I should add that these privileges have always been arbitrary.
110 years ago, as a Finn, I would have not been considered “White”, in fact in 1908 the Federal Government lost a lawsuit where they denied citizenship to Finnish people claiming that they were Asian and thus covered under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The same is true for Irish or Italians who were discriminated based on being “Alpine” and not “Nordic”.
The idea is not to punish anyone, but to avoid unfair advantages being provided to particular groups due to no merit at all, but because their parents happened to pass on particular traits.
As a White person, the only “shame” you should feel is if you try to maintain a system that throws your fellow Americans under the bus.
And you claimed that was due to biological reasons, when those results are due to social inequality and pressures caused by racial inequity.
If you concede that point why would you argue that biased outcomes in policing must also (based on the invalidity of a biological differences in these groupings) must also be caused by this arbitrary grouping.
It is another example of the reason we should work on fixing the issue, and in no way validates the systemic biases that your post about precincts was trying to defend.
HD, part of what rat avatar is referring to is this:
The use of the word “biological” generally implies something related to birth and heredity. That is, DNA. An inherent difference, biologically, between different humans related to their racial/ethnic makeup, passed down generationally.
If that’s not what you meant to say, now’s a great time to clarify.
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Sure. Americans are on average taller than Japanese people. That trend has continued for many generations. I’m not trying to assess the cause with that observation (frankly, I don’t know) and I suppose it’s possible that it’s just due to differences in our diet over our lifetimes or the altitude we live at or something like that. I thought “biological” was an acceptable label for noting those physiological differences between these two groups of people, but I’m certainly open to correction on my word choice if there’s a more accurate one.
The problem with stating it is biologically related is that race is not a valid biological classifier. It is based off criteria that just don’t end up mattering that much from a hereditary DNA basis.
Race is not a cause or the “real” reason something occurred, the ultimate cause is typically related to the conditions provided by society in most of this differentiation.
It is important to keep social-constructs like money, which is very real and has very important impacts on outcomes separate from physical, biological differences.
Racial exclusion and immigration laws have almost exclusively been based on pseudoscience that claimed that these differences were real, inherited traits. So the language surrounding these concepts is important to keep precise.
There is no scientific validity to the historical racial categorization of humans, it is a manufactured social construct with very real consequences for a large number of people.
Yeah, I didn’t say otherwise. I just said they’re taller than Japanese people on average.
So … for example, the prevalence of red-headed people of Irish descent has nothing to do with hereditary DNA? Or is “red-headed” not a biological difference? Or are you saying “Irish” isn’t a race? Basically, what’s your point?
Great, so if “biological difference” isn’t the correct label, what is, for example, for the red-headed Irish people from above?
Irish isn’t a race, but demonstrates how there is more diversity within the eugenicist era racial categories than between them.
Also having red hair doesn’t predict traits that make one group superior or inferior to others.
Lets be clear, these racial categories were created to label people as superior or inferior in intelligence, morals, etc…
Bring a cite that shows that these minor cosmetic differences have value in prediction of other traits that are unique to these groups based on these minor differences.
The AAA cite above covered why this just doesn’t apply, please feel free to revisit that page before returning with yet another discredited theory.
IAN rat avatar and cannot speak for him, but I think the issue is that “race” is not a reliable indicator of genetic relatedness. That doesn’t mean that there don’t exist many identifiable human population groups whose members are more closely related genetically to people within the group than to people outside it. But such populations shouldn’t be conflated with vague categories like “race”.
As I understand it, it’s still debated whether the prevalence of red hair among the Irish is due primarily to Celtic or to Norse ancestry. In any case, though, even a population as historically isolated as the Irish turns out to be descended from multiple waves of ancient migration by peoples from as far afield as Spain, the Middle East and Russia. “Irish” is not a genetically distinct category; even “red-headed Irish” is not a genetically distinct category.
Suppose, for example, that you and your cousin both have red hair, but your sibling does not. Sure, hereditary DNA probably has a lot to do with the fact that you and your cousin both have red hair. But does that imply that you and your cousin are somehow more biologically akin or more closely related than you and your sibling? No.
Likewise, trying to classify “red-headed Irish” as a genetic grouping would be biologically meaningless. Yes, red-headed Irish people do owe their hair color to common ancestry. But that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily more closely related to other red-headed Irish people than they are to Irish people who don’t happen to have red hair.
Gotcha, and thanks for putting that in such clear terms. I think I have that idea pretty clear in my mind, and agree with your post.
Getting back to Shodan’s apparently-controversial remark, he said:
Do you agree that black people (who are just self-identified members of a social construct group and have no distinctive DNA that would identify them as black or otherwise differentiate them from other people) in America commit a disproportionate amount of street crimes (due to, probably, a whole host of reasons like poverty rates, culture, lack of male role models, oppression, lack of opportunities, racism, bad schools, etc)?
Nasty? Maybe. It’s certainly not nice. Sadistic? No, I don’t think so. Not when there’s a good reason to be happy. Sadism is when the happiness is its own goal. Celebrating the death of a monster isn’t the same thing. The Munchkins weren’t sadists for singing “Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!”
