Julian658 wrote:It was not my intention to prove absence of racism when I stated more whites get killed than blacks. I stated that because many people do not know that whites also get shot . A lot of uninformed people somehow assume that it is mostly black people getting shot by the police. The media and black leaders "stay mum" about the subject because they like to stoke racism to get ratings and to get elected to office.
Many crimes are more common among the poor and hence the poor come in contact with the police more often. However, it is not only poverty what increases the chances of being shot by the police. These issues are almost never univariate. Your researcher assumes that black and white poverty are the same and hence any difference in the rate of killings among the poor must be due to racism. I am not trying to deny racism, but black and white poverty are not the same. There are many other variables that were ignored. Let me give you an example: ON the average women earn less than men. Most assume is this is due to sexism. That would be a simplistic univariate analysis. However, the difference in pay is multifactorial and difference in gender is one among many reasons why women earn less than men.
I believe the overwhelming majority of these shootings are related to very poor outdated police training and the fact that America is so violent that the cops themselves are running scared. I am always puzzled as to why some black people put up a fight during arrest. In which planet do they live? One would think a black (or whatever color) person should know by now that it is best to be cooperative with cops. Neil DeGrass Tyson, the famous physicists knows this and is very calm and polite when in contact with the police. If I am stopped by a cop I am incredibly polite, it works every time. I think there is a lot of PTSD in black America regarding the police. This causes the limbic system to take over and at that point there is no reasoning. It is nothing but "fight or flight". And to make matters worse the cops are also in panic mode. The decision to shoot happens in an instant.
A Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. published a study on police brutality: He found out that blacks and Hispanics are brutalized much more often than whites------------yes there is racism. However, he found no racial differences with regards to shootings. By the way Roland G. Fryer, Jr is a black gentleman.
Citation:
Roland G. Fryer J. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy. Forthcoming.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publi ... -use-forceIn conclusion, on a proportional basis with regards to population blacks get shot more often. However, blacks come in contact with cops more often for a large variety of reasons and poverty is but one among many.
Fair point, nothing about the post denies any sort of racial bias existing in the shooting of blacks, but I wanted to point out the limitation of considering the raw number in part because sometimes people can sprinkle facts in order to leave the rest to the audience's imagination which can swing in all sorts of ways of course. And a fact left alone does beg for some sort of significance to give it proper context. It is also the case that the is often an emphasis on the fact that white people are killed by police in a dismissive fashion rather than seen as being congruent with a trend of police violence on the basis that it raises the prospect of such violence being seen as normal and without bias.
I mean even if there was some sort of lack of bias in police shootings, police violence could still be a cause for concern, and that people just don't take it as seriously as some.
There is certainly a build-up of a news cycle where there is a new black person in the headlines who has been killed by police which shouldn't be hard as there is someone killed almost every other day.
AGreed, being in poverty contributes to the risk of coming into contact with police and thus the risk of being shot by police but isn't a cause of it. I'm not sure the paper itself is bold in it's conclusion to say the rest of the variance is explained by racial prejudice on the part of the police who act at their discretion in stopping citizens and that.
But it certainly does away with the sense that with some things considered equal, it's not that you simply have a lot of black people in poverty, and thus it explains their shootings wholly either.
Well even when it comes to the term sexism, it is loaded as many reduce things to being a mere disposition or attitude and lose sight of the institutional ways in which people lack the opportunity for somethings but that is normalized for people, naturalizing the status quo rather than considering how one can improve the opportunity for anyone without regard for their demographic.
So I would agree the wage gap isn't simply people being like fuck paying women, but that the wage gap still arises because of many things which structurally inform the likelihood of women not having the same wage earning opportunities.
To help illustrate my point...
https://everydaygeopoliticshouston.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/feminist-discussion-post-2-the-wage-gap-intersectionality-and-the-white-privilege-of-liberal-feminism/2. The role of choice in shaping the gender wage gap.
So, in thinking about our definition of the wage gap, there are multiple approaches to understanding and explaining it. Many talk about the wage gap using theories of human capital. These people examine the wage gap as a function of characteristics of the worker: unequal education, training, skills, personal choice of occupation, or personality. This is the camp you seem to fall into, since you argue, “men are paid more than women because of their choices.” It’s important to note that this human capital approach is not a denial of the existence of the wage gap however; rather they are just explaining it in a particular way.
