"There were some old style editors who were still at the Post when I was there. One of them said, 'We don't cover black murders because those are cheap deaths,[..]Inside the newsroom some of them would say hello or nod or even speak to me but if they saw me outside the building they would pretend they didn't know me."
I honestly can't even imagine what it's like to live like that. Not just the callousness but also just having to deal with it every single day, and probably the indifference by everyone else. Pushing through that over years and decades is really astonishing, I'd have probably given up anything a week in.
What I can't imagine is what it was like to be that person. I wasn't alive (much less socially or politically active) in the time period being described. I'm alive now, when we have similar but different attitudes towards racism and sexism. However, people who I know and respect, who taught me the fundamentals of morality as a child, were those same people in the 60s. What goes on inside the head of a person in this kind of environment? Are they oblivious? Do they rationalize it? Are they conflicted or confused but pressured? How is this cultural attitude maintained in adults or taught in childhood?
I'm aware of some similar externally confusing contradictions in my own life - I eat beef and pork at family gatherings, though I believe those animals to be nearly as complex and intelligent as my own beloved dog; my home, vehicles, and lifestyle contribute fewer greenhouse gasses than my neighbors' might but still far more than they must if we're going to reverse climate change; I worry about erosion of privacy and corporate overreach but find the utility of Google's communication and navigation tools and Amazon's low-friction product delivery too compelling to avoid the appalling privacy implications...
Will my children and grandchildren look back in horror at how I used to live? Did my parents and grandparents have the same questions and rationalizations about about their own lives? I've asked a few of them, but never gotten an answer that allows me to intuit their perspective.
Your comment hides a lot of depth and comes off as a bit flippant to me. BLM was largely triggered by cop-on-black killings. Civilian black-on-black killings (like those referred to in the quote) continue to get fairly little attention, even from the BLM organizations themselves. Indeed, this is a fairly common conservative criticism of BLM - that it's an anti-police movement, not an anti-black murder movement. (This is not to express an opinion on the criticism, merely to state it's existence.)
The two issues (police violence targeting the black community and internal violence in the black community) are closely coupled, though. Broadly speaking, communities that don't have reliable and safe access to state-empowered law enforcement (say, if there's a threat or history of law enforcement applying violence unjustly or indiscriminately or simply an absence of law enforcement) will turn to resolving disputes internally, and that "resolution" tends to be more brutal than what is applied by a modern police force. Historical examples include the US old west, Scottish highlands and many versions of organized crime (notably the Sicilian and NYC mafias and the Central American cartels).
When the news media, being (for better or worse) a driver of public opinion and thus electoral policy especially at the local level, ignores both issues (as they have a long-standing habit of doing) while playing up (or even fabricating) reports of black-on-white violence, it exacerbates both issues as well as strengthening the feedback loop between them by driving support in the broader community for more hard-line policing.
The fact that police often threaten underpolicing of black communities in response to protests goes a long way to explaining why cops killing black people and people who aren’t cops killing black people are related. I wouldn’t say the movement is ignorant of this connection at all, it’s a big part of the argument. To oversimplify, black communities are faced with a Hobson’s choice of violence at the hands of police or violence at the hands of criminals. White communities for the most part can trust that the police will fight crime in their communities without subjecting them to violence in the course of it.
And if that's all BLM did, far fewer people would have any issue with them. But you're simply ignoring reality if you really think that they limit themselves to unreasonable killings.
Like any and every popular movement, there will people that attach themselves to it to serve their own agenda, sometimes fully self serving, sometimes because they see a platform to advance something they see as extremely important for society, even if many other people disagree on the fundamentals or just the methodology. While missteps of the BLM movement deserve to be called out and criticized, it's also important to remember that great many people are more interested with the original core tenets of the movement and so it's not accurate to paint them all because of the actions of a few.
The same goes for the Democratic and Republican parties. I'm sure everyone here could point to bad actions that people have taken in the name of those groups and/or organizations, but that doesn't mean we should assume those negative instances represent the wishes of all the others in that group, or apply the criticism across the entire group when it doesn't reflect a majority of their views.
And before people come back with their perceptions of how much of a group believes in and supports the actions of some, it's worth considering that opposition groups will always latch onto the problem people and subgroups and play them up as larger than they are, so the media will almost always either misrepresent them as a larger or smaller portion of that group than they actually are.
Yeah like that person who lit a cop car in Seattle on fire!
Oh, they were white? And from Texas? And didn't appear to believe that black lives mattered at all?
The point I'm trying to get here is that you're arguing with what should be an unimpeachable central thesis "black lives matter".
Also, you are kidding yourself. The US is still painfully racist. People were gonna get mad no matter what because it was about black people.
There's nutpicking and then there's having your movement taken over by nuts.
The public face of BLM at its peak, for better or worse, featured a large number of nuts. Like your bro in Seattle there. Or those CHAZ people, also Seattle, who actually killed 3 black guys in as many weeks as part of their black lives matter protest. In the mainstream, anyone who acknowledged black-on-black crime or said that rioting might be a bad PR look was called a fifth column or concern troll.
Mob mentality is a thing, I'm not perfect either but a lot of people got carried away.
The point I was making is that my "bro" wasn't part of BLM, but was merrily lumped in by media services that were actively lying during the protests in Seattle.
And yeah, the people who said that about protesting were concern trolls. There was a lot of police on protestor violence, and there was an honestly alarming amount of lies spread in news during that time. I'm talking about misreporting of events I was present for, or was actively watching live feeds of.
He was at a BLM protest and lit up that cop car. I checked, his quote was "I got carried away".
No comment on CHAZ killing 3 black dudes? Is that a pro or anti 'black lives matter' action?
You can define your personal boundary for who "counts" and not, have it include all the peaceful people and none of the bad/unwise people, and call everyone who disagrees a concern troll.. and hey, you'll be right, according to you.
