[AnthonyMouse]

The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that.

There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.

[cookie_monsta]

It might be worth considering that murdered-on-tape-in-broad-daylight is at the extreme end of the spectrum of violence - both direct and indirect - that minorities experience throughout their lives. Otherwise you might end up with the belief that a black person's experience of the USA is only 0.0005% different to that of a white one's.

[darawk]

I think the point is that, though police violence is terrible and should absolutely be corrected, trying to summarize the United States with it is incredibly reductionist.

[cookie_monsta]

Maybe. Or maybe the point is that for some people systemic racism isn't just another abstract problem that doesn't really affect them every single day of their lives.

[darawk]

It seems to me that's what's happening in this thread is privileged people with no experience of systemic racism telling Filipino veterans how they ought to feel about the country they fought for. The people with the concrete experience are speaking, and HN commenters are telling them they're bad and wrong and should be more mad. Seems strange, in light of the prevalence of the word 'listen' of late.

[cookie_monsta]

Seems like an odd place to put this comment. Nobody's talking about Filipino vets on this sub-thread, much less how they should feel or who is bad or wrong or should be mad. Am I missing subtext?

[darawk]

It seems to me that the thrust of this sub-thread is a debate over narratives. One narrative is "America is basically good, but it has serious problems, and we're working on fixing them". Another narrative is "America is basically bad, we should burn it to the ground and start over". Neither of these narratives are right or wrong, because all narratives are false. But I think one of them is more useful than the other.

[hootbootscoot]

You had me, then you lost me.

Hubris and the unwillingness to comprehend real problems and the desire to cover them up with "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" won't go down well.

What I'm seeing is more apologism for wrongful historical actions, perhaps in RESPONSE to what you described, but at this point it's become an "AMERICA IS GREAT SO SHUT UP"

[darawk]

Nobody is saying "America is great shut up". America has very serious problems, both currently and historically. The point of this piece and the other commenters in this thread in defending America is not that we should ignore the problems. It's that we should work towards fixing them in a positive way, not a "fuck America" sort of way.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" so much as pointing out specifically why the claim that it isn't great is wrong, to which the responses were a moving of the goalposts to some other, generic wrongs against black people that haven't actually been specified and so can't be addressed.

[filoeleven]

What’s the probability of being killed in a terrorist attack?

It happened a handful of times before in the US, then in 2001 reaction one attack spawned whole new agencies, onerous airport security changes, etc.—not to mention the longest running war in the country’s history. And for the most part, Americans were cheering about it.

Why is 9/11 revered as a national tragedy while ongoing murders by racist police are being downplayed?

[AnthonyMouse]

If you're looking for somebody to argue that the response to 9/11 wasn't an overreaction you're not going to get it from me.

[sdenton4]

The police murders are the most visible, egregious, tip of the iceberg. All the rest is all too common.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

[pydry]

Imagine a gang running your neighborhood that has a 0.0005% of murdering you (but if they do they'll get away with it) and an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder (don't forget that gangs exist for protection as much as power projection) , but is likely to beat, coerce and steal from you with total impunity.

The gang is well stocked with small arms, helicopters, tanks, missiles and even anti aircraft weapons.

They view you as threat to be pacifier although they're unlikely to murder you specifically.

What's to be done with that gang?

[AnthonyMouse]

> an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder

Considering how much murder is happening there already, I wouldn't guess that the amount there would be if the police stopped investigating them would be smaller than the existing rate of murders by police.

Also, as already mentioned, 0.0005% is the approximate rate at which the police kill black people, not the rate at which they murder them. What do you propose the cops do when someone draws a weapon on them?

> What's to be done with that gang?

You're talking about the local police, in black neighborhoods, in cities with Democrats already in elected office. They've been able to pass whatever changes they want this whole time, so what's stopping them?

[jessaustin]

Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case. The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case.

That's kind of my point. The black vote has gone disproportionately to Democrats for many years and what they get for it is not the change they're promised even when their party controls the government, it's lip service and rage propaganda like "police murders" which can't possibly be the most significant problem faced by black families, because it gets them to go out and vote for the same party again even as they don't fix the real problems -- because if they fixed the real problems they couldn't run on it again next time.

Why are cities burning over "police murders" and not the War on Drugs or school choice? Why are we de-funding the police and not de-funding the zoning board? A cynic could answer.

> The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.

I think this is a trope. Democrats are desperate to paint Republicans as racists because they're so reliant on the black vote. Then we get many stories about "dog whistles" and comments taken out of context and maximally uncharitable interpretations of any linguistic ambiguity, meanwhile the biggest actual reason Republicans don't much court black people is that they don't vote for them regardless, because Democrats will spend all day telling everyone they're nothing but racists no matter what they do.

Republican President signs criminal justice reform into law and then a cop commits murder in a city controlled by Democrats and it's the Republicans who are down in the polls.

[jessaustin]

I don't care about dog whistles. I do care that many Republicans have gone to great lengths to prevent black people from voting. That they have dressed up their racist disenfranchisement efforts with concerns about nonexistent problems impresses me not at all.

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/28/pennsylvania-voter-rolls...

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...

Of course Democrats are also implicated in another source of disenfranchisement, inadequate facilities provisioning and maintenance. Even on that topic, Republicans are more to blame in e.g. Wisconsin.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/07/829091968/long-lines-reported...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...

https://apnews.com/eb8c216987916586cf0b5f68c38871fa

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/09/873054620/long-lines-voting-m...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-03/californ...

[AnthonyMouse]

We hear this all the time too, but then you look and the black voter turnout in any given election is the highest or second highest of any racial group. So if there is some widespread conspiracy to suppress the black vote it apparently isn't very effective.

It's also doesn't seem reasonable to characterize asking for ineligible voters to be removed from the rolls as voter suppression. There is a consistent narrative that voter fraud doesn't happen, as if that's a result of nobody having any incentive to do it instead of a result of groups constantly fighting against it, as though we could just stop taking any measures to try to prevent it and there still wouldn't be any.

If a demand to remove ineligible voters is also removing eligible voters then the problem is the people processing the request removing eligible voters, not the people making the request to remove ineligible voters.

They're also being incredibly disingenuous in claiming that proposed measures to detect voter fraud are unneeded because we haven't detected much voter fraud -- as if you can justify not replacing a bad smoke detector because it isn't detecting smoke.

[pydry]

>Why are cities burning over "police murders" and not the War on Drugs or school choice?

Probably because it was the most visible and potent symbol of injustice.

If you're the underdog and you need some sympathy it's a little easier to get it by saying "please stop murdering me in my sleep when I've done nothing wrong" than "please stop putting me in jail just because I like to inject a bit of heroin".

In terms of your broader point, it's not like the two wings of the business party have ever represented the underdog.