Looking for reasons to accept people who have overcome embedded racism is not the same as having a quota. And by the way, that’s the reason that children of successful Black immigrants don’t get a boost. They did not have as much to overcome.
@puzzlegal, what were the coded messages Harvard gave you for interviews last year?
They had a lot of interview text samples. And every one of them was about the student’s leadership role in an ethnic organization (Black, Hispanic, and First Nation). Any one or two of those narratives would have been unremarkable. Most interview write-ups include a paragraph or two about the student’s participation in extracurricular activities and to what extent they were leaders in those activities. But every one of them having basically the same theme struck me as a pretty heavy-handed message.
True.
Not true. The US has a split between prisons and jails, and there seem to be approximately twice as many people in prisons compared to jails. Those who have not yet been convicted would be held in jails, but according to this US government site are only 7/10 of the total, and AIUI some of them would not be eligible for bail in any case. Additionally, although some are unlucky enough to spend months in jail awaiting trial, the average time spent in jail is 32 days.
Matt Yglesias is great. He says the most obvious, common sense things, like ‘police reduce crime’, and highly ideological but woefully misinformed people appear to argue with him. He also wants to improve people’s lives by building more housing and public transport (among other things), and is realistic enough to understand the middle class won’t live in cities or use public transport if they’re full of crime and disorder. He also proposed achieving police equity by moving more police to high crime areas, which probably wasn’t the kind of equity you were envisaging. 
Yes. Not nearly enough for the amount of crime it suffers. According to Wikipedia, the US has fewer police per capita than New Zealand and Japan, as well as half the countries in Europe, and it has a lot more serious crime. The NYPD spending $2.2 bn in overtime also tends to imply they are short-staffed.
Pretty much everyone who has looked at crime agrees that increasing the chances of getting caught has a bigger deterrent effect than increasing the severity of the sentence - this implies the US should have more police to prevent crime and catch criminals, and shorter sentences hopefully resulting in fewer prisons. Americans are under-policed as well as over-policed, and this is particularly true for minorities: when the CEO of a health insurance company is shot in the street, police pull out all the stops and catch the killer within days. When it’s a random young black man, do they do the same?
There’s a social contract aspect to this: we as individuals give up our right to take personal revenge, and in many countries our right to defend ourselves, on the understanding that agents of the state will defend us, and avenge us if we suffer a crime. If the police are unable or unwilling to do this, then people go back to carrying guns or knives for self defence, and to tit-for-tat attacks. This is likely a big contributor to the extremely high murder rates among black Americans. It’s also a vicious cycle, as witnesses are reluctant to come forward, which makes it impossible for police to prosecute killers, which makes it too dangerous for witnesses to come forward. Increasing the number of police, and a big push to solve crimes could break this cycle, and start a virtuous one, where an increasing probability of getting caught reduces crime, which gives the police even more time to focus on the remaining ones.
…its true.
I didn’t make a distinction.
What I said was true.
He’s a fucking idiot.
He says stupid fucking things like:
Police do many things. Their mere presence, though, doesn’t “reduce crime.” They enforce the law. They sometimes “protect and serve” but they are under no obligation to do so.
Its a complex, wide ranging topic that can’t be distilled down to single talking point.
But the thing is: Yglesias is a fucking idiot. So of course it’s distilled down into a single talking point. A rather meaningless talking point.
I’m not sure what the “laughing” emoji is supposed to mean here. Police already overpolice “high crime areas.” But they are often “high crime areas” not because of high crime: but because of the people that live there. Stop and frisk didn’t target “high crime areas”. It targeted Black people: largely innocent Black people.
This isn’t funny.
Prove it.
New Zealand police also aren’t routinely armed. And the United States spends more on policing than most small armies. When the local sheriff has their own Armoured Personnel Carriers and the NYPD have an intelligence division stationed in multiple overseas countries, the comparisons with other, relatively normal countries start to fall over.
It locks up more people. By crime-rate, it’s relatively middle of the road. About the same as the UK and NZ. But they lock up nearly four times as many people as you do, and most other countries don’t even come close.
That isn’t explained by the crime rate.
The NYPD isn’t short-staffed.
Overtime is a scam. “Dollars for collars.”
