
The systemic racism black Americans face, explained in charts - laurex
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/21284527/systemic-racism-black-americans-9-charts-explained
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downerending
These charts point out a lot of issues, most real problems, in my opinion.
It's far less clear that this is the result of "systemic racism", though. The
idea that "poverty begets poverty" could explain a lot of it more simply.

Also, I am very dubious about survey questions. Asking someone how they _feel_
about the police is going to draw a lot of noise and crosscutting motivations.
It would be far more useful to know what they _do_ in a situation where they
need a policeman.

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grawprog
>They are calling for lynching to be made a federal crime.

Lynching doesn't already fall under murder? Does America actually distinguish
between murdering someone by hanging them publicly as a mob and other kinds of
murder?

Sorry, I'm not trying to be facetious or anything, I'm not American, I just
don't understand how that doesn't fall under other murder laws.

~~~
wahern
Things are more complicated now but after the Civil War, during
Reconstruction, the Federal government began to pass various criminal and
civil laws in defense of freedmen. Technically these laws were superfluous to
state laws, but necessary as state laws weren't enforced fairly, including in
state courts. But after marshal law, these Federal laws had to be narrowly
tailored to fit within the powers granted by the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments--e.g. addressing lynching. The Federal government had no
jurisdiction to enforce general criminal laws, and technically it's still
similarly constrained, though the boundaries have been pushed out
considerably.

The now famous law (currently 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Enforcement_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Enforcement_Act))
granting people a Federal civil remedy for harms by state officials was part
of this trend. Though, until the 1960s it was rarely used as Federal courts
often interpreted it to apply only when a state-based remedy was unavailable
or if the officer was directly enforcing an unconstitutional state law. It was
[liberal] "judicial activism" that changed the precedents and made that law
more readily available. And then [conservative] "judicial activism" that
created Qualified Immunity, partially neutering it all over again.[1]

State based anti-hate laws seem to have come about as a way to 1) signal to
the community a newfound or renewed commitment to apply laws more fairly and
2) focus resources on certain categories of crime that the community deemed
especially egregious.

[1] People lauded Justice Thomas' dissent to the refusal to grant certiorari
for a Qualified Immunity case. But if you read his actual dissent he not only
believes QI to be wrong, but _also_ suggests the court should revisit the 1961
case, Monroe v. Pape, that actually gave S. 1983 teeth. Overturning Pape would
be _worse_ than Qualified Immunity in terms of the ability for harmed citizens
to hold police officers accountable.

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pyuser583
Wait ... is lynching a federal crime or not?

If a lynching occurred tomorrow - an overt old-fashioned lynching, complete
photographic postcards for sale, could it prosecuted in federal court?

I’m confused because places like the New York Times talking about legislation
that would make lynching a federal crime. But a few years ago they were
talking about how Doug Jones prosecutes historical lynchings as a federal
prosecutor.

So apparently Doug Jones was elected to the Senate for prosecuting lynchings,
which aren’t actually against federal law.

Something is wrong with this picture.

I suspect that lynchings have been illegal for a very long time, but under
more general Civil Rights legislation.

~~~
wahern
Judging by the article, apparently lynchings aren't a Federal crime, at least
not independently of more wide reaching statutes. But a lynching is a category
of crime that would readily fall within the purview of Federal jurisdiction
under one or more of the Civil Rights amendments. To the original question of
why create superfluous crimes, specifically of acts already considered murder
under state law, it's because the states cannot always be trusted to
vigorously enforce them, yet the Federal government doesn't have the power to
criminalize murder generally.

I was surprised there's not already a Federal anti-lynching statute, but
perhaps it existed and then was rescinded or invalidated during Jim Crow,
maybe on the pretense that it was already covered by other Civil Rights
statutes or that lynching as a class of crime was too ill-defined.
Prosecutorial discretion to abstain from enforcement is more easily abused the
more general the statute. During the Jim Crow era both the Federal Congress
and Federal Supreme Court were complicit and in some cases active participants
with the states in relaxing Reconstruction era reforms. The history is
complex, especially when you factor in the period of marshal law. (And it's
made more complex by attempts to obscure it. In my high school American
history class in the 1990s we were taught that the Confederacy formed
principally to preserve "states' rights", not to preserve slavery. Such
semantic games work quite well over time.) Unfortunately, I already blew my
monthly time budget reading about the history of Qualified Immunity last week,
so haven't dug deeply into the history.

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4gotunameagain
Black Americans are more underpaid and more unemployed, thus more likely to
commit crimes, thus more likely to have negative interactions with the police
etc etc. It's a vicious positive feedback cycle.

How do we stop this?

~~~
thephyber
Step 1: lots of us need to recognize there is a problem.

Honestly, I don't have much hope that we see significant improvement because
the country has so many other fundamental problems (most of which apply to
100% of Americans, not just 13%).

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FloatArtifact
Poverty and crime. I do not deny that they correlate but I've yet to be
convinced It is reflection of causality. Perhaps are we asking the wrong
question?

