may not be true in general, but it's the picture we got here.)

However, it does seem that even though the soviets haven't been with us for several decades, the subject of their favourite whataboutism fallacy didn't end when the cold war did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

"Police brutality" was common enough to be portrayed in 2004 childrens' pop culture (note the knee on the neck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3NFHv7ASo