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by underlipton 86 days ago
American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated. Explicit references have been removed, but a lot of the structural elements that supported those explicit references remain. I know many people recoil at the idea, because it seems like an affront to their personal self-image and the national ethos (or at least its marketing), but I generally hold that if an institution acts in a way that's consistent with historically-aligned racial prejudice, it's actually on the institution to show that it wasn't a racially-motivated outcome, not the other way around.

And there is some evidence that the institutions themselves recognize this (or they did, until we elected an openly-corrupt white supremacist to the highest office): https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/us-doj-res...
2 comments
gnerd00 86 days ago
> American institutions were set-up prima facie to be racially-motivated

the history of the United States is a collection of States and territories, forming under very different legal conditions over 100+ years or so.. that blanket statement is without context or detail aka insufficient.

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johnnyanmac 81 days ago
Hard to give an entire 8th grade history curriculum in this setting. So thars an exercise left to the reader.
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gnerd00 78 days ago
ok - then most 9th graders would know that slavery was explicitly illegal in many US States from the day before they were founded.. Race-based slavery is not at all unique to the USA. Only people who do not know history think otherwise.. So this commentor a)does not know 9th grade level US history, and b) does not know high school level world history.

yes agree - education is an exercise for the reader.. you have to actually read something to learn from books.

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johnnyanmac 78 days ago
You had a week to deliberate and digest this thread, and your retort shows you do not know what prima facie is.

And yes, slavery is not an American invention. But this topic is about American culture in regards to police and how they harass people (with a bias towards minorities) in "legal ways".

Again, hard to cover all the subtleties in HN. Research Jim Crow laws as a starting point for research.

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jepj57 85 days ago
Joe Biden left office Jan 20, 2025.
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