Nope, no comment because I don't know what you're talking about. I spent some time reflecting on this little interaction and it really reminded me of when it was going on. I got a call from my grandmother to watch out because she had heard about some really ugly things and these Seattle riots, and was I staying safe? And it was bizarre, because the places she was describing were places I had been, and I had zero evidence for anything she described. It was like she was living in a reality where I was under siege while I was going to the protests that she was convinced were violent riots. Because that's how they were being reported.
Which brings me to talking to you. You've got this world view I can't validate but I suspect was informed by broadcasts that at the time I materially disagreed with, due to them being materially incorrect. You're characterizing the activity as a riot and talking about CHAZ like you know what it was like, but you don't. If you did you'd probably mention the fucking stupid garden people put in that immediately stopped being maintained, or the teargas fired at peaceful protesters, or the mayor promising that wouldn't happen anymore and that promise being broken less than twelve hours later, or that a big part of what was going on was that Seattle was trying to remove federal oversight in the form of the consent decree - Seattle has a pretty ugly history with its police, and a consent decree is a no fault agreement to oversight. Oh or the person who tried being a vigilante peace-keeper, how that didn't go over well, and ended in tears and hugs or any of the other bizarre events.
And that person - they weren't involved with BLM, thats the point. They came in from out of state and took advantage of some chaos. They were not ideologically involved. This is not a BLM equivalent of right-wing terror attacks. The rhetoric in the streets was to be on the lookout for agent provocateurs trying to stir this into violence, that anyone being violent or destructive was actively working against any kind of social reform or change.
It sounds like you see this as a tribal issue. Where it's your tribe vs the other tribe and saying something like "it got out of hand at times" would be conceding ground.
Consider the current moment where critical race theory has now been weaponized back against liberals and used to delegitimize legitimate points and problems we have. Maybe this could have been avoided if the movement had told Robin DiAngelo to shut up and stop giving them ammo. Instead they tried to 'cancel' anyone who saw this coming a year out, like Lee Fang or David Shor.
You happy with the results? Was it worth it? Where are the wins?
“reasonable” and “justified” are arbitrary standards created randomly across every jurisdiction
getting the “perfect case” is not really possible when the “rulings” simply match your pre existing appeal to authority or not
people are therefore pushing as many cases as possible into the national spotlight to make it more obvious that uniform accountability standards republic-wide are necessary. if you feel some other killings need more attention then do that
Can you explain that criticism? Why, to them, is that related?
I've seen it before, and I've seen talk show pundits that they watch say it, but whatever is clicking in their head is not clicking in mine.
I am not exactly understanding the train of thought which is being used to invalidate calls for police accountability. I am not seeing it related at all.
I guess a stretch would be "black lives don't matter to them so why are they trying to convince us", or maybe its not a stretch to the people that would think that, but its also hard for me to relate to because I don't really get the segregation mentality, it seems dated
Majority of murders are among people of same race and demographic. People kill those that are nearby and those they know.
So you have white on white killings too, despite that term being literally never used. Majority of murders are male on male killing, males both being same race. Then you have domestic murders and those are also people living close to each other.
Black on black murders don't get little attention. They are the kind of murder mentioned fairly often, most often when someone argue that cop violence is not issue.
It’s news in Chicago so the Chicago papers don’t consider it “cheap” just because it’s commonplace. DC had a lot of murders in black neighborhoods too, at least in the past. Shouldn’t the Washington Post, a DC newspaper, cover those in detail? And if the time period of the article doesn’t line up and the murder rate rose later, how are those earlier black victims “cheap deaths” even by that metric?
In every circumstance, there appears to be a racist connotation to calling black murders “cheap deaths”.
I don't understand what point you're making, but I have noticed that "google Chicago shootings" has become something of a racist dog whistle, so if that's not your intent there may be better phrasing with which to make it.
Isn't "dog whistle" in this case just mental gymnastics to insinuate someone did somehow secretly say things even when neither meant to nor literally said it? Excuse my childish question, was that any different from purposefully misunderstanding your parent?
At the moment there are two other responses to my comment, and they both interpret the parent comment in completely opposite ways, so I'd offer that as support for my argument that the parent comment wasn't clear.
I'm using the term "dog whistle" here to mean a comment that appears to be innocuous, ambiguous, or harmless to anyone who doesn't already understand the reference, but which in fact has meaning or acts as a placeholder for a longer, well-tread narrative to people familiar with a particular subculture.
In this case, the two ways it can be interpreted are spelled out pretty concisely by the first two responses here:
"The point he's making is that despite lip service by the media little has changed", which I take to mean, "Media still considers the deaths of black people to be cheap and therefore not worth reporting."
Then we have, "The point is black lives seem to matter only if taken by a white police officer", which is the dog-whistle version I was talking about. If that's the message someone is taking from the ambiguous phrase "google Chicago shootings", well, I can't think of a better illustration of the term "dog whistle".
I mean, look, if black lives matter (and they do), then all black lives matter, whether they're killed by a police officer, or whether they're killed by other blacks in inner-city violence.
We need to continue to have the conversation about police killing blacks. We also need to have a conversation about inner-city violence, and try to figure out what can be done to help. We need both. How do we have the second conversation without it being shut down as an attempt to shut down the first conversation?
Totally, and if I said anything to imply I didn't consider the second topic to be worth discussing then I'd like to correct the record: I do think it's an important (albeit separate) topic.
> How do we have the second conversation without it being shut down as an attempt to shut down the first conversation?
The best answer I can give you is that it's subjective. I'm happy to have a good-faith conversation even (or especially!) with people I disagree with, but dropping "google Chicago shootings" into a drive-by comment isn't what I would consider to be making a good-faith argument.
It relates to racism because the topic, in fact, is racism. It flows naturally that when a conversation starts on racism, generally, conversations on the topic are also related to racism.
