[rmxt]

"Reasonable discourse" doesn't start with denying that racism exists in the United States, as the grandparent post does. "We have a black president so we can't be racist" is a pretty damn tired trope.

I think people should be able to speak freely, but I won't lament systemic racism's demise.

[ebfe]

>"Reasonable discourse" doesn't start with denying that racism exists in the United States.

Would you mind quoting the part of his post where he says that racism doesn't exist?

[rmxt]

Let me rephrase: the original post denies that racism exists and/or plays a significant role in some very serious recent events, such as police interaction with members of minority communities and resultant citizen deaths, police interaction during routine traffic stops, and racially motivated mass shootings. Also, they off-handedly dismiss the experiential evidence of others while tooting their own horn about their experiences during police encounters.

[Nadya]

Everything seems large when viewed under a microscope.

[rmxt]

I'm guessing this is a criticism? Well, it's a faulty one: much like scientists deepened the field of biology by looking both under a microscope and at the macro-scale (population studies, etc.), we can improve society for all people involved by both looking at micro-interactions (individual traffic stops) and macro-interactions (social forces and policies).

[Nadya]

In another comment someone listed three micro-interactions [0] as evidence of a media narrative. So I'll provide three micro-interactions.

Dillon Taylor, Gilbert Collar, Christopher Roupe.

My criticism is about placing small, isolated incidents under a microscope. A seemingly large amount of evidence gets national media coverage - so it appears to be a bigger problem than it is. Ebola fear-mongering is a good example of that. There are local pandemics of much more immediate danger that receive far less coverage for far less time than ebola did.

It's confirmation bias at best and media propaganda at worst. The media is a business, people seem to forget that. They have no issues towing lines if it brings in more revenue. That also means they'll tug political ideologies that align closely with their viewers.

I also have no issue admitting that a problem likely does exist. But it's much smaller than the media would have you believe: they just put it under a microscope. So to you, it seems much larger. That's the problem with microscopes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9971212

[hoopd]

Then you misinterpreted what they said. The point was that white people don't get to run away from traffic stops and knock tasers out of cops hands without getting shot. But when a black guy does it it makes the cover of Time magazine because it's so racist.

[marcusgarvey]

>Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts – 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring – 185, more than one per week.

ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.

Our examination involved detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides stretching from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report. The data, annually self-reported by hundreds of police departments across the country, confirms some assumptions, runs counter to others, and adds nuance to a wide range of questions about the use of deadly police force.

Colin Loftin, University at Albany professor and co-director of the Violence Research Group, said the FBI data is a minimum count of homicides by police, and that it is impossible to precisely measure what puts people at risk of homicide by police without more and better records. Still, what the data shows about the race of victims and officers, and the circumstances of killings, are "certainly relevant," Loftin said.

"No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system," he said. "This is one example."

http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-...

[hoopd]

This is a bit of a non-sequitor.

"21 times greater" is a great sound-bite but I honestly don't know what you'd expect. Take white males, make them 10 times as likely to be killed in general, 5-10 times as likely to be murderers, make them stronger, more likely to come from extreme poverty, give them a 50% high-school graduation rate, increase their rate of illiteracy, increase the rates at which they carry deadly weapons, increase how often they are violent in general, increase their sense of despair and hopelessness, break their family structure so many of them turn to street gangs for acceptance and give them a culture that openly glorifies violence against the police.

Now they're still white males, how much would their chances of being on the losing end of a violent confrontation with the police increase?

In other words there are many other causes and conditions that are at play here and assuming it's because cops are racist is absurd.