[tstrimple]

I'm not sure why everyone keeps scoffing at the idea of calling some of these folks Nazis or racists. It's not hyperbole or an exaggeration. We did have a rally with a bunch of white nationalists exercising their "free speech" to chant "The Jews will not replace us" and they ended up murdering someone there. We had a National Security Advisor to the President of the United States promoting replacement theory. There are countless other examples major and minor over the last 12 years. Just how much racism and bigotry has to be clearly and consistently demonstrated for the labels to stick?

[dbrueck]

Applying those labels to people who are objectively and overtly acting that way is not the problem. The problem is that way too often people are assuming it's there. It's a presumption of intent, "racism is one possible explanation for your viewpoint, therefore I somehow /just know/ that you are a racist person".

Example: every recent white-cop-shot-a-black-person incident in the U.S. Not only is there widespread assumption of racism being the motivation (despite little or no evidence of that), you can't even /talk/ about parts of the problem without being labeled a racist. Heck, even /raising the question/ of whether or not the incident was motivated by racism will often get you labeled as racist. Want to discuss the practical benefits of being cooperative during a police encounter? You're racist!

[Krisando]

> every recent white-cop-shot-a-black-person incident in the U.S. Not only is there widespread assumption of racism being the motivation (despite little or no evidence of that), you can't even /talk/ about parts of the problem without being labeled a racist.

What I thought was even more interesting was that racism was never a charge raised in the George Floyd case yet it was one parroted by many individuals as completely 'obvious' guilt in.

The discussion that happens outside of these circles seems to be entirely different approach too and I would dare not even mention facts like this among work colleagues, even though he is plainly guilty of other charges as it does not fit the narrative they hold.

[BlueTemplar]

The worst part is how this kind of "anti-racism" is itself promoting racism by focusing way too much on skin color.

[zxzax]

>Not only is there widespread assumption of racism being the motivation (despite little or no evidence of that)

It's hard to say what all the issues of individual motivation are in every case, but there is evidence that racism plays a factor. [0] It may not be because of overt racism, the officers involved don't have to attend klan rallies for other racially biased policies like redlining to have a broad effect on policing.

>Want to discuss the practical benefits of being cooperative during a police encounter?

The reason you're getting dismissed here is because this is missing the point. People in a state of confusion or crisis sometimes don't have the option of being cooperative with the police. That shouldn't be cause to get you shot and killed by a police officer inside your own house with no due process, which currently you have an increased risk of that happening to you if you're of a certain race.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

[dbrueck]

> People in a state of confusion or crisis sometimes don't have the option of being cooperative with the police.

I hear your point, and I'm all for mercy, patience, trying to understand and help people in crisis, etc. But at the same time, choices have consequences, and you can't escape that. This isn't victim blaming, it's just a law of nature. It is a tragedy if someone gets into such a state of confusion/rage/whatever that they, say, try to stab someone to death, but it's also not wrong for someone to step in and protect the intended victim. And if the act of saving the innocent harms the attacker, that's awful, but the fact remains that the attacker would not have come to harm if not for their earlier choices.

> [0] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

I haven't had time to look at this study in depth, but a cursory glance suggests they are almost completely ignoring what is probably the most important factor, and that is the rate of violent crime (the second most influential data point would probably be socioeconomic level).

They show a correlation between race and death at the hands of police, which is indisputable. A causal relationship is TBD, though they brush up against it by stating, "This pattern is similar to the distribution of violent crime".

[tstrimple]

Cooperation is no guarantee that you won't be extra-judiciously murdered without consequences either. We have plenty of examples like Philando Castile to put the myth of "just cooperate" to rest.

[dbrueck]

So? There is no guarantee of anything, for anyone. But in terms of risk management, you can take some extremely simple steps to reduce the risk to approximately zero. Here's "the talk" that all parents can have with their kids:

1) Do your best to avoid breaking the law or associating with people that do. 2) If you have a police encounter, cooperate.

Does that /guarantee/ anything? Of course not. But follow those two simple rules and the odds of getting killed by police are /effectively/ zero. Yes, there's still a chance, but there's always a chance (for everyone, of all colors). But follow those two simple rules and you'll probably win the lottery or get hit by lightning first.

