# Why do so many of the people who identify as White have a hard time seeing the racism around them? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 29, 2019, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716 "2019-03-29T17:08:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/61 "2019-03-31T04:44:53Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Well, the one item that I do think is important is about how minorities are treated by the justice system, in particular seeing how minorities end up with more time or harsher punishment for the same crimes that whites are found to commit. > > [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/theres-overwhelming-evidence-that-the-criminal-justice-system-is-racist-heres-the-proof/?noredirect=on&utm\_term=.72f6c672286d](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/theres-overwhelming-evidence-that-the-criminal-justice-system-is-racist-heres-the-proof/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.72f6c672286d) Indeed. The author, Radley Balko, also writes for _Reason_ and other libertarian sources and he’s done a lot of good work and policies, criminal justice, and civil rights issues. Rich and middle class people can afford good lawyers. The poor cannot, and get stuck with public defenders, who are usually terrible. This leads to a huge difference in outcomes between rich and poor in the criminal justice system. Blacks are the most likely to be poor compared to Whites, Hispanics, and Asians. Therefore blacks are much less likely to have access to a good lawyer. Poor black men virtually all end up plea-bargaining when accused of a crime. Overall, wealth is a better predictor prison time than race. (No time to find a cite right now, I’ll do so tomorrow.) There is absolutely no doubt that the whole prison system, courts, and policies sucks for many poor people. Making it less sucky for the poor should be a primary focus of anyone who wants to address racial disparities. I vote Libertarian. If my party was in charge, no one would go to prison for drug possession, so racial disparities in sentences for that “crime” would vanish. Sentences would be much shorter for all minor crimes. Asset forfeiture laws would be outlawed. I would love to see black voters moving en mass to the Libertarian party or to any third party focused on civil rights, but among the two major parties, neither is focused on addressing poverty and its relationship to incarceration. Many commentators have noted that Bill Clinton signed a huge criminal justice bill in his first term, which sent the incarceration rate for black men soaring in the 90’s. How did black voters respond? By overwhelmingly supporting his reelection bid. And that’s the general story for decades at all levels of government, from city to federal: black voters often support politicians who promise tough policing and long prison terms (though there have recently been some promising reformers elected in a few cities). For those determined to view everything in terms of racism, it may be difficult to accept that reality. But many black voters in big cities in the early 90’s were facing record-high crime rates. Their problem was not racism. Their problem was massive crime, primarily from black gangs. They _wanted_ the police to strike back hard at the gangs. So to chalk up all problems with police tactics and mass incarceration to racism actually ignores the experience of what many black people were living through. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/62 "2019-03-31T05:03:26Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > So to chalk up all problems with police tactics and mass incarceration to racism actually ignores the experience of what many black people were living through. So yeah, what slavery, “separate but equal” and the Jim Crow laws caused before should be ignored also. /s No, you blatantly ignore the main point, it was about how for the same crimes blacks and minorities see more prison time than white people. When that was the case, moves like Clinton did were bound to cause more disruption among Black and other minority families. And no, talking about how unjust it is for blacks and minorities to get less access to good lawyers actually points to one of the key issues about the injustice, it remains part of the racism in the system when there is very little effort made to improve the access to better help. As for the drug war, that seems to be another blind spot for many conservatives when they ignore one of the reasons why the war on drugs was intensified under Nixon. [https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html) > [@](#): > > One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine. > > “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. > > “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/63 "2019-03-31T05:18:05Z")
One more thing: > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Indeed. The author, Radley Balko, also writes for Reason and other libertarian sources and he’s done a lot of good work and policies, criminal justice, and civil rights issues. And indeed, the reason for pointing at his article was that he included evidence, that you implied was not there. The title of his article BTW is: “ **There is overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice system is racist, here is the proof** ” ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/64 "2019-03-31T06:18:23Z")