(In the same way that if I asked HN about their favorite keto recipes more than likely all the replies will be about keto broadly)
The discussion above is to identify that when someone says "google Chicago shootings" what they actually are trying to do is undermine the position of someone bringing up "Black Lives Matter" in an indirect way. This specific behavior of bringing up another, new subject matter for the purpose of undermining a position, instead of stating one's criticism about the position directly, is known as a dogwhistle.
I don't see why criticizing BLM automatically makes something racist. BLM has alot to be criticized for, but i'd think most of it is not really tangential to the virtue of its anti-racist cause. MLK also cheated on his wife, and its fine to criticize him for that, but that doesn't make his other efforts invalid.
I searched about the Chicago shooting deaths, and i don't see how it makes any point for or against BLM?
And, even if BLM is selectively in what they care about. Aren't they allowed to?
I feel like i got between the fronts of for-BLM and against-BLM groupthink.
> I don't see why criticizing BLM automatically makes something racist.
It doesn't! Any social movement, no matter how just their cause, should be willing to accept valid criticism. However, when Person A says "look at this instance of systemic racism" and someone else replies "But MLK cheated on his wife!!", that's not arguing in good faith; that's commonly known as "whataboutism". [^1]
> I searched about the Chicago shooting deaths, and i don't see how it makes any point for or against BLM?
This is what makes it a dog whistle. The words are "google Chicago shootings", and there's nothing wrong with the literal meaning of those words, but other people here clearly received the message "this point about systemic racism is invalid because BLM is a bunch of hypocrites".
If you google for the exact phrase "google Chicago shootings", including the word "google", you will find many instances of people using that phrase to make bad faith arguments criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement.
There's a whole pile of twitterese phrases like this that are used to fly under moderation radar. Some refer to specific standard sections of Wikipedia's biographical articles in order to highlight that a person's Jewish, some are like this (that's why the "google" is important to triggering one's "this might be one of those things" alarms—a common pattern for these is directing people to look at another resource, using set phrasing)
Yes, seeing dog-whistles everywhere gets tedious (for all concerned) but the above is, unfortunately, a real thing. I'd be surprised to see it used with that intent on HN, though.
I still think you guys are bullshitting me. What prevents me from looking up phrases from your post on the internet, pick out some social groups that also use that phrase and claim you are associated with it? There isn't even a way for you to falsify it.
> There's a whole pile of twitterese phrases like this that are used to fly under moderation radar.
What rule is it breaking to tell people to "google chicago shootings"?
And my question
> How does the second statement relate to racism?
is still not answered. Is just knowing the information about the Chicago gun violence putting some folks at disadvantage? Where is the implied link here?
> I still think you guys are bullshitting me. What prevents me from looking up phrases from your post on the internet, pick out some social groups that also use that phrase and claim you are associated with it? There isn't even a way for you to falsify it.
I understand. If you don't keep an eye on the right parts of the right sites (including, in particular, Twitter, but also others) you've probably never seen this kind of thing actually done with the intent to slyly express racist or white supremacist junk. In the right places, though, it's commonplace and only barely veiled (questions from newbies who don't "get it" draw winky-emoji, or more veiled pointers so the newbie can triangulate the real intended meaning, that kind of thing).
> What rule is it breaking to tell people to "google chicago shootings"?
It's not, that's the point. They're dodges/stand-ins for other things, including prior whistles that are recognized as breaking the rules and do get moderated. The more deniable, the better.
In some cases, there's some unfortunate overlap between actual concerns about a real issue (black-on-black violence) which one might innocently express interest in, and precisely the same issue (and, specifically, Chicago, for this issue) as a common short-hand for rejecting the importance of other issues of violence against black people (you see how useful it would be for shifting blame or implying even worse things, if one wanted to do that, right?), or a kind of conversation starter for what amounts to a recruitment script.
[EDIT] to be clear, I'm not claiming you had ill intent. I'm explaining why that phrasing and topic set off some alarm bells for some people.
I happened to catch an actual, no-bullshit white supremacist recruitment program on a fairly high-powered (like, literally—they have quite a bit of broadcast power) local AM radio station a few months back (I checked their schedule afterward, out of curiosity, and much of the rest was religious programming—go figure). By which I don't mean they were explicitly saying "come to the Knights of Columbus hall at 7:00 on Wednesday for our meetings", but they were going through this plainly carefully scripted soft-handed discussion (two-host format) and doing a lot of "just asking questions" but somehow those questions kept taking them right up to the edge—and I mean right up to the edge—of "it's the Jews and black people who are the problem", meanwhile they're dropping one phrase or historical reference after another that's unmistakably from white supremacist "thought", as in, encountered basically nowhere but there, so their listeners have a nice list of things to google that will definitely lead them further down the rabbit hole. It was unreal. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, but they just kept going with that stuff, relentlessly. It was the entire thing they were doing, nothing else. It was very different from normal right-wing radio, which I hear a lot of (what can I say, I have a problem and enjoy listening to nutty crap when driving) and there was no doubt what they were up to.
There's some real WTF to be found in this country. Everyone freaking out about dog whistles is ridiculous, and those accusations are abused. But then you hear something like the above, and... yeah, it's a real thing sometimes. Very strange place.
Google gives personalized search results. It seems Google is aware that you frequent Hacker News. DuckDuckGo has non-personalized search results: https://archive.vn/mxh08.
Yes. It's a way to say 'you seem bad, and nobody should listen to you' by virtue of simplistic pattern recognition. If you happen to use the same few words that somebody the OP dislikes used, you are categorized and ignored. Note that this is completely independent of whether those words are true or false, harmful or helpful.
It's a discussion killer and a thought ender, and I think HN would do well to ban accusations of dog-whistles. It never heightens the dialog, it only drags it down.
Is it? Definitely the most visible thing was the "defund" thing, but certainly in my circles I saw a lot of interest in reparations, housing reform, health care justice, etc, all with an eye toward addressing the generational economic issues that have led to or at least greatly exacerbated community violence.
> The BLM movement is quite silent regarding other black deaths
There's an expectation that the police will investigate regular crimes and bring the criminals to justice. For crimes committed by police, there's no such guarantee. Why is it wrong for a movement to focus on watching the watchmen?
In any case, what are protests and rallies going to do against gang violence? You need social programs to keep kids out of gangs, provide poor families additional assistance, improve living standards and so on.
> A cohesive home with both the mother and father present
Which can be torn apart by crime, police brutality, over-policing, or criminalization of being poor; get a parking ticket, fail to pay it, go to jail, lose your job, rinse and repeat.
(A sign seen at a BLM protest sums it up: "You kill our fathers, then make fun of us for not having one")
> where moral values are taught
I'd wager that the vast majority of parents and guardians teach their kids not to lie, cheat, steal, or hurt other people. How much those teachings take root depends a great deal on the child's environment and peer group. Don't believe me? Then why do parents pay so much money for a "good" school district? The moral values they impart should hold even if they live in a "bad" neighborhood, right?
> sad, government-run program
Who said anything about government-run? Churches, community groups and local clubs like the Rotary Club, even police departments (this last one is the government, I'll give you that) run after-school and youth programs to keep kids busy and engaged in productive pursuits.
Secondly, if both parents are working long hours, you need someone to keep an eye on the kids after school. Some people have grandparents or other relatives but not everyone is so lucky (the grandparents themselves might be working long hours; generational poverty is a thing). Absent that support, the external factors I mentioned above begin to dominate.
Again, I don't understand the hate for a movement that, at its core, claims to want to hold government servants accountable for the crimes they commit. That's generally considered a good thing across political lines.
When the law enforcement institutions are a demonstrable enemy of your community, and seen as a threat rather than a resource, lawlessness will naturally result. The intra-community violence is a symptom (a serious symptom, but a symptom nonetheless) of the systemic problem.
One sees the same thing in refugee camps, which I think are directly analogous.
The only alternative explanation is "these types of people are violent and lawless by nature", which I do not accept.
No it isn't. In addition to seeing law enforcement as a threat, there are other forces that couple explain disparate murder rates - such as the rate of drug use, the rate of single parent households, the level of lead in water.
Your comment reads perilously close to "Either you believe <party line> or <be racist>, no alternatives, so I choose <party line>." There are a hundred other explanations.
If the level of lead is higher in black communities, that certainly falls under the umbrella of "systemic problems." I also think a lot of this is interrelated. Without any sort of trust in a law enforcement system, of course there's going to be higher drug use.
With a large number of black people being incarcerated due to systemic justice problems, of course you're going to have a higher rate of single parent households (and this is something that can propagate through generations).
Those things you listed aren't really "other forces" that can explain disparate murder rates. They're all part of the same issue.
I wrote poorly: my intended meaning was "the only alternative to a systemic root problem". Lead in water is a good counterpoint because although it's "systemic" as in "the water system", it's not what most people mean by systemic in this context.
Drug use and single parenthood, though, are in line with my intended (not what I wrote) meaning, though. One has to ask why there is higher drug use and single parenthood, and it seems to me that the end result of asking why will be "systemic issues" or "nature of the people".
Of course, which systemic issues will remain a difficult question, and the answer will probably be a bit of a bunch of things. But overall, my comment was attempting to answer why I think BLM supporter focus on law enforcement violence, and "are silent" on black-on-black violence - it's because the latter is seen as a symptom, the former a cause.
The American Cancer Society is quite silent regarding heart attacks.
There are plenty of groups working on Black maternal and infant mortality, drug and gang violence in the Black community, etc. If you want to work on that feel free to volunteer/give money. The criticism that "movement A isn't doing anything about topic B" is just sort of silly, as I can always come up with some worthy topic that movement A isn't addressing, no matter which movement.
I've never understood this point. White people are mostly murdered by other white people. Black people are mostly murdered by other black people. This should be obvious...most murderers know their victims, and they know them well enough to have a motive to kill them. When a police officer wrongfully kills a white person, we don't go around telling white people that they shouldn't care about police murders because more white people are killed by other white people than the police. Why does it matter when discussing black people murdered by police?
Here's something that you should consider: the police murder problem in the US is massive. If our police had the same rate of killings as German police, we would have about 45 deaths at the hands of the police every year. But we actually have over 1000. And black people are twice as likely to be killed than white people by our murderous police. Why shouldn't we complain about that?
Because the black homicide rate is really high. It can be a bit easy to forget this, caught in the abstract. The movement isn't called "the police shouldn't kill people" - it's called "black lives matter". I'd expect a movement named "white lived matter" to focus on all-up issues for white people.
> black people are twice as likely to be killed than white people by our murderous police.
Giving yourself a broad focus "black lives" and then ignoring the number one category of death among young males (homicide) - it's a bit odd.
Imagine if you ran across the "Cancer Matters" institute and it turned out they don't study lung, breast, or prostate cancers (the three most common and deadly). Instead they study just one specific subtype. What would you think?
Edit: just a small comment, but I'm more trying to "explain the argument" than make it myself. Asking if organizations are "pure enough" to their purposes is a common tactic on all sides, and it's clear that _some_ who ask this don't do so in good faith, trying to set the bar impossibly high. People have wildly different perceptions of BLM, in part because BLM is different organizations in different cities. I don't mean to endorse those impossibly high bars, only to _explain_ that the criticism is that BLM is not meeting the bar to some folks in terms of actions matching the mission/label. I'm trying to answer in good faith - assuming that the question was asked in that same good faith - as a legitimate request for explanation.
This is all a whataboutism. You don't like the slogan because you want it to be about one thing, but the movement is focused on another thing.
But, would you believe that the two things are related? Black people have been subject to overpolicing since, well, police forces were formed expressly to recapture escaped slaves. The police have had an enduring impact on black populations, ensuring that black people are significantly overrepresented in prisons. Poverty is a spiral, and folks with a criminal history can't get honest work so they return to crime. Kids without good role models are apt to end up in jail before they're adults. Extreme levels of black on black crime are a natural, I'd say unavoidable consequence of the circumstances. And the police, the courts, the prisons, maintain the hedges of that spiral into poverty.
