Sir Xsarus wrote:
But after 20 years of running this poll, when white people have won 60-70% of the pots, there might be a suspicion that something is not quite truly random.
Sure. But that wasn't the question I was given. I was merely trying to get someone to acknowledge that you can't just look at one event and assume intent with regard to the outcome. A random act can result in unequal outcomes. Most often do, in fact.
Quote:
seriously, what's wrong with you. It's pretty ******* easy to tell when an outcome is outside any reasonable likelihood of happening randomly.
You'd think so. But I think that when it comes to certain politically sensitive subjects, people's ability to do this seem to get tossed out the window.
Quote:
So no one is going to cry foul at someone flipping heads twice in a row, but that's not what's ******* happening.
Yup. But here's the thing. There are more factors that could result in a long term skewed set of outcomes than intent. My issue is with people assuming that the cause of unequal outcomes for black people in the US must be racism on the part of the person immediately involved in the action that caused the outcome itself (so police in the cases we've discussed here). But that's like claiming the guy reading the result of a coin toss is lying about it in order to make one side lose more often, instead of accepting that maybe he's reading the coin result correctly and fairly, but the coin itself is weighted unfairly.
Which is how I see police involvement in these cases. The cops are showing up and dealing with the person and situation immediately in front of them. To assume that each individual cop is acting on some broad and consistent racist motivation rather than just the specifics of that situation is innately unfair. And what's interesting is that when we do look just at the details of each individual cops actions, we very very rarely find racial discrimination (extremely rarely, in fact). But when we look at the statistical outcome, we see unequal results. Which, again, should make one look at other environmental factors causing that inequality, and not the cops. But "racist cops" is a much more effective and powerful rallying cry. It mobilizes people against an "enemy" they can see. And every time a white cop shoots a black person, it's an easy narrative to paint. Worse, once you've rallied people to that idea, when the cop is exonerated (rightly), this results, not in a re-examination of the base assumptions about the cause of the unequal outcomes, but a rage against a system that is seen as unjust to the racism that people have been taught is the culprit.
And then we get riots.
This is why it's important to look at the actions themselves and ask if they really represent an act of racial discrimination, or if we're just assuming so because the outcomes from a set of such actions are unequal along racial lines. It's wrong to assume from the latter that the former must be true, but that's what is happening in far too many cases. We see cops shooting blacks at a higher relative rate than whites, conclude this must be because of racism on the part of the cops, and thus any time a cop shoots a black person, that cop must be a racist. Um... But that's not necessarily true at all. But until we challenge that assumption, we can't even begin to look at what other factors may cause those statistically unequal outcomes. And until we do that, we have no hope of fixing the actual problem.