[omniglottal]

Step #2 is precisely the opposite of the advice that keeps innocent victims of the police out of jail. Cooperate, sure, but the actual advice that lawyers provide is not to talk, and end the interaction as firmly and respectfully as possible. As a reminder, cops are encouraged and professionally trained to manipulate and deceive, and they will use anything you say against you.

Your advice might work more effectively for someone privileged enough to be able to afford bail and a lawyer.

[dbrueck]

> Step #2 is precisely the opposite of the advice that keeps innocent victims of the police out of jail. Cooperate, sure

So... not quite the opposite after all? :)

[andrepd]

> Not only is there widespread assumption of racism being the motivation

Well, is there?? Everybody I seem to interact with doesn't think so. Where are all those bogeymen chanting racism right away? Surely you can quote some sort of survey to back up your perception, right?

[dbrueck]

For starters, go search Twitter for 'George Floyd' - it's hard to find threads that /don't/ make it about racism to some degree or another. But even a cursory search on other sides yields oodles of results; here's some from just the first page or two of hits:

"Racism killed George Floyd" - https://www.americantheatre.org/2021/04/15/day-after-day-rac... "George Floyd murder exposes rotten racism in the US" - https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1190140.shtml https://coloradohealth.org/insights/good-health/racism-publi... https://www.amestrib.com/story/opinion/2021/04/01/opinion-ge...

There's pages and pages of this stuff. And beyond that there's layers of not-explicit-but-not-subtle positioning of incidents - if a cop (of any color) shoots a white person, it's a police shooting and usually doesn't go much further than the local news. If a cop (of any color) shoots a black person, it's national news and the victim's race is mentioned constantly. If racism is not being implied, what is the relevance of his race?

[andrepd]

> For starters, go search Twitter for 'George Floyd'

Twitter is not a representative slice of the population or its feelings, so that's why your premise is right out of the bat flawed.

[dbrueck]

You asked for examples and so I gave them to you, and then you dismissed the first because you didn't like it and then completely ignored the other two.

I'm discussing this in good faith and am assuming you are too. Please update your reply or erase it. Thanks!

[Negitivefrags]

You specifically asked “where are all the boogeymen?” and the answer was “On Twitter” but that wasn’t good enough for you?

[sollewitt]

Data on lifetime likelihood of death by cop in the US by ethnicity. https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

It's very evident the US has strong implicit biases just from the Justice system. We could also look at incarceration rates, or sentencing disparities by ethnicity.

At some point saying "hey, we can't just _assume_ this is racist" _appears_ less like good faith debate and more like bad faith denialism.

[belorn]

Statistics do not prove intent, unless you want us to use the same data to prove that the Justice system is an order of magnitude more sexist than racist because 2000% more men are killed then women. The numbers for incarceration rates and sentencing disparities are similar damning.

If we go by the data in the study, the likelihood of death by cop in the US is determined by age first, gender second, race third. If we look at other studies we can add social economical factors, geographic location, geopolitical and cultural factors, all which has correlation impact with age, gender and race.

[sollewitt]

Agreed, I think one of the ways the two camps talk past each other is using "racist" to refer to both the motive of individual actors and the systemic and cultural biases.

Also yes, the judicial system is also sexist - police don't see women as being threats demanding lethal force, juries are more willing to see women as victims including of their circumstances. That's not the only reason for discrepancies, sociobiology looks into links between biological factors and criminality too, but the cultural issues are enough that defendants are coached to behave differently based on gender.

I see your final point, but my hunch is if you dig in to the correlation between age, gender and race with economics and geography, the eigenvalues will be ordered the other way (race, gender, age) - and if so I think that would indicate the Justice system is only a reflection of the larger society, rather than negate the idea of a racist justice system?

[belorn]

My hunch is leaning towards the opposite. Social economic status is determine from primarily income, education and occupation, and each three is correlated to age groups and gender to a point where one can make pretty decent probability curves for each. There are not many 20 years old that share income of 55 years old. Naturally there aren't many phd's or people working senior positions at a very young age.

If we look at age groups, 20-29 is the most common age for criminals to be found guilty by the justice system which matches the age when people exit from schools and have the lowest amount of income and highest rate of unemployment. High crime areas also tend to have a lower median age than low crime areas. For being shot by a cop, this age jumps a bit to 30-40, but I don't know why.

The general problem with this kind of statistics is that you will always end up with correlations that goes both way. If a country has a massive wave of refugees of a certain age, refugees with a lower social economic status that the existing population, you get an obvious correlation with social economic status, age and refugee status. At which point some statistician try to normalize values and those numbers suddenly becomes a discussion about which factors are considered and which ones aren't.

