QatzelOk wrote:Thanks for a better understanding of "defunding'" Godstud.
But this brings up another problem that I have with this campaign.
IT IGNORES the racism and lack of equality that causes negative confrontatations with the police. Let me explain this in detail:
Black Americans have less security, less income, and less social opportunity than other Americans. This is not because of the police. This is not because of police brutality. It's not because of Derek Chauvin.
It's because of American society.
The police are one of the unfortunate groups that must deal with the misery and rage of this injustice (against African Americans) every day, in their faces, and they must also absorb a lot of the rage from suffering African Americans.
If the police have been armed like a military over the last 20 years, it's because the 1% want to have them surpressed.
This means that even if you arrest every violent cop, defund every police budget, and eliminate all the military equipment - nothing will ultimately change for black people. The entire society must be reconstructed without a class system.
Until then, defunding the police is just more feel-good reactionary sloganeering that will help you feel good as your government does absolutely nothing to change anything for African Americans.
I think it is indeed absurd to blame the cops for all the social ills in the US, and there's a clear class angle in policing. I would say quite a bit of the current racial inequality in the US actually has a lot to deal with class, which is not really acknowledged as it
should be by the wider society due to the rather explosive history of race relations in the US, because African Americans still get the short end of the stick in many ways and because White America was more egalitarian and horizontal in interactions between its members than most European countries were during the colonial era, even if there were of course different social classes and socioeconomic inequality, which leads the wider society to disregard social class as an explanation for social issues in general.
But I don't think the cops are militarized because they are there to protect the 1%, I think that's the case simply because civilians have more firepower available. As I said earlier, policing started as a military activity to enforce the prevailing laws and guarantee general public safety (particularly in the roads) anyway, and the remilitarization of the police is far from exclusive to the US. It's also been going on in Latin America, Canada and Europe (at least), that is, it's been going on across the West, and it's been happening for a long time (at least for a century). This development mirrors others related to their jobs, for instance, the first submachine gun (the Tommy) was invented and began to be sold a century ago as well.
One aspect where that class inequality shows, is that lower income households have higher rates of crime victimization in the US (and probably across the West too):
Bureau of Justice Statistics wrote:Household Poverty And Nonfatal Violent Victimization, 2008-2012
Erika Harrell, Ph.D., Lynn Langton, Ph.D., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Marcus Berzofsky, DrPH, Lance Couzens, Hope Smiley-McDonald, Ph.D., RTI International
November 18, 2014 NCJ 248384
Presents findings from 2008 to 2012 on the relationship between households that were above or below the federal poverty level and nonfatal violent victimization, including rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. This report examines the violent victimization experiences of persons living in households at various levels of poverty, focusing on type of violence, victim's race or Hispanic origin, and location of residence. It also examines the percentage of violent victimizations reported to the police by poverty level. Data are from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects information on nonfatal crimes, reported and not reported to the police, against persons age 12 or older from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. During 2012, about 92,390 households and 162,940 persons were interviewed for the NCVS.
Highlights:
For the period 2008-12-
Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000).
Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8-2.5 per 1,000).
The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels.
Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000).
Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per 1,000).
Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).
Note that this says nothing about the relationship between poverty or inequality and the overall level of crime. For instance nowadays the homicide rates in the US are at the same level as in the early '60s:
While inequality is way higher than it was back then:
(Note how income redistribution, that is the difference between both series, is essentially constant over time).
But what it does mean, is that poor people are also victims of more crime (at least nowadays). Maybe the overall level of inequality does in fact decrease crime, but the effect in reality is small and of no practical relevance (there are other determinants of crime that are more important than income inequality).
QatzelOk wrote:This is, of course, true Sivad. Which is why "Poor Lives Matter" would be a more appropriate slogan.
But African Americans belong disproportionately to the lower classes. And blacks have been in the USA for centuries - they're not recent immmigrants, so this disproportionate poverty has to do with systemic racism and entrenched nepotism, as well as the total absence of reconstruction for African Americans after slavery was abolished.
I actually think this is a bit of an open question. Maybe it's because I come from Latin America, so my terms of comparison are a bit distorted, but although nepotism exists in the US, it's not THAT bad and the US is definitely a meritocratic society (Latin America on the other hand takes nepotism to insane levels, but maybe this shouldn't be that surprising since inequality is higher than in the US).