I think there’s many reasons it’s difficult for white people to see the racism in American society. The narrative regarding race I heard in school growing up basically amounted to “Look at all that bad stuff from the past. We had slavery but a bunch of white folks fought a war to end it. Then we had a bunch of bad stuff like segregation but after Brown vs. The Board of Education white people came around. Well, there was that little hiccup in Little Rock but we’re cool now.” I realize we’ve got limited time and resources to teach kids these things in school but it’s a narrative designed to have a happy ending rather than an accurate reflection of the truth which I think that hurts our perception of the situation today. We’ve turned racist into cartoon villains. When people think of racist they often picture a Neo-Nazi or a klansman (often with a nice southern accent). So if _that’s_ what a racist looks like then I can’t possible be racist because I’m neither a Neo-Nazi nor a klansman. You’re either a racist or not, there’s no room for a little nuance here. I’m certainly not arguing that a little racism is okay. It’s just difficult for people to examine their own bias when finding it means the possibility of being lumped in with those cartoon villains. And of course we live in a fairly segregated society. When I lived in Little Rock 32% of the population were African Americans. I moved to a suburb in another county and it’s 95% white. I moved from a neighborhood I would estimate was nearly 40% African American to a neighborhood that’s about 98% white. It’s easy to dismiss the complaints of people you don’t really have any meaningful contact with outside of a work context. ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/65 "2019-03-31T06:29:17Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > because they don’t believe in Freedom of Speech. > . That doesn’t make any sense, in English. What did you intend to say? That they don’t support the idea of complete freedom of speech, just like the USA doesn’t support the idea of complete freedom of speech. Or did you mean that they don’t believe that freedom of speech exists? “Believe in”. How do you know what a UK citizen believes in? The answer is, you don’t. I am also at odds with your assessment of Japan. Sure, positive discrimination exists, for mundane and personal-level activities, but negative discrimination exists at the core of any serious business. ---
**Author:** ![Unreconstructed\_Man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/76d3ee/32.png) [@Unreconstructed\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unreconstructed_Man)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/66 "2019-03-31T10:16:04Z")
> [@GigoBuster](#): > > No, you blatantly ignore the main point, it was about how for the same crimes blacks and minorities see more prison time than white people. When that was the case, moves like Clinton did were bound to cause more disruption among Black and other minority families. And no, talking about how unjust it is for blacks and minorities to get less access to good lawyers actually points to one of the key issues about the injustice, it remains part of the racism in the system when there is very little effort made to improve the access to better help. Do rich or middle-class black people have this problem? ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/67 "2019-03-31T15:03:55Z")
[People of color more likely to be exposed to harmful levels of air pollution than white, even when income is accounted for](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/14/us-people-of-color-still-more-likely-to-be-exposed-to-pollution-than-white-people) [Stigmatized racial and ethnic minorities receiever lower quality health care even when income is accounted for](https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/2018/sep/focus-reducing-racial-disparities-health-care-confronting) [Online lenders tend to charge black and Latino borrowers more interest than white and Asian borrowers even when credit rating is accounted for](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/14/are-you-minority-borrower-you-might-want-think-twice-about-using-an-online-lender/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.08946c46a98c). The “the burden of proof is on YOU” people really rankle my nerves. There has never been a time in the US when racial minorities weren’t getting screwed over by whites. Many of the same people who were protesting black kids going to school with white kids in that grainy footage from the 1950s and 1960s are still alive today, as are the kids who were standing right beside them, holding up signs reading “GO BACK TO AFRICA, NIGGER!” But the racism denialists want us to believe those people are all dead or they had a change of heart once MLK was assassinated. How convenient for them. Let’s accept the premise that “everyone is a little racist”. That doesn’t magically take away racial minorities’ right to complain about racism. It still means that racial minorities have it harder than whites, since whites outnumber and outpower them. If everyone truly is a little racist, then it is perfectly rational for black people to be afraid of white police officers and to worry about getting hired or promoted and to be extra distrustful of the white politicians who talk about making America great again. So when white people trump out the “everyone is a little racist” card to excuse themselves from having to change their ways, they are basically saying to racial minorities “I guess it sucks to be you, huh?” Whether they understand this or not. My hypothesis is that classism feels more rational than racism, so that’s why it’s the default explanation. But we should be challenging it as well. It isn’t fair that poor people receive inferior educations, live in more toxic neighborhoods, and are unjustly incarcerated at higher rates than the rich. It seems to me the same people who don’t see racism also don’t see anything wrong with these class disparities either, but of course they’ll act like they do when it comes to something like Affirmative Action. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/68 "2019-03-31T15:19:53Z")
