[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.

[ttt0]

It wasn't racist in my country at any point, as we never had any slavery (we did enslave and genocide each other, but we're all white so no one cares) or racial minorities even, besides maybe some Turks or whatever. And I was still told by some people that I benefit from white privilege.

[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)