A random Black man like Jordan Neely? Murdered by a white man, literally caught on camera, but the white man got away with it?
No the system didn’t treat him the same.
“Defend” and “avenge?”
Not defend. Not in the US.
As for “avenge?”
That isn’t the role of the police. And it’s disturbing that you even use language like that. There certainly isn’t a social contract that I’m aware of that states the state will avenge me if I suffer a crime.
What makes you think the role of the police is to “avenge?” That isn’t their role in the UK. They maintain maintaining public safety and order.
The cycle starts with the stat you have chosen to completely ignore. I’ll repeat it for you.
“One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime” compared with “one of every 17 white boys.”
I’m not surprised that you chose to ignore that stat. Because it blows your argument completely out the window.
Remember, I was responding to the question: :“Does this seem like a problem parents need to warn their kids about?”
And the answer is an resounding yes. I’m not going to let you pivot away from this so easily. Nothing in your response addresses this. None of it explains the rather large and obvious disparity.
The cycle doesn’t start with “witnesses refusing to come forward.”
The cycle starts with Black boys being profiled, targeted, and thrown into the industrial prison complex at younger ages and orders of magnitude more often than white boys of the equivalent age. And once they are in the cycle for many, it’s nearly impossible to get out. You are addressing the symptom, not the cause.
America doesn’t need more police. There are more than enough police to lock up more people per capita than anywhere else in the world. They are doing just fine. Crime isn’t out of control. It’s on a par with equivalent countries.
@DemonTree - not sure if you missed this, or if you just have no response - in which case, a “I guess I was wrong in trying to argue about a foreign country with someone from that country based only off my reading of biased social media posts” would be a good one.
Does this mean you will never argue with any American about things American? You know, some British posters were defending Brexit, and I argued against it- was I automatically wrong as I am an American? 
If it’s an error based on my only reading social media posts, I’d hope I’d be corrected by actual Americans.
If it’s some matter of fact, and the facts are on my side, I’ll continue to argue.
This kind of thing (being corrected about South African facts by an actual resident) isn’t at all a new experience for you, after all, so I don’t know why you’re sticking your oar in.
I don’t know, were the numerous British people arguing against it also wrong?
I don’t know what your argument was, or what facts were bandied about.
My argument is not that Brits can’t argue with South Africans about South African topics.
It’s that when they are corrected about a factual matter by people with actual in-country experience (as in - I have sung that very chant, at the actual people it is intended for, and been shot at for it), they not just blithely repeat the same incorrect fact later in the same thread as though no correction had happened.
You didnt correct me at all, You just complained about my post, being as i was an American.
And you know i have seen Americans here (actual in-country experience) on this very SDMB being totally and completely wrong when they corrected others. So, you can be wrong also, despite the fact you live there. British people can be wrong about their nation, American certainly can be wrong about theirs, and so forth. The fact you live there doesnt make you right.
Dude, anyone can read that thread and see that’s not the case. Why would you even try to double down on this now, when you silently slunk out of that one?
Sure. Sometimes they even continue to double down about it, and need to be pitted…often about military matters, it seems.
Sure - and someone is always free to bring cites to that effect, in which case I’ll reply with my own cites showing how the word Boer was used in South African Struggle culture.
No, the facts make me right.
I have been busy because it is Christmas tomorrow, and I have a small child, and my husband is working all the time. I want to reply to Puzzlegal and Ulfreida too, but I decided to reply to Banquet_Bear last night because I skipped his post earlier.
Since you are so desperate for a reply: Nazism was/is a political movement, it’s not an ethnic group. Almost no Germans today consider themselves Nazis, so singing songs about shooting Nazis is not attacking them. Compare to their Axis partner, Imperial Japan, where there is no such distinction. No one today is singing songs about shooting ‘Japs’ because it would be racist and offensive, and if a US politician led their supporters in doing so, I’m pretty sure everyone here would condemn it.
So was the Apartheid-era National Party government, and the related Apartheid era police force.
Chanting about shooting the police or the Apartheid government was not chanting about killing an entire ethnic group.
…
I…
I can’t even…
Sorry. Words fail me.