> [@pullin](#): > > I think in some cases it’s simply a matter of context. I’m an old white guy, and until just now I’d never noticed that. Is that depiction considered racism? Is my lack of awareness ? I’m really not sure. The depiction is indeed a form of racism, specifically of “whitewashing”; while it doesn’t affect specific, name-and-lastname individuals it does make a specific group look whiter than it is. The most blatant form of whitewashing involves casting white actors to represent actual people who were a different ethnicity. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/69 "2019-03-31T17:00:28Z")
> [@Isamu](#): > > That doesn’t make any sense, in English. What did you intend to say? That they don’t support the idea of complete freedom of speech, just like the USA doesn’t support the idea of complete freedom of speech. Or did you mean that they don’t believe that freedom of speech exists? “Believe in”. How do you know what a UK citizen believes in? The answer is, you don’t. It’s illegal to speak out against the government, for one. To be fair, it’s not enforced, but there’s nothing to prevent them from switching around on that. It is illegal to be racist or sexist. Not strongly enforced, but there is no protection against that being changed by the government, on any given day. It is illegal to scorn the religious. Again, it’s not strongly enforced, but there’s no defense against that. Profane, obscene, and sexual content are all currently legal, but there is no particular restriction on the government from deciding that you’ve had enough of that. There is no higher concept of freedom speech that trounces the whims of the day. The current law is the current culture. Given a position of power in government, even a minority culture could easily start to change those things. It’s simple law, not supreme law. As the UK became more tolerant, blasphemy, obscenity, etc. became legal. As it went past that into PC-land, racism and sexism and religious intolerance became illegal. When it edges back away from that, the laws will change again. It’s just culture codified, not a fundamental value. > [@](#): > > am also at odds with your assessment of Japan. Sure, positive discrimination exists, for mundane and personal-level activities, but negative discrimination exists at the core of any serious business. As I did note. I didn’t make an exhaustive list, but the topic isn’t “Let’s learn about Japan!” I was teaching about the concept of positive discrimination. As such, I wrote more about it. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/70 "2019-03-31T17:22:19Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > I believe that racism is relatively rare in the USA You must be so happy in your made-up world. It’s enviable in a certain way. A terrifying way. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/71 "2019-03-31T17:26:41Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > In the UK, there are very sharply separated Muslim areas. The nearby locals wanted to be super PC so when there were hints that they were selling children to each other as spouses, they suppressed that information because it would be anti-PC to arrest them for breaking the laws of the land. > > The Muslim community (as I understand it from reading about the situation) is a strongly separate community. There is not a lot of withing together and hanging out and so on. They’re there in town, but it may as well be a different town that just happens to exist in a donut hole of our town. > > In American history, we used to have sharp borders like that - with the East Coast creating all these Little Italies and Little Ukraines and so on, the West Coast has a half dozen Chinatowns, but that’s no longer how it works. Chinese people come over and just pick a place to live. They might try to pinpoint someplace _more_ popular with other Chinese, because they want access to a Chinese supermarket, but it’s not a huge deal, and white people don’t avoid moving in, nor do Indians or anyone else. It’s not a matter of being pushed into that area, it’s just that that’s where there’s a Chinese supermarket. > > Ignoring the African American issue, the US is among the most inviting and diversity-friendly places on Earth. Canada may be ahead of us (though, I know they have problems with their native people in places). I’m unaware of state of the Netherlands, but we’re probably ahead of the UK, France, Germany, etc. > > If you watch Dr Who, for example, they’re clearly trying to include diversity as an active measure. They clearly know that it’s a thing that requires active investment. And, more importantly, I would be willing to bet that if you threw a White Nationalism rally in the UK (if the government allowed it), you’d probably get a crowd the size of or larger than our Unite the Right did, even though the UK has a smaller population. But, in the UK, they probably don’t allow it because they don’t believe in Freedom of Speech. > > And that’s one reason why they probably have the division and the racism, because they don’t allow people to talk and they have their stupid libel laws that don’t let the press raise concerns in advance. Have you ever actually even visited the UK? Yes, there have been some major scandals involving what amounted to organised gangs grooming and raping underage girls. Yes, the majority of the men involved were of Pakistani origin. That’s about as far as that goes though; reluctance to be racist in reporting may have been a factor, but a hell of a lot of it was that the groups involved didn’t really look like what local authorities would expect as a gang (middle aged men, steady jobs, often married), and that the girls involved were generally of very poor backgrounds, many of them were in care and already had arrest records. It went as far as it did because the police were dismissing victims because they weren’t deemed credible, also because the victims were often not making any complaints, and despite them being still kids, there wasn’t anyone looking out for them. If middle class girls ‘from good families’ had been targeted, the law would have been down on the perpetrators like a ton of bricks. Regardless, the existence of a -very real and horrible crime ring involving classism racism and a specific subset of Muslim men and certain police forces, which came to light around 8 years ago means very little in regards to the everyday situation for most residents, Muslim or not. There’s not a terrified populace scared to report crimes in case they offend the PC police. Regarding the claims of ghettos and ‘no go areas’, that’s just nonsense. I lived for 5 years in an area which was around 1/3 Muslim, with three mosques within walking distance, including one 5 houses away. I worked with Muslim men and women, chatted to them on the street, made friends, got invited to events at the local mosque, including community street parties (never once got invited to anything by the church on the other side of the road I might add, buncha cheapskates). The kids from the nearest mosque even gave an generic good wishes Eid card and box of chocolates to everyone for at least 5 streets out to celebrate Ramadan. These are not the actions of an insular community secretively trying to cut itself off. I’m sure you could find a street you wouldn’t be welcome to walk down where everyone was Muslim, I could find you one just the same where everyone was Christian or atheist too. Oh, and there absolutely are white nationalist parties in the UK, just the rallies they hold are generally quite pathetic. One local one, involving the BNP, who were bussed into the city to try and drum up support, had over 50 counter-protesters for every one white nationalist, who pretty much laughed at them and partied until the BNP cut the march short, slunk off down a side road, and went home several hours earlier than planned. Groups like that have not been banned under free speech rules, though they don’t tend to get very big as it does turn out that most of the organisers are violent arseholes who keep getting arrested for doing stupid things. Who knew, huh? I mean, racism is certainly a problem here- the existence of white nationalist groups at all is kind of a giveaway- but it’s mostly the sneaking insidious kind. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/72 "2019-03-31T17:27:18Z")
White people don’t notice racism. Men don’t notice sexism. Thin people don’t notice how fat people are treated. Wealthy people don’t know anything about poor people. Notice a pattern at all? If you can afford to not notice the suffering of others, you mostly don’t. If you are directly _causing_ the suffering of others, for your own pleasure or convenience, then you _can’t._ Unless you’re a sadist. Most people aren’t sadists, they’re just trying to stay comfortable. Empathy is one of the most uncomfortable emotions you can have. That’s why people avoid it as much as possible. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/73 "2019-03-31T17:59:47Z")
**Unreconstructed Man** , what **monstro** said. While wealth can improve but not eliminate the disparities, wealth can make the more wealthy Blacks and other minorities to paradoxically encounter more racism. > [@](#): > > One of the paradoxes of racial discrimination is the way it can remain obscured even to the people to whom it’s happening. Here’s an example: In an ambitious, novel study conducted by the Urban Institute a few years ago, researchers sent actors with similar financial credentials to the same real estate or rental offices to ask about buying or renting a home or apartment. In the end, no matter where they were sent, the actors of color were shown fewer homes and offered fewer discounts on rent or mortgages than those who were white. > > The results even surprised some of the actors of color; they felt they had been treated politely — even warmly — by the very real estate agents who told them they had no properties available to show them but who then told the white actors something different. The full scope of the disparate treatment often becomes clear only in the aggregate, once the camera zooms out. > [@](#): > > Almost all of the black people who