In fact, feminist (and non-feminist) interventions into the wage gap often deal with addressing the structural ways that gender norms (not just overt gender discrimination) help produce these outcomes. For example, they discuss how gender ideologies work to route women towards particular jobs, and how occupational sorting impacts the pay gap (Penner 2008). They discuss how women’s uneven childcare responsibilities impact their choice of occupation and ability to advance their career, a pattern that has been dubbed the “motherhood penalty” (Budig and England 2001)—in contrast to evidence that men actually earn a wage premium for fatherhood (Glauber 2008). They also demonstrate how the norms of acceptable gender behavior influence confidence and negotiation stills (Nyhus and Pons 2012; Palomino and Peyrache 2010). As Misra and Murray-Close (2014) argue, the argument that the wage gap is solely a matter of choice and thus no policies are needed to address it is representative of “widespread confusion about the sources of the gender pay gap and a failure to appreciate the extent to which contextual factors, including policy supports for pay equity, condition the impacts of men’s and women’s choices on their earning.” Further, as the AAUW (2015) describes, even though women are more likely to go into disciplines like teaching that are paid less, we still should be asking questions about whether lower wages in female-dominated fields are fair. In this regard, perhaps it’s also worth considering how the gender composition of certain labor fields has also contributed the way that the labor is valued, as fields like teaching are often treated as reproductive labor akin to childrearing (going back to my previous discussion about productive/reproductive labor).
Ultimately, choice is far more complicated than you are acknowledging. One of the problems with this type of faith in a meritocracy (the idea that anyone can be successful if they make good choices and work hard) is that it can lead you to turn a blind eye to the systemic conditions that help produce certain outcomes. In this case, it is leading you to ignore how gendered social systems help produce gendered outcomes in wages, and the ways these outcomes distinctly impact people of color and other marginalized groups (as I discuss in a minute). I’m not saying these systemic conditions wholly determine futures, but dismissing them only allows us to see half of the story. Moreover, it allows us to unproblematically blame people (in this case, women) for their position, rather than critically and compassionately examining the systemic factors that might lead people down certain paths or to make certain choices.
The above being a kind of abstract individualism that ignores the real-world influences upon people's decision making such as how women disproportionately tend to stay at home with children and forgo careers.
A similar thing could occur in the context of police shootings.
I have my reservations about whether the problem can be reduced to police training, it seems a charitable and easy fix for a problem that seems to be much bigger. Maybe it plays a part but then it still is a kind of weak kind of change. Like it has the feel of if we just do this, then everything will be better but I'm not sure how many people are really on board with that being the fix. There seems to be a lot of conflicting ideas of what is wanted and by whom.
I think a lot of people out of fear do go to great lengths to tolerate police, even when the police themselves are aggravating the situation. Like I think of Lt. Caron Nazario's interaction with police and how it seemed to me the police were the ones escalating things.
I think there can be intense feelings in some interactions which is charged for both ends, shit most people get anxious about getting pulled over even if they've done nothing wrong because you expect to get scrutinized and the consequences can be high.
Yeah, I heard about that paper and how it got all controversial for its findings.
Seems there is not anything totally damning about it, other than efforts to argue the sorts of limitations of the study. I think the one that stood out to me was the point about the group of black and white people who are stopped by police may not be identical for an air-tight comparison. Where there isn't an ability to control for bias in the police's discretion in who to stop.
It seems he responded to such criticisms:
"
Several scholars have rightly pointed out that these data all begin with an interaction, and suggested that racist policing manifests itself in more interactions between blacks and the police. The impact of this hypothesis in our shootings data seems minimal. The results on police shootings are statistically the same across all call types—ranging from officer-initiated contact with a suspicious person (where racism in whom to police is likely paramount) to a 911 call of a homicide in progress (where interaction with the potential suspect is more likely independent of race)."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-data-say-about-police-11592845959Another reason is of course the discretion of police and beyond them is the prejudice of people who call the cops on black people for little more than they're black in a place that they think they don't belong or doing something that doesn't seem 'normal' to their idea of a black person.
Roy Wood Jr. has a good comedic bit about some cashier trying to make him not use a plastic bag for his new iPhone because of the environment, and he explains how the guy just doesn't get why he needs the back and even the recipient to prove to security and the rest of the world he isn't walking out with a stolen iPhone. He needs proof of his purchase because he may get hassled otherwise.
And this is where I would emphasize some of the larger institutional arrangements which help create this sense of a black person doesn't belong here beyond just media representation of the supercriminal and rhetoric of the super-strength black man, is that some people have very little contact or regular engagement with black people.
Part of which is the result of things like economic segregation which reflects the inertia of historically discriminatory practices and even just the status quo reflection of such disparities as things reinforce themselves.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics