wat0n wrote:But in this case, Blacks are clearly not barred from policing and have not been for decades now. As such, they also participate and help shape the culture of policing.
Agreed, they aren’t barred from becoming cops but I don’t see the significance of this other than the extreme case of overt discrimination in law which largely gets eroded or reframed in more abstract laws.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/tnamp/ You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, N*****, N*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “N*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, N*****.”
But such presence doesn’t negate the point that practices and institutions can tend towards white supremacy.
To try and drive home how an increase in a demographic doesn’t automatically promote their interests against dominant norms.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf In India: Development as Participation (2002), Sen goes one step further as a result of his study of ‘son preference’. Son preference is the tendency of people in certain cultures to prefer a son to a daughter, resorting to abortion of female foetuses or simply neglecting the health of young girls. As a result of these practices, India and China are each ‘missing’ about 40 million women in their current populations. Sen observed that this tendency not only increases with industrialisation and rising real incomes, but increased even in those societies where women had a voice. Even educated women and women who have full control over the decision whether or not to abort a female foetus, may be active participants in exercising son-preference because they share their husband’s preference for a son.
This type of gender inequality [son preference] cannot be removed, at least in the short run, by the enhancement of women’s empowerment and agency, since that agency is itself an integral part of the cause of natality inequality. This recognition demands an important modification ‒ and indeed an extension ‒ of our understanding of the role of women’s agency in eliminating gender inequality in India. The enhancement of women’s agency which does so much to eliminate sex differentials in mortality rates (and also in reducing fertility and mortality rates in general) cannot be expected, on its own, to produce a similar elimination of sex differentials at birth and abortion, and correspondingly in the population of children. What is needed is not merely freedom and power to act, but also freedom and power to question and reassess the prevailing norms and values. The pivotal issue is critical agency. Strengthening women’s agency will not, by itself, solve the problem of ‘son preference’ when that works through the desires of the mothers themselves. (Sen 2002, p. 258.)
... the agency of women is effective in promoting those goals which women tend to value. When those values are distorted by centuries of inequality, for example yielding the perception that boys are to be welcomed more than girls, then the empowerment of women can go hand in hand with persistent inequality and discrimination in some fields, in particular ‘boy preference’ in births (with possibly brutal results in the form of sex-specific abortions). Indeed, the agency of women can never be adequately free if traditionally discriminatory values remain unexamined and unscrutinised. While values may be culturally influenced (we have provided some evidence corroborating this presumption), it is possible to overcome the barriers of inequality imposed by tradition through greater freedom to question, doubt, and ‒ if convinced ‒ reject. An adequate realisation of women’s agency relates not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess. Critical agency is a great ally of development. (Sen, 2002, p. 274.)
To reflect the fact that recognition as an equal participant in the social and political life of a society still leaves the person trapped within dominant customs, beliefs and modes of living, which for example, may include misrecognition of their personality or unjust constraints on their activity, Sen introduced the term ‘critical voice’.
And I would even give the example that a black american raised predominantly among whites tends to have a complex with themselves as they do not have the community support and resources against racist bullshit that pops up. A great example in the new Bel Air show is how Will is confused and offended with Carlton being okay with some white kids he goes to school with saying the n word. Will doesn’t tolerate that shit but what Will doesn’t understand about his cousin is that he likely accepts it as an adaption to that environment. He might’ve learned that he can’t effectively challenge it or that he doesn’t have the means to change it as one person.
What happens with encounters that did not end with a killing? The study is comparing only those who died, which is not even what you should be comparing.
Furthermore, I ignore if that