responded — 92 percent — said they felt that discrimination against African-Americans exists in America today. At least half said they had personally experienced racial discrimination in being paid equally or promoted at work, when they applied for jobs or in their encounters with police. > [@](#): > > There were some stark differences in the way people in different income brackets said they experienced discrimination. Just about 2 in 3 people who earned more than $75,000 a year said that someone has referred to them or black people with racial slurs; less than half of all people who made less than $25,000 said the same. The same trend was true when respondents were asked whether someone acted afraid of them because of their race: Fifty-five percent of people who made more than $75,000 a year or more said this was true, compared with 33 percent of those who made less than $25,000 a year. > [@](#): > > The researchers did not attempt to posit any theories to explain why respondents answered differently based on their incomes. But what could be happening is that higher-income earners might live somewhat less segregated lives and have more chances to have more cross-racial encounters — and more negative cross-racial encounters. > > I ran this theory by Phillip Atiba Goff at John Jay College, whose specialty is the psychology of bias and racism. Goff was wary of speculating on statistics from a survey that he didn’t conduct, but he offered this useful bit of context that he called “the bind of black success”: Not only were higher-income black folks in more contact with white people, but they also more acutely experienced the stakes of being direct competition with them. “The more proximity to inclusion is realistic, the price of exclusion is more pronounced,” he explained. > [@](#): > > Taken altogether, these survey results aren’t terribly surprising: They’re backed up by the reams of data that show the extent to which African-Americans are far more likely to live in areas with concentrated poverty even when they are high earners, are more likely to go to segregated and underfunded schools, and more likely to be stopped by the police and searched once they are. Black folks are living objectively more difficult lives than similarly situated white folks. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/74 "2019-03-31T18:34:04Z")
Forgot the link: > **[How Black Americans See Discrimination](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/10/25/559015355/how-black-americans-see-discrimination)** > > A new survey from NPR shows that black people often feel differently about discrimination depending on their gender, how old they are, how much they earn and whether they live in cities or suburbs. How Black Americans See Discrimination ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/75 "2019-03-31T19:14:06Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > [People of color more likely to be exposed to harmful levels of air pollution than white, even when income is accounted for](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/14/us-people-of-color-still-more-likely-to-be-exposed-to-pollution-than-white-people) Ok, let’s have a look at that article. The popular media does a bad job of representing science papers. The Guardian is a far left source and thus even less likely to be accurate. To start off, when summarizing a scientific paper, they could have given a proper reference to the paper but they didn’t. It appears [this is](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP959) the paper referred to. First of all, the Guardian headline claims that “people of color are exposed to pollution” in general, but the study in question only looked at NO2, which is one of many pollutants. More importantly, what the study actually found is that NO2 levels for all racial groups, both in 2000 and 2010, were very far below the levels that the EPA considers dangerous. Specifically, the EPA’s [standard](https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollution/primary-national-ambient-air-quality-standards-naaqs-nitrogen-dioxide) is 53 ppb. The average for black areas was 16.2 ppb in 2000, dropping to 10.0 ppb in 2010. The paper does include a model purporting to show that heart attacks would decrease for non-whites if air pollution were lower, but gives no explanation of how that squares with the fact that NO2 levels are in ranges the EPA considers safe for everyone. So if the Guardian wanted their readers to know the truth, they could have reported that average black neighborhoods were well below dangerous levels of NO2 in 2000 and even farther below in 2010. More generally, they could point out that air pollution of all types has decreased enormously in urban areas in America over the past few decades, and thus people of all races are surely much safer from health impacts. But that’s not the sort of thing that Guardian authors are hired to write. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/76 "2019-03-31T19:23:59Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > So if the Guardian wanted their readers to know the truth, they could have reported that average black neighborhoods were well below dangerous levels of NO2 in 2000 and even farther below in 2010. More generally, they could point out that air pollution of all types has decreased enormously in urban areas in America over the past few decades, and thus people of all races are surely much safer from health impacts. But that’s not the sort of thing that Guardian authors are hired to write. Sure, what the study concludes should be ignored. /no s this time. > [@](#): > > Results: > > Estimated annual average NO2 concentrations decreased from 2000 to 2010 for all of the race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status groups, including a decrease from 17.6 ppb to 10.7 ppb (−6.9 ppb) in nonwhite [non-(white alone, non-Hispanic)] populations, and 12.6 ppb to 7.8 ppb (−4.7 ppb) in white (white alone, non-Hispanic) populations. In 2000 and 2010, disparities in NO2 concentrations were larger by race-ethnicity than by income. Although the national nonwhite–white mean NO2 concentration disparity decreased from a difference of 5.0 ppb in 2000 to 2.9 ppb in 2010, estimated mean NO2 concentrations remained 37% higher for nonwhites than whites in 2010 (40% higher in 2000), and nonwhites were 2.5 times more likely than whites to live in a block group with an average NO2 concentration above the WHO annual guideline in 2010 (3.0 times more likely in 2000). > > Conclusions: > > Findings suggest that absolute NO2 exposure disparities by race-ethnicity decreased from 2000 to 2010, but relative NO2 exposure disparities persisted, with higher NO2 concentrations for nonwhites than whites in 2010. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/77 "2019-03-31T19:41:23Z")
And from the paper too, not The Guardian: > [@](#): > > Although absolute NO2 exposure disparities reduced substantially during this period, there remain potentially large public health benefits from eliminating these disparities: nonwhites remained 2.5 times more likely than whites to live in block groups above WHO guidelines for NO2 in 2010, and based on the back-of-the-envelope calculation described above, the estimated nonwhite–white NO2 disparity may have been associated with thousands of premature IHD deaths among nonwhites in 2010. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/78 "2019-03-31T19:59:33Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > No, you blatantly ignore the main point, it was about how for the same crimes blacks and minorities see more prison time than white people. Actually I did not ignore that. I specifically said that: Rich and middle class people can afford good lawyers. The poor cannot, and get stuck with public defenders, who are usually terrible. This leads to a huge difference in outcomes between rich and poor in the criminal justice system. Blacks are the most likely to be poor compared to Whites, Hispanics, and Asians. Therefore blacks are much less likely to have access to a good lawyer. Poor black men virtually all end up plea-bargaining when accused of a crime. Overall, wealth is a better predictor prison time than race. (No time to find a cite right now, I’ll do so tomorrow.) There is absolutely no doubt that the whole prison system, courts, and policies sucks for many poor people. Making it less sucky for the poor should be a primary focus of anyone who wants to address racial disparities. Here is the [citation](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/mass-incarceration-race-class-peoples-policy-project): “For all four outcomes, being lower class instead of middle or upper class makes a massive difference. Being black rather than white has a modest effect that is nonetheless statistically insignificant for all outcomes but one”. So we are both in agreement that the disparity between how the criminal justice system treats rich and poor leads to blacks receiving harsher penalties on average. I am not what you are attempting to accomplish by falsely claiming that I ignored that fact. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/79 "2019-03-31T20:07:02Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > So we are both in agreement that the disparity between how the criminal justice system treats rich and poor leads to blacks receiving harsher penalties on average. I am not what you are attempting to accomplish by falsely claiming that I ignored that fact. That follows for what you will continue to declare, do you say then that Radley Balko did not show evidence that ‘the criminal justice system is racist’ and that there is plenty of evidence for that? BTW what you are claiming here then does not follow, if we are in agreement that ‘for the same crimes blacks and minorities see more prison time than white people.’ then you are attempting now to claim that wealth dismisses that claim, not so. And one reason for that is that race also influences the chances for someone to get wealthy. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2019, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716/80 "2019-03-31T20:17:21Z")
To me what I see here is what many conservatives fall for, they can minimize the effects of one item, like the effects of contamination, or the effects of the racism seen in the drug war, or the results blacks and minorities get from the justice system, or the less opportunities they have on housing or jobs. However, that does not logically turns off the aggregated result of all that and other sandbagging that happens due to race. Sure it is better than before, but ignoring what still needs to be done, is like ignoring the forest in trouble for the few trees that they pick as good ones. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-of-the-people-who-identify-as-white-have-a-hard-time-seeing-the-racism-around-them/831716.md?page=5)