In the example of meth versus heroin, if they were white then they would not have been in jail.
Do clarify. If they were white caught with heroin, they would not have been in jail? If they were black, but caught with meth, they would not have been in jail? And are you clairvoyant, that you can tell me what would not have happened?
I mean, seriously, you (and others) exaggerate by claiming that there are “many” people who are in prison “by virtue of their skin color”. Then, of course, you cannot give even one example of such a person. It’s complete bunk. So either admit you fibbed, or provide the example.
Both. See #CrimingWhileWhite (White people recounting personal incidents of criminal misbehavior and police leniency)
I’m sure a fair number of white Caucasians go to jail every year for meth.
How much?
Let’s stipulate that $10 million in wealth above the median wealth is enough to offset racial disparities. You’ll live in a fancier neighborhood, any drugs you want to do you can do inside your house, you can afford private limo service instead of relying on cabs, your kids can go to private schools of your choice, etc.
Will $1 million offset the difference?
Will $100,000?
Will $20,000?
Will $1,000?
How much wealth does a black person need to have above the median income in order to offset the influence of racism?
You get to be reincarnated as a kid growing up in Compton, black or white. How much money would reincarnated-you have to be offered to think that being reincarnated as a black kid was the better offer?
I’d say $1 million, maybe less, maybe $100k.
But a black kid from rich parents in Beverly Hills, who can send him to USC or Harvard is better off than a white kid from a trailer park in Compton.
How about you?
You’re almost certainly right that the super-rich black kid is going to have an easier life than an impoverished white kid. I don’t know many people who would disagree with that.
I don’t know exact numbers. But isn’t it interesting that you figure not having to deal with racism would be worth somewhere between $100K and a cool million?
Perhaps that’s a starting point for reparations :).
I make north of this…let me think a sec, nope.
I want to cry bull on this question because I work with children and adults born with special needs. Down syndrome, autism, blind, deaf, mental issues, dwarfism, cerebral palsy, etc… The one common theme I’ve gotten from working with those is that skin tone becomes irrelevant and people rise above and work together despite it.
So my opinion, I’d rather be born nearly any race than be born with some of the issues I see kids have to deal with.
If you got 2 eyes, ears, hands, and feet that are working and you’ve got a good brain, consider yourself damn lucky and then go from there.
I’ll add “and born in a first world nation”, but yes, you make a excellent point.
All right, look - if you built a statistical model to explain the likelihood of people going to jail, you’d have to include lots of specifics in it, like socioeconomic level, and education opportunities, and urban versus rural address, and lots of other things. Race would absolutely have to be one of them. All sorts of studies find that people are targeted by police and sentenced (and hired and educated and disciplined in school and other things) in ways that depend on race. And in such a model you could separate out race and say how many more people would have wound up in jail if you changed that one variable. That’s the best estimate of how many people are in jail by virtue of their skin color. Studies that look at overall outcomes, and experiments that test specific hypotheses, overwhelmingly find a dependence on race.
But it’s going to be very rare that you can attribute specific cases to skin color.
They have a pretty good idea how many people get lung cancer by smoking, but in the case of any one individual lung cancer patient there’s no way to say his cancer was certainly caused by smoking.
The fact that huge statistical trends aren’t built of individual certain anecdotes does not make them false.
That’s completely missing the point. It’s like saying that being blind isn’t an issue in our society, because there are people with 20/20 vision BURNING ALIVE IN A HOUSE FIRE RIGHT NOW.
The question isn’t whether it’s better to be white and blind or black and sighted. The question is whether, everything else being equal, racism disadvantages black people. If you’re already blind, is being blind and black harder than being blind and white?
This kind of comment right here is why I posted that Dunbar poem. I’m smiling and LOLing like a good little darkie, but I’m screaming and raging inside.
I provided a cite. I’ll bring it up again:
Ok. So I will amend any and all statements to say this:
Blacks are more likely than whites to go to jail for drug possession despite the fact that whites Americans are more likely to use most drugs.
Another quote
Once again, even though the majority of the drug uses are white, Blacks are still more likely to go to jail for drugs. Being white means one is less likely to go to jail for drug use than if one had been Black. Source.
I would like to add that in the 19th century so many people immigrated to the US and they brought with them no history of racial bias to black people. Now they did bring the old world biases with them about say Jews, Catholics, or Armenians in fact the “N” word where I was brought up was “Norwegian”.
So to them blacks were more of a curiosity.
This doesn’t even belong in this thread.
Surely you can see that?
The history of the city of Chicago does not bear this premise.
Ain’t the melting pot grand?
Most famous of these immigrants and their attitudes toward black people, perhaps, are 19th century Irish immigrants to the US. Racial politics are weird, and there was an attitude in NYC among some folks that the Irish were subhuman and little better than black people, and were relegated to a similar social status. The Irish race riots of 1863 were in part motivated by a frustration with this social status and a desire for Irish immigrants to distinguish themselves from black people; the result was a lot of dead black people in NYC.
Even stipulating your idea that immigrants don’t bring a history of racial bias–and I’m mightily skeptical of that idea–once those immigrants got here, there was a lot of American culture they adopted, and anti-black racism was a very common bit of culture that got adopted.
Yes, 19th C Europeans had no history of racial bias. None. Whatsoever.
I’d say it is really “Poor dudes are more likely than rich dudes to go to jail for drug possession” With wealth comes better lawyers- and with even middle class respectability comes roots, family, etc, the kind of person a judge doesnt like to throw in prison.