[JPKab]

Thank you for linking to studies on the systemic racism issue.

"Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees."

It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism, when this paper states that it's actually a 10% delta, and the other 90% is due to previous criminal record, etc. It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.

The issue I have with the term "systemic racism" is that it is typically used in a purposefully nebulous fashion to capture and group a collection of specific, actionable issues that can be measured.

[RoboticWater]

Physics is also a purposefully nebulous term used to capture and group a collection of specific issues that can be measured. God forbid people want to group together racial disparities caused by institutional practices under the term "systemic racism." We could call them "fiddledydoop" for all I care, but there is obviously a good reason to group these things together.

Of course, you seem to be implying that people aren't actually trying to address these issues individually, and you couldn't be more wrong. Academics and policymakers alike are forming and implementing solutions all the time. You might just be looking too closely at Twitter.

It's frankly insulting that, despite the ongoing tragedy of racial inequality and the abundance of experts actively working to resolve it, that you and others are so caught up in such meaningless semantic games.

> It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism

I'm not sure how you can substantiate that claim.

> it's actually a 10% delta

You say that like a 10% delta because the color of your skin isn't tragic.

> It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.

Are they supposed to? We have a representative democracy for a reason: average people and activists push for change, and experts and representatives try to enact that push a reasonably as possible. I wouldn't expect the average person to approach policy failures with moderation. Most don't have years of higher education or a heterogeneous voter base to appease to moderate them. That goes for all sides. Don't act like the constituency who decry systemic racism approach it with the same nuance as Sowell.

[JPKab]

Your analogy isn't correct. Physics isn't used as a catch-all to explain things that haven't been researched.

And I never said the 10% delta wasn't awful. That is of course a horrific thing that must be addressed. It's also a specific issue that can be measured and solved.

Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south, had to defend my belief in evolution. The favorite weapon of the biblical creationists is termed "God of the gaps". They would look for some biological feature (their favorite was the human eye) that wasn't fully explained by evolutionary science, and then claim that gap in science had to be filled by God's existence.

Systemic racism is "racism of the gaps". Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist. The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored. Southern whites are much poorer than norther whites. Must be bigotry. It couldn't be cultural differences.....

Women are radically underrepresented as victims of police violence. There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police. Asians are underrepresented in police killings. Police must systemically favor them.

We know that this isn't true, and that women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police. But this logic is willfully ignored in place of the "systemic racism" canard when looking at black male overrepresentation in police killings. It's exactly what you would expect when people who seek power instead of truth are dominating the conversation.

And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives, let's talk about the fact that BLM's hyperbolic language around police killings of black men has caused a large percentage of the population to think that police are a statistically significant threat to the lives of black men in America. The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

Here, you see that 76% of the people killed by police are non-black in the US. And yes, black men are overrepresented, and so are latinos. Asians are underrepresented. Activists have SUCCEEDED in manipulating the public on this, and have created social pressure that academics are yielding to.

Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?

The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly. Racial issues are easy to weaponize, and that's probably the motivation, but it comes at the cost of actual truth. Police kill citizens of all colors with impunity. George Floyd's murderers were arrested a day later. The killer of Daniel Shaver (the second most egregious police killing video I've seen after George Floyd) was given early retirement with a full pension.

[Woberto]

I think you make some good points toward the end, which is why I wanted to say that, as a member of the general public, I don't feel like activists manipulated me. They brought up the issue, and some of them may have more extreme views than I, but I think it's clear that some examples of police violence are unnecessary, regardless of whom they're perpetrated against.

[RoboticWater]

> Physics isn't used as a catch-all to explain things that haven't been researched.

Has systemic racism not been researched?

I feel like you're just grasping at semantic straws here. Systemic racism is a theory, like any other scientific theory. Believe it or not, it's a framework that informs research.

> Systemic racism is used just like God was when I, growing up in the south

God is a theory too, just an increasingly tenuous one. Systemic racism seems to bear out in studies.

I don't know why scientifically minded people seem to act like science is just a done deal, and that any theory they instinctively don't like is somehow newfangled. This is just not how science has ever been conducted. Every theory starts out new and strange, and we just have to see how it comports to the data.

> Every discrepancy between two arbitrarily separated groups is termed evidence of some non-specific, internal bigotry that absolutely must exist.