If you've been listening to BLM activists and have only heard anti-police rhetoric, and missed the points about systemic poverty, and the entire remainder of the criminal justice system, then either you haven't been listening very carefully, or you've been getting your information from a biased source that's filtering the message down to what they want you to hear.
Black on black crime is absolutely, horribly, heartwrenchingly, problematic. It harms our entire society. But you don't fix that with a stronger police force. We've tried that. You fix that by addressing the inequities across the board, starting with the criminal justice system.
If you want to dig past the abstract, crime is far more predictable by poverty rate than it is, or ever has been, by race. In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks. But the racially segmented crime rates are higher because black poverty rates are higher.
And why is that? Ask any sociologist and they'll have the same answer: systemic racism. This shows up in hundreds of different ways: redlining, wage gaps, resource availability, etc.. The criminal justice system as a whole, and cops in particular, are a huge part of this. Cops Terry Stop black people at higher rates than white people. Cops detain black motorists at higher rates than white people. Cops arrest black people at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They are prosecuted at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They receive longer sentences than white people for the same crimes. And they get wrongfully convicted (as evidenced by exonerations) at higher rates than white people. And we have an extremely ugly history of making laws that are intentionally targeted at criminalizing black people...giving cops more ammunition to continue this oppression.
Black people being murdered in cold blood by police officers is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to black oppression by the police. World War I wasn't started because people really cared about Austrian Archdukes...the explosion into full on war was a long time coming, and Franz Ferdinand was just the trigger. Just as well, BLM activists absolutely care about black people being killed by black people. But when a cop, who represents a daily oppressive force against black people trying to make their way out of poverty, brutally murders someone in cold blood, in broad daylight, and with dozens of witnesses begging him to relent, and then continues to choke a dead body for several minutes after he gave up the ghost....yeah, protesters have every right to make a big fucking deal about it.
BLM absolutely cares about black violence and crime. They know what the solution is: black economic mobility. And contrary to the experience of poor white people that also experience violence and crime problems, cops are a part of the problem, not the solution.
Just to be clear, to all the downvoters, this is an actual earnest conversation. I don't think any participant of this thread deserves the downvotes that it is getting. I do believe there is subtle racism here, but it isn't malicious racism, just the typical sort of everyday biases that present themselves in all people from time to time. We don't solve systemic racism by taking sides and lobbing pot shot insults. That does more damage than good.
> In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks.
This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.
Are population density factored in? My guess would be that a higher proportion of poor white people live in rural areas, compared with poor black people, and out in the sticks crimes are more likely to go unnoticed (you're less likely to get picked up painting or even shooting stop signs than tagging walls in a city, I expect) or to not happen due to lack of opportunity (what, you gonna go on a pick-pocketing spree at the Piggly Wiggly checkout line?)
(I'm not saying that's definitely what causes the difference to persist when income-adjusted, I'm just curious if you found that to be factored in, somehow, in the research you've seen)
[EDIT] I guess for international readers or US readers who haven't spent much time in the country, I should clarify that shooting street signs, mostly stop signs, is a (perhaps surprisingly) common activity in the rural US. You'll see lots of bullet-holes in signs if you drive around a bit in that kind of area. It's the rural equivalent of putting bumper stickers on the back of them, I guess.
I don't doubt that you've found those statistics, as sociology is an incredibly difficult field from a methodology standpoint. Unfortunately there are problems with nearly all methodologies. There are two potential sources of the discrepancy in information here: how do you define crime, and how do you define poverty.
The definition of crime has a lot of data collection problems. Official crime rates are compiled by police reports, and if there is a bias in policing or prosecution, there will be a bias in reporting as well. There are methodologies that are used (all of which with their own problems that make them suitable for some analyses but not others) to allow for better analyses to be made. It is through these alternative methodologies that we can even make claims like "black people are twice as likely to be arrested than white people for possession of marijuana": pure collection biases hide the fact that black people and white people are consuming marijuana at similar rates.
The definition of poverty is also fraught, though not for systemic racism reasons. Poverty can be defined in relative terms or absolute terms. It can be based off of wealth, or it can be based off of income. It can be based on household income/wealth or individual income/wealth. It can be defined in terms economic mobility (the ability to change wealth over time), or point in time measurements. It can include social capital as well: some definitions of poverty take into account education availability, parental education levels, etc.
In fact, you mention single parent households, which is deeply tied to poverty. child abandonment rates have a strong inter-causal link with poverty: high poverty causes income earners to abandon their children, and children without income earners in the household not only live in higher poverty as a result, but are likely to perpetuate the poverty. And disparate policing certainly has its own contributors to poverty, because it takes parents away from children.
A good overview of the various methodologies and existing literature can be found here:
From 2018: "The latest and greatest in deflections and dog whistles: ‘What about Chicago?’"
... Of course, no one whistling “what about Chicago?” has any desire to resolve the problems in Chicago. If this were about Chicago, they’d be talking about the perils of low investment in communities, the shuttering of mental health facilities, school closures, police corruption or ineffective policing. There would be a push to bring back programs that were cut during the Illinois budget crisis. CeaseFire’s violence reduction strategies were working, until the budget freeze of Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) cut $4.7 million in funding in 2015, effectively shutting down the program. Though some funding has been restored recently, the momentum they had built has obviously been lost. “What about Chicago” is a convenient deflection, and nothing more ever seems to come of it....
Do you think a paywalled article from 2018 is supposed convince me that I am a racist? Or that the guy who called me a racist done so because he read that article? Or that national media is not supposed to be covering mass shootings from yesterday because that would make them racists?
Given that the sum total of your own words in the comment I responded to is "you just made that up, didnt you?", that is what I was responding to.
If @hairofadog did in fact just make up this claim, I'd be tremendously interested in hearing what access they have to time travel devices to plant a story from over three years ago in a major national paper of record.