I do believe that indeed this has a lot to do with the failure of the Reconstruction Era and the following Jim Crow system, although this was perhaps inevitable given the prevailing racism at the time. However, the Civil Rights Movement did succeed in removing and indeed banning the racism in the law that absolutely denied opportunities to African Americans. First segregation in education and everywhere else, then over the years more subtle forms of discrimination have been banned too, and now we all get compulsory training on preventing discrimination and bias in general (based on race, gender or other protected categories), at least in Illinois, along with protections for people who try to exercise their rights under the law. As such, I don't think it's that easy to say that the US hasn't made huge progress (as other countries have) on the issue of systemic, institutional racism. Even if there may of course be still some of it in some way (as there can be in pretty much any other country as well, given institutions don't exist in a vacuum and are doomed to reflect the societies they are part of in some way or another, as racism still exists at a societal level), I would not say that the American system in itself is inherently racist - whatever racism there is, is largely a reflection of the wider attitudes in society (e.g. if juries discriminate against African Americans, it's not because the jury system is racist but because they are drawn from the general population and part of it is racist since societal racism still exists). If such racism was removed, I think the institutional aspect would disappear too.
African Americans have had plenty of trouble to catch up. I think part of the reason is primarily due to the persistence in the effects of past discrimination more than current societal or institutional racism, this is keeping in mind that African American students only stopped to be segregated 65 years ago. There's some research suggesting parents play a key role in the development of their children from the very beginning, if African Americans from the '50s and earlier were getting a worse education than Whites then such disadvantage may as well have affected the stimulation of their own children, and it can in turn be affecting their grandchildren today in the form of worse early age stimulation than White children get, which in turn leads to a harder time in school for African American children, higher school dropout rates compared to White children, lower higher education enrollment for African American children (and in worse universities, since higher education needs to be a lot more selective in enrollment than elementary and secondary education do) and, in turn, less opportunities and lower average incomes for African Americans. A similar case can be made comparing White middle or upper class children with White poor children too, but since Whites have lower poverty rates than African Americans, then the former would still be better off than the latter in average. This also is different from what happens to immigrants, because emigrating to the US implies making a choice (even refugees fleeing persecution and war make a decision to go specifically to the US, even if they didn't decide to leave their countries of origin, since they could go elsewhere), Americans on the other hand are mostly born in the US and therefore don't choose to be Americans. This is important because then the population of immigrants can be radically different from natives in some relevant ways for this analysis (and hence their issues aren't comparable to those faced by African Americans).
This would essentially call to do some income redistribution (since the same mechanism can affect poor children regardless of race, and African American children would be overrepresented here), but in a way that fosters solving this issue. That is, it would call for further income redistribution, but with many conditional transfers (there is already something like that in the form of the EITC but that is to provide incentives to work, this would provide different incentives).
NYC did so and it did improve outcomes among participants, both in terms of poverty reduction and educational outcomes, so it would be reasonable to start scaling this up, including by increasing the transfer amount (which means redistributing more).
QatzelOk wrote:I am dissappointed that so many low-class people have decided that systemic racism is the police's fault, and that if we get rid of them, racism will dissappear. (this won't work)
I actually wonder if that's what low class people believe or if it's what woke upper middle class progressives (particularly White ones) believe.
I also wonder what's going on with the Left. It used to care about class, and about class relations, with Marxists taking the extreme view that everything is about social class (under their own definition centered on economic behavior, based on the difference between the exploiters and the exploited) and others such as social democrats (in the case of the US, supporters of the New Deal be it in its original or revised forms) taking less dogmatic views but still making redistribution one of its major priorities, and making the analysis of socioeconomic inequality their main intellectual basis and goals, with identity politics playing a role in both but always secondary to the Marxian concept of class and socioeconomic inequality in each respective case. Yet nowadays Marxism has disappeared in all but name and the rest seem to be more concerned about identity politics than about social class. I think it has to do with the elitization of the political and intellectual Left that people like Piketty have noted, making you Qatz a bit old fashioned for even daring to suggest class and poverty have a lot to do in a problem that affects a minority, perhaps as much or even more than racism itself.
This is how we are both getting to similar conclusions from radically different perspectives (me, clearly from a positivist, modern and liberal, neoliberal or perhaps socioliberal perspective; you from a post-modern leftist one). And it's also how it is currently the Right that is becoming more attentive to class as a category to consider in this kind of issues, since taking it into account isn't necessarily inconsistent with neoliberalism and minarchism.
QatzelOk wrote:But racism has to go. The only way to get rid of it MIGHT be to get rid of most of the conventions of civilization though, since all civilizations are based on fake social divisions that always create misery for the majority.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will work either. Tribalism is as old as humanity itself is, and some people will tend to show it in one way or another. It can be based on physical features we associate with race (primarily skin pigmentation) but it can also be based on plenty of other things (ethnicity, nationality, religion, political leanings, gender, sexual orientation, age, even what sports team you like, etc).
What governments can do of course is to take those out of the equation when legislating on substantive matters (such as civil rights, economic rights and policy, social rights, freedoms, and so on), this is keeping in mind the State will also have to show and perhaps even be based on it in some way or another but that it should be expressed on secondary issues (say, picking national and religious holidays, naming streets, promoting the national and local cultures and perhaps not so secondarily education curriculum) not fundamental ones.
This applies even to a certain country I am known to be fond off, although I wish it would make more progress on this matter.
- By late
- By starman2003