Except the term "systemic racism" literally means that this bigotry is externalized—it exists within the systems of rules we created.

It also seems weird to use "absolutely must exist" sarcastically when you agreed to that 10% statistic earlier. That's just one stat. No, not everything is systemic racism, but as we established earlier, that's not what anyone's saying. Research suggests that the problem is pervasive enough to validate the phenomenon of "systemic racism" is quite real.

> The fact that various cultural groups behave and raise children differently is ignored.

It isn't? Culture, much like individual action, is determined heavily by institutions. People can complain about rap music glorifying a distrust of the law, but when there are actual stats showing a 10% disparity in sentencing, I can't really be too harsh on the rapper here.

Frankly, I never understand this vector of attack. Like, let's assume that all this was actually 100% culture. How do we fix anything? How do you change culture? You can't just tell Black people "be better, and stop that rap music." It seems to me that the answer is still institutional change.

> There must be systemic bigotry towards men by police.

This is actually true. The justice system is disproportionately harsher on men, but that's because we perceive men as being stronger and more in control of their actions. Indeed, we do need to have a cultural shift towards the perception of men, but that shift starts by making our institutions more willing to consider men as vulnerable so we can address it.

> women are underrepresented in police killings because they are dramatically less likely to be in confrontations with police.

But why is that the case. It's not random.

> And since you are defending activists willfully misrepresenting data to feed emotional narratives

You can be dismissive of activists, just make sure it's universal. No side has ownership of "calm rational discourse." I just see a lot of people focus on the temperament of activists rather than the actual policy being considered. It's just a pointless ad hominem. Everyone can point to some group of the unwashed masses and say "look at all those dumb people supporting you, don't you look silly now!"

> The other impression left on the minds of the public is that black men are exclusively the victims of police violence, when the data says otherwise.

Sure, I also think "defund the police" is a misguided slogan. Fortunately, laws aren't written by slogans, they're written by experts.

> Ask yourself why you have to use Google to find the name of a Latino who was unjustly killed by police in the last 5 years, but you (if you are like me) can list the names of multiple black men unjustly killed by police in the same time frame? Do you think that discrepancy in knowledge is natural, fair, or just?

No, but the reforms that BLM protesters are asking for would also help Latino people. I agree that it would be great that the discourse could be on all police violence, because it certainly is pervasive, but I'm not really going to blame Black people, who have an incredibly unique history in this country to focus on their own community's strife.

I also wouldn't expect an organization called Black Lives Matter to be advocating for Latinos (though, I think the work that they do conveniently does). No one is suppressing a Latino Lives Matter movement, it's just that the Latino experience in this country doesn't seem to coalesce in that way. I'm sure there's a very interesting investigation one could perform to figure out why.

> The ethno-centric activists have taken the very real issue of police violence, and turned it into a race specific one, needlessly.

I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific.

[JPKab]

"I don't see why that's a problem when the goal is the same. Proposed police reforms aren't race-specific."

It's a problem because making it race specific undermines the goals of police reform. BLM the slogan isn't the same as the organization. The organization conflates the goals of police reforms with a lot of the typical ultra-left wing ivory tower identity ideas like claims that the nuclear family is internalized white supremacy. These ideas are unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans on all parts of the political spectrum, and weaken the goal of police reform.

I grew up in a mostly black county, and the first time I walked into a classroom that wasn't mostly black was freshman year in college. I've noticed a pattern among whites who grew up in segregated suburbs of holding black people to a lower moral and intellectual standard than they hold themselves to. Words like "its understandable that they would" are used to justify BLM willfully, actively, and purposefully misinforming the public on police violence. A consistent minority of people of all racial categories are inherently wired for bigotry. White people need to get more comfortable calling out these hard-wired bigots when they DON'T share their own skin color. Stop celebrating this behavior. It's bad, and needlessly divisive. I got my ass kicked several times by the minority of black kids in my school who were bigots. Most of the non-bigoted black kids stood by and watched. A minority would intervene on my behalf. This is pretty identical to historical acts of white racism. The conformists are what worry me the most. You know, people who suddenly, because the New York Times said so, start capitalizing Black when they've never done so in their entire lives. NYT did so because they think the tiny ivory tower academic community that told them to capitalize black was representative of the black community. As if white academics are remotely similar to the typical white American.