As a protip, paywalled articles are often available through archives. Experience infonauts have learned to make use of these:
Whether or not you're a racist is really up to you, and how you behave regarding and concerning race-related matters. That's not looking so good from where I sit.
Why would you assume I didn’t read that article? Experienced infonauts know better than posting paywalls links on hn. Look, I know about Chicago because a good portion of my multiracial family lives there, and I argue against mainstream narratives because watching collapse of institutions that push these narratives is the most terrifying and fascinating thing I have seen. Trust me, I lived through perestroika and the collapse of the anti fascist wall.
A whole generation of blacks could not get decent jobs for reasons like that. This generation gave birth to a new generation with less opportunities than they could have had because of the opportunities their parents got denied. It takes long time do undo the damage such profound discrimination causes, and it requires the heroic effort of many individuals like this reporter.
>it takes a long time to undo the damage such profound discrimination causes
yes and for many, the damage is irreversible. Denied access to education is also a big factor Blacks face. If you are unable to study and get a good education, you can't work a decent job. It's then harder for you to let your children study to tertiary level as you might need them to step out to work earlier to contribute to the house, and they are then stuck in lower paying jobs. The cycle then continues when they have kids and when their kids have kids and it goes on for many generations.
This is precisely why Education should not be treated as a business. If Education was free for every citizen, it does a lot to bring equality of opportunity (it does not fix all of the damages from discrimination, but aids significantly in recovery). So is healthcare.
Having experienced education and healthcare in USA and Denmark, I cannot believe such extremes exist in the same world. It blows my mind that the wealthiest country on Earth by such a huge margin could not give its citizens unified and free healthcare and free access to Education. Just imagine what would happen to American economy in the long run if people were free to educate themselves(better workforce) and didn't need to go bankrupt because they got an unfortunate health condition?
I am sad that there are no politicians that think about these in long term. Everyone seems to only care about the next election cycle.
Even if education is free, having time to study is also a luxury we take for granted. Going to university means a few more years of them not being able to work full-time and contribute to the household income. But for sure, if education was free it would improve access to education and restore some balance.
>Going to university means a few more years of them not being able to work full-time and contribute to the household income. But for sure, if education was free it would improve access to education and restore some balance.
In Poland you can attend higher edu institutions on weekends and work meanwhile.
It often costs you like 1.x * minimal wage per semester, thus in total like 17K PLN for bachelor/engineering degree (3.5 years).
I did it, those a few years will be hard for you when it comes to free time, but I think it's decent trade off, especially if your job is already related to what you're studying, so this way you can have both: degree and work experience.
> In Poland you can attend higher edu institutions on weekends and work meanwhile.
> It often costs you like 1.x * minimal wage per semester, thus in total like 17K PLN for bachelor/engineering degree (3.5 years).
It is indeed something, but why poorer people need 2-3x effort to reach the same level of education? Why are many people against things like public income and free public schools which would fix issues like this? Why do we focus on the ones exploiting the system to get "easy money" instead of focusing on people already exploited by the system which would benefit from this?
This sounds like a great system and more countries should implement this. In Singapore (where I'm born), there's night classes/part-time degrees for people who need to work. It would be wonderful if more countries recognized the need for flexible studying options like Poland.
The US public school system is "no additional charge" - you have to pay taxes to help fund it regardless of whether you use it, but you do not have to pay anything beyond those taxes for your children to attend.
It may not be much good, but that's a different question.
This is the fantasy of public education. It is the time of year where we experience the reality of public education. Many parents in the U.S. just spent thousands of dollars in "additional charges" to enroll their children in public schools.
True, there is a public school system in the US. I missed to recognise it. As you say, whether or not it is sufficient is another debate.
When I wrote my comment, my thoughts were around higher education though - not primary, middle and high schools. The ones like college education and higher education where people pay through the roof and rack up debts that stay with them for decades.
There are state schools, I got my bachelors and masters from university of alabama and funded it by working at a gas station. In state tuition was ~1200/semester back in 2005. I graduated with ~5k student loan that i paid off in 2 yrs post graduation.
FWIW I looked at University of Alabama tuition now and for an academic year was 10k in-state, or 5k/semester assuming 2 semesters a year. (With fees, room, and board, the total comes over 25k/year.)
So you most certainly can't fund your education at the same institution working at a gas station now with only 5k student loans.
> With fees, room, and board, the total comes over 25k/year
We lived off campus 4 ppl in a 2 bed ( ~100/head). My total living expense was ~350/month. My parents had recently immigrated, so i was totally ok with not having a "college experience" or actually knew what exactly it was.
I was able to find another job on campus as an attendent at computer lab which game plenty of time to relax and do coursework.
I agree that now it might not be possible. But its doable if you get grants( which most of my classmates did) and are ok slumming it out though college.
there are tons of exceptions to this. In my case I had almost 3 years gap between high-school and freshman year. My roomates were able to easily prove financial hardship that comes with on campus living.
Many communities in the US actively cripple their public schools via poor funding (and then send their kids to private schools, leaving only the poor behind).
"Segregation Academies", still highly prevalent across the south.
But most of these schools remain overwhelmingly white institutions, both because of their founding ethos and because tuition fees are a barrier to entry. In communities where many or most white students are sent to these private schools, the percentages of African-American students in tuition-free public schools are correspondingly elevated. For example, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, as of 2010, 92% of the students at Lee Academy were white, while 92% of the students at Clarksdale High School were black.[4] The effects of this de facto racial segregation are compounded by the unequal quality of education produced in communities where whites served by former segregation academies seek to minimize tax levies for public schools.
We spend more than almost every country. It's not low in poor areas either; for example, Detroit Public Schools has much higher funding than the state average in Michigan.
It’s complicated by the fact that if you do give the public schools money, they spend it on $10 million football facilities for 15 year olds, this is what happened in our community.