Is the justice system ageist, sexist, racist, and -phobic? When it tries to do a risk assessment based on little else than demographic data then yes.

[dbrueck]

I'm all for looking at incarceration rates and sentencing disparities, etc. - if there are actual imbalances after controlling for relevant factors, then it makes sense to root them out and fix them.

That said, studies like the one you're citing appear to be flawed because they fail to account for rates of crime (especially violent crime) as well as socioeconomic factors. Correlation is not causation and all that.

(see e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-rac...)

[tstrimple]

I think you're missing the point w.r.t. BLM and racist policing. The assumption isn't racism. The statistical evidence says racism. And the argument was never that all of these white cops are independently racist in their heart of hearts. It's that they participate in and support a system with explicitly racist outcomes. There is simply no question that the criminal justice system in the US has racist outcomes.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09637214187639...

[jimmygrapes]

Are there not many potential explanations other than a nebulous concept of "racism" for these statistics?

[tstrimple]

Are there many potential explanations as to why our justice system has racist outcomes? Absolutely. Does that change whether the outcomes are racist or not? Absolutely not.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over racism where one group seems to think racism only exists when it involves white hoods and hurling racial epitaphs and the other group is more concerned about large societal trends and documented evidence of disparities in outcomes based on race.

Machine learning algorithms are a perfect example. If you build an ML algorithm for approving home loans using historical data, the outcomes of that algorithm will likely have a strong racial bias due to the history of housing segregation. If a company were to use that algorithm, they would be participating in systemic racism even if not a single person in that company was racist. It's racist because the outcomes are, not because of individual racists within the system trying to explicitly hurt black folk.

[dbrueck]

The term "racist outcomes" is an example of the problem we're talking about. A racial disparity is not racist. Correlation is not the same thing as causation.

Racism could very much be one of the factors, but painting the entire disparity as racism pretty much guarantees we will make no progress on zeroing in on, and ultimately eliminating, the actual racism.

Conflating racial disparities with racism is really harmful and counterproductive.

[BlueTemplar]

The problem is that at least at some point it was racist, and a bunch of feedbacks keep it that way, with machine learning potentially another one.

[dbrueck]

Can you double check the link? You might have mistakenly posted the wrong one. Thanks!

(I read it and the accompanying PDF and neither seem to support your point of "statistical evidence says racism" - this is a study about how sharing data showing a correlation between race and policing affects people's attitude towards policing)

[goodpoint]

You are pointing out that neonazi groups exists and did rallies.

Those groups often call for "free speech" and complain about being silenced.

Yet, *your* comment is being downvoted away and appears light gray to me.

This is really concerning.

[vixen99]

The commenter clearly has an agenda to further. No dispassionate observer whatever their political leaning really believes the 'silencing' only exists on the Right. Not a hint of that in the comment. That's concerning.

[bmmayer1]

I'll bite.

It's because the labels themselves have become diluted to have any real meaning. Yes, there are white nationalists who show up to rallies waving Nazi flags. But it's also totally normal to hear people refer to "white supremacy" with regard to SATs[1]. So there really is a diminishing return on calling things racist, and that's probably what most people are "scoffing" at.

[1]https://www.tcpress.com/blog/dismantling-white-supremacy-inc...

[zxzax]

I think you're just illustrating the point. It's okay to address issues with racial bias in SAT questions. Those things can still be racist (maybe not even intentionally so) and worth addressing despite there being worse racism somewhere else. We don't have to ignore that, it's not getting diluted because there are neo nazis that exist somewhere else.

[bmmayer1]

Using loaded terms like "racism" or "white supremacy" to describe major incidents as well as minor "not even intentionally so" infractions is pretty much the definition of dilution.

[klyrs]

This conversation shows up on pretty much every HN story that ends up discussing racism. This fear of "dilution" is a textbook "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

[fidesomnes]

> I'm not sure why everyone keeps scoffing at the idea of calling some of these folks Nazis or racists.

Except you call everyone Nazis or racists including Jews, blacks, and others (J. K. Rowling for a recent example) who would be considered disqualified from white ethno-nationalist movements.

[HaggardFinical]

Can you point to an example of anyone calling Just Kidding Rowling a nazi or a racist?