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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While wealth can improve but not eliminate the disparities, wealth can make the more wealthy Blacks and other minorities to paradoxically encounter more racism.
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 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 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.
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: “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.
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.
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.