It’s unfortunate that these have no short and convenient names suitable for chanting, but I just rechecked and my memory is not wrong: mainstream media agrees that ‘white farmer’ is the literal translation of the lyrics, and merely says that according to the song’s defenders, the words should not be taken literally.
If there was no word for ‘Nazi’, would it be okay for a politician in eg Russia to lead a rally in singing old songs about killing Germans and when called on it, explain they mean the WWII regime? Germans would rightly find this threatening. Even if it’s true that most people don’t take the words literally, almost certainly some will. It was the height of hypocrisy to see the same people who talk about ‘stochastic terrorism’ and blamed attacks on Asians on Trump calling Covid the ‘China virus’ make excuses for this.
They do - it’s “Boer”. Here: definitions 6, 7:
A pejorative name for a member of the South African security forces, including any member of the police force, prison service, or defence force; in the plural, the police force, prison service, or defence force. Cf. Amabhunu sense 3.[…]
In historical contexts. Usually plural. A pejorative name for the South African government.
Feel free to post cites of these Black South African mainstream media sources…
Or at least say that’s how they feel in court.
Where they ultimately lost their case.
Once again - I am telling you what the words mean, exactly as someone who has sung the song understands the words to mean. And you’re arguing with me about it - someone who literally has sung the song (even if half a lifetime ago) and knows what we meant by it. I know what my father meant when he said “The Boere came here looking for your sister”, I know what my schoolmates meant when they said “The Boere killed some comrades in Athlone”, I lived it already. You are just flat-out wrong, but then I’m pretty used to White foreigners trying to explain my own country and its ways to me, so it’s hardly surprising you won’t admit being wrong. That’s Whiteness, in a nutshell.
I think the point of bringing that up was not to say, “it’s okay to be in jail” (it’s not) but rather, that most of the Americans currently incarcerated have been convicted of something, because you only go to prison after a conviction.
On the other side, you two may be comparing apples and oranges. Of the people currently incarcerated, a majority have been convicted of something. Of all the people ever incarcerated (which absolutely includes a crazy high number of Black men), it’s entirely plausible that most were never convicted of anything.
My unpleasant stint as a grand juror investigating allegations of police corruption in the 30th precinct of NY certainly taught me that more police <> more public safety.
…I’m not here to debate the nitty-gritty of the American industrial prison complex.
I’m answering the question “does this seem like a problem parents need to warn their kids about?”
And the answer is a resounding yes.
I admit, I am just making an educated guess based on the times I have discussed this issue with black men who grew up in the city of Philly. I am white. I grew up in a nice, safe suburb. As I have also said, I am a Jew. If you are Jewish parents, you must add ‘the holocaust talk’ to the necessary big conversations you will have with your kids. There are many books for young readers on the subject.
If you are black parents, it would be foolish not to have
‘the police are racists, here is how not to be beaten, arrested or killed while running normal errands talk’. It is, very frighteningly and tragically, an event a child needs to be prepared for.
Oh, i completely agree with that part of your post. But DemonTree brought up the distinction in this context:
And their distinction between jails and prisons does speak to how many of our incarcerated people have been convicted of something.
Of course, some of those convictions are pretty bogus. That grand jury i was on was just an endless parade of horrible stuff done by the police. But the case that stands out to me the most, because it made me the angriest, was this:
A man who had recently moved a little north out of NYC drove to the old neighborhood to pick up some jerk chicken for his pregnant wife. On the way back, he picked up a hitchhiker whom he knew slightly, having been at the same party as the guy. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for driving while Black.
The police “found” a joint in his car, which they planted there. But the driver believed that the hitchhiker might have left it there, so he was not certain of his innocence under our ridiculous drug laws.
The driver was jailed. His wife was due to give birth at any time. The police told the driver that it might take a really long time before he could get a lawyer and a hearing, but if he pled guilty they would release him. They didn’t tell him that pleading guilty meant the police got to keep his car. (Did i mention our ridiculous drug laws? Essentially, the car was guilty of transporting illegal drugs, so it could be seized and sold by the police to enrich their department.) So he pled guilty.
Yeah, just another Black men engaged in crime in America. That’s why he was imprisoned.
…the distinction was a distraction. DemonTree wanted to pivot away from the question they asked in the first place.