No idea about the specific situation in the US, but in my experience these kinds of distortions are almost always because said public school can only get the 10M for sports facilities because there is a specific fund for exactly this but not general school funding. The school then applies for it anyway because that means they can divert 100k or some other paltry share of said funds to be used for general school equipment etc.
This is true for core instruction but not sports and other extracurricular, which are Pay-fors in many parts of the US. Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" (great book!) is eloquent on the costs and consequences.
I knew the immigration policies in DK were bad. But, not this bad. While I lived there, myself, and my Danish friends were embarrassed by the obviously discriminatory policies targeted at differently looking people. Particularly, the idiotic law about a handshake with he mayor to confirm naturalisation in Denmark. Under the assumption that Islamic women will hesitate to go through it. The rhetoric from the Folkeparty was always a cause of embarrassment in the Danish society. I did not live near the Copenhagen area where I imagine most immigrant neighbourhoods tend to be around. I realise that I may have been living 4 years a bubble and thinking everyone is so nice and liberal, and always care for the greater good.
It saddens me to know about such discrimination in a country that gets so many things right.
It breaks my heart to just read the following quote from the article linked above.
"I talk with children who are living in this area, and they believe they are Danish because they are born Danish, they have Danish passports, they speak Danish, they go to schools here — but people always tell them: 'You're not Danish because you're Muslim.'"
- This is not a hallmark of an open society. All the Danish people I know (in my apparent bubble) don't care about religion. Just let people be who they are, practice whatever religion they want. I wholeheartedly agree with not allowing anybody to impose their religion on others (this applies to the politicians imposing their beliefs on immigrants too).
I sincerely hope that things turn around for the better, and the reasonable voices of the Danish society votes the discriminatory people out.
By any chance are you Shrikant Narasimhan from Chennai, India that went to the jail that was Sairam Engineering College back in 2006? If so, I sat on a few quiz rounds with you and Vinod.....
Would integration into Danish society be worse if immigrant communities formed insular enclaves? I can see a rational reason to encourage cultural intermixing, so that different cultural groups have to be aware of and support each other.
I lived in DK, and as shocking as it sounds, it's true. Just a nitpick: the law is not exactly against "non-white" people, but about "non-Western". African-Americans would count as Western, Russians would not. But in effect, the policy affects mainly Muslims: it was probably designed with that in mind.
>A whole generation of blacks could not get decent jobs for reasons like that. This generation gave birth to a new generation with less opportunities than they could have had because of the opportunities their parents got denied. It takes long time do undo the damage such profound discrimination causes, and it requires the heroic effort of many individuals like this reporter.
Every new group in the US is initially seen as "the other". After some point, however, employers that hire "the other" find that they can pay them less because there is less demand to hire them, and thus benefit financially, they hire more. As other employers follow suit, over time the salaries go up until they match that of other groups.
Their children benefit. The first generation of manual laborers and farmworkers begets the second generation of policemen, nurses, and soldiers begets the third generation of doctors and lawyers and professors.
In the US this has happened to Irish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Jews, Asians, Indians, and Latinos. Why hasn't this happened to blacks (or has happened in substantially less numbers), despite the latter having the benefit of US citizenship and command of the English language from birth?
"Inside the newsroom some of them would say hello or nod or even speak to me but if they saw me outside the building they would pretend they didn't know me".
When you experience this as an immigrant (so the ignoring party knows you have a different nationality) is it generally racism?
I’ve been living in the US for 21 years and whenever I experience this I assume it is racism and/or prejudice. I cannot confront them so I have no way of knowing their exact reasons for doing this. Maybe I’m just socially awkward and I don’t quite know how to play native in this country.
It didn’t bother me much until the last couple of years. I now have a young daughter who’s friends with a lot of the other kids in the neighborhood. I receive the same treatment from some of these other parents outside of the playground or outside of the school line and I can’t help but think they’re going to perpetuate this cycle in the future.
Since it’s generally harder to recognise people of other ethnicities, maybe they either mistakingly think it’s not you (without other context to help them), or think it might be but don’t want to take the risk of offending a stranger.
I have some kind of "face blindness". I have failed to recognize members of my own family who showed up at my house when I wasn't expecting them, and once didn't recognize my girlfriend when she saw me on the street and grabbed my arm. She called my cell phone in tears asking why I had pushed her away.
I always have to greet people with the best halfway "hello again"/"nice to meet you" slurring my words I can and watch carefully to see if they recognize me, then in a panic try to figure out who they are. It is always a terrifying experience, but on many occasions when it has been someone of a different race they've made a comment indicating they assumed it was because of their race.
Even within the same ethnicity, there are myriad reasons why someone might not be confident that they recognize someone else, or that if they do, an unprompted greeting would be welcome.
This assumes a whole lot. How do you know for certain that the person is treating you differently from others because of your background? Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office. If you're constantly on the lookout for some nefarious activity you may start to interpret it where it doesn't actually exist.
I've definitely done the same and have had the same done to me even with people who I am rather friendly with in the office (across all identity characteristics). I'm more introverted than most and generally shy away from a lot of social interactions unless I have to or would obviously come across as impolite. The prevailing culture in my location is to generally leave people alone outside the office as engaging in smalltalk can come across as being annoying when they probably just want to get where they're going, indulge in their phone, or are mentally preoccupied with what they should do for dinner that evening.
> Depending on the person and the prevailing culture it may be perfectly normal to more or less ignore someone outside the office
Precisely this. When about town in public, I ignore everybody except my closest friends or family, or people I have arranged ahead of time to meet up with. For me, this is an application of the Golden Rule. I do not like it when work acquaintances approach me in public and start trying to idly chat me. I don't like it when that's done to me, so I don't do it to others.
Hearing that some people will interpret this as racism or similar is disappointing and disconcerting, but I'm not going to change my behavior. If somebody is making those assumptions, that is disappointing but their assumptions are their responsibility, not mine. And frankly, treating others as I wish to be treated takes precedence over treating others as they wish to be treated.