Fair enough. Are you saying that gives you the right to decide the level of sickness of those other victims who don’t have your attitude? I say this as someone who would also be in a camp, since you seem to think that matters.
Hate and bigotry didn’t take that life. Pride and failure did.
Wait, are you seriously suggesting Adolf Hitler was a candidate for reform? Who else? Stalin? Pol Pot? Idi Amin?
Some people are “just” monsters, beyond the hope of reform. All we should do is cage them. And if they save us the trouble, well, I’m happy enough.
Revenge is a natural human (actually,pre-human) impulse, and I think labelling it as “sick” is just sanctimony. And I get that - I’m pretty sanctimonious about my equally un-natural pacifism - but I don’t go labelling non-pacifists “sick”, I recognize it’s a perfectly normal choice. Yes, by all means, surpass your own animal instincts, that’s laudable - but allow not everyone else does, or even wants to.
It seems very odd to me to pose the question that way. If you are saying that people who are poor and oppressed, with toxic culture and minimal opportunities and education, etc., are more likely to commit disproportionate amounts of crime, then surely we should be focusing crime-fighting efforts directly on poverty and oppression and toxic culture and lack of advantages, etc. The fact that black Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor doesn’t mean that blackness is a reliable proxy for poverty.
Focusing policing efforts on black people in general, when what we’re actually worried about are the criminal tendencies specifically of poor, oppressed, unstable, disadvantaged, etc. people, reminds me of the proverbial guy looking for his car keys under a streetlamp. He didn’t actually drop the keys there, but he’s looking there because that’s where the light happens to be.
I don’t understand why you think it’s odd. Here are the relevant posts that got me to the point where I thought an answer to that question was worthwhile in our conversation:
All I wanted to find out with that question was whether you subscribed to Czarcasm’s apparent theory that blacks are not actually disproportionately-likely to commit crimes, but that it only appears that way because they are the subject of increased enforcement efforts. That seems obviously wrong to me, but I wanted to see if we were on the same page on that point or not.
If there’s actually a police chief out there that’s instructing his officers to “go out there and pull over every black person you see, because they’re more likely to be criminals”, they ought to be fired. I suspect what’s happening is that police are focusing their efforts on high-crime areas, and mostly by coincidence happen to be interacting with a lot of black people in those high-crime areas (because that’s who lives in the high-crime area), and that tidbit of data gets spun into news stories like “police are stopping twice as many black people as white people. Why are they harassing minorities?”
…I’ve spent several posts talking about the very real case of “Stop and Frisk” in New York. It isn’t a hypothetical. You can go and look at what happened. There was no “coincidences.” The courts didn’t find that things happened “by accident.” No “tidbit of data” got spun into news stories.
So why don’t you have a look at that and then come back to the thread.
No, the police and society in general look for crime everywhere. They just find a disproportionate amount of it in black neighborhoods.
Do you really think we would find as many murders in Salt Lake City as we do in Detroit if we just looked more closely? That is more than mildly absurd.
The only privilege I see for some “whites” has been that they haven’t been as victimized by the state. Some whites benefit from the aggressions of the state. Some “blacks” do, but not nearly as much. “State privilege” has much more explanatory power than “White Privilege”. What can’t be explained by state privilege is best explained by individual behavior.
Whites have passed laws to subjugate blacks (Jim Crow, drug laws, minimum wage, Great Society). It is to be expected when the state is run democratically and the “whites” who have been in control of the state seek to expand their control into many aspects of life at home and abroad.
I’m not sure I can explain it any more simply. Czarcasm and others seem to believe that the disparate crime rate of blacks vs. whites is due simply to police looking for black crime and not for white crime. That isn’t true, and it isn’t true to the point that it is rather ridiculous.
Police do not simply arrest people based only on what the police see - they also respond to complaints. For it to be true that the differences between black and white crime do not really exist, the police would have to be ignoring crime reports from white neighborhoods, and/or residents of white neighborhoods not reporting crimes.
Do you actually believe that the crime rates in SLC are the same as in Detroit, and that police and citizens simply overlook muggings and robberies and murders and auto thefts and assaults in Salt Lake City, but tally and respond to them in Detroit? Why would that be?
I doubt it is racism - most black crime is committed against black people, and most white crime is committed against white people. (Most inter-racial crime is committed by black people, but that is a different discussion). The idea that the disparate rates of crime committed by blacks is simply a matter of ‘you find what you are looking for’ does not hold water.
Salt Lake City has low crime rates. Detroit has high crime rates. In fact - not simply as an anomaly of attribution.
Look at the National Crime Victimization Survey. Notice that crime victims report the race of their attackers in proportions that roughly match the race of arrests. That’s not evidence of racism - pretty much the opposite.
If you want to define “white privilege” as “I haven’t knocked off a liquor store lately”, go ahead, but that’s not useful, IMO.
It seems very odd to me to pose the question that way. If you are saying that people who are poor and oppressed, with toxic culture and minimal opportunities and education, etc., are more likely to commit disproportionate amounts of crime, then surely we should be focusing crime-fighting efforts directly on poverty and oppression and toxic culture and lack of advantages, etc. The fact that black Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor doesn’t mean that blackness is a reliable proxy for poverty.