I think what you're describing as xenophobia is fear of the other. What I see here is the fear of someone who would actually like to do the right thing, but has fear of what their own kind will do to them.
Doing birthday stories for the rich shows and being told to use the servants entrance seems likely a classist discrimination not a race problem at first glance. Race seems to be the major factor for much of the rest of the article, which I'm not discounting. Whether maid or journalist count as tradespeople or guests is another discussion and the bigger question is why should it matter if the person is a maid or reporter why is it okay to deperson a class of people because of their job?
Back to the discussion of race, how far have we come from the hotel owners denying this black woman access? Airbnb recently has had issues with people attempting to discriminate on race.
Other discussion points aside this reporter got the job done and got the story: "You do what you need to do in order to get the story."
I believe the most important line from the article is here:
"And if you don't have people who see the world through different eyes represented, you just don't have a full picture of what's going on." Often I see only one party line, group think, everyone else is wrong because we are right and facts which don't support the narrative should be downvoted and suppressed attitude which will only create fractured communities and alienated people. To come together we must seek the truth, we must not silence different eyes, but must provide reasonable reproof with documentation to those who spread misinformation.
> Doing birthday stories for the rich shows and being told to use the servants entrance seems likely a classist discrimination not a race problem at first glance.
Here's a thought experiment: imagine the Post sent a white female reporter to cover the same event. Do you suppose the butler would assume this reporter was a maid? It is just a thought experiment. We can't know the outcome. But Ms. Gilliam lumped this in with everything else because she assumed the butler inferred her class and role from her race. She might have been wrong, of course, but her inferences should count for more than ours. She was there. She lived that life in that time. It seems pretty likely that people in that time assumed black women with business at houses of the wealthy were maids and improbable that they assumed women in the kit of a reporter in general were maids.
Things change slowly. This reminded me of a fascinating book I read years ago, Volunteer Slavery, by Jill Nelson, the first black reporter hired for the Post’s new Sunday magazine in the ‘80s. Although the restaurants in the neighborhood may no longer have been segregated, some of the newsroom attitudes hadn’t changed much. The book also happens to be quite funny.
> When Dorothy Butler Gilliam arrived at a wealthy Washington woman's 100th birthday party the doorman told her she couldn't enter via the front door. "The maid's entrance is around the back," he explained.
For the record, this happens to any minority. It boils my blood too when someone says to me at a trade show "I'm looking for the CEO" and I'm standing right there, with my name badge and title of CEO. Or more prevalent: they walk straight up to my (non-technical) sale colleagues who more "look" the part.
I worked part time at a grocery store as a cashier while studying.
Several times people would come up to me while I was out in the shop restocking or similar, and clearly assumed I was the manager or ask if I was.
The only common theme I could figure was that I was the only guy at work at those times. A couple of times it happened when I was together with the actual manager, a woman about my age.
I saw the same thing with the assistant manager, a slightly older guy. If he and the manager were standing together, people would address him first, asking if he was the manager.
A few years ago (2016), a black MP (Member of Parliament) entered a members-only lift in the parliament building (House of Commons). Another MP (unamed) in the same lift told her: "This lift really isn't for cleaners." [1]
More recently (September 2020), a black barrister (type of lawyer) was mistaken for a defendant three times in one day. Her experience was widely reported in the press. [2]
These examples received press attention, but there are undoubtedly many examples that are never reported (for people from any ethnic minority). There have been horrible examples of racism against people of South-East Asian origin during the pandemic.
Sometimes, it feels that progress is being made. At other times, it seems much still needs doing.
The problem of discrimation appears to be Europe-wide too. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published a survey in Nov 2018 that examined the experiences of almost 6,000 people of African descent in 12 European countries. Summary of weighted results across all surveyed countries (taken from the report): https://imgur.com/a/gcHR5dk
> A few years ago (2016), a black MP (Member of Parliament) entered a members-only lift in the parliament building (House of Commons). Another MP (unamed) in the same lift told her: "This lift really isn't for cleaners." [1]
That surely can't have been a mistake, I don't know if the cleaners there are uniformed, but even if not I assume she would've been dressed more like an MP (the MP that she was) than a cleaner, especially a cleaner - as opposed to just non-member aide or whatever - must've been a deliberately racist comment? [*]
(HoC dress code is a lounge suit for male, and unspecified but typically an equivalent appropriate suit/dress for female members. I'd have thought any member, whatever gender/colour/race/etc., that swapped clothes with a cleaner would be kicked out of the chamber before long.)
[*] Assuming it's true - I must admit this sort of unnamed perpetrator, unverifiable story does strike me as a bit suspect. But I think that's fine anyway even if so, the specifics aren't really important, it can be a parable for how she feels generally on other (real) occasions.
> [*] Assuming it's true - I must admit this sort of unnamed perpetrator, unverifiable story does strike me as a bit suspect. But I think that's fine anyway even if so, the specifics aren't really important, it can be a parable for how she feels generally on other (real) occasions.
You're right, I refuse to believe any sitting member of a governing body that [recently put out a report][1] saying Britain is the least racist country in the world could have deliberately tried to make a black MP feel unwelcome
I'm not quite sure how to take your comment, I think it's meant sarcastically? Note the bit the the asterisk was on was me saying it sounds deliberately racist. And I said assuming it was true and that it doesn't matter if it isn't because it can be how she feels generally or on other occasions.
Maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick, but it seems like you're reacting as though I said 'no way, didn't happen, she's a liar, nobody was racist to her, racism doesn't exist'(?) - which is not at all what I said.
I'd venture that in this day and age, the average person has more respect for maids than for reporters. While being a maid may not be a great job, it does actually benefit other people, and folks would miss maids if they all quit tomorrow.
I honestly can't even imagine what it's like to live like that. Not just the callousness but also just having to deal with it every single day, and probably the indifference by everyone else. Pushing through that over years and decades is really astonishing, I'd have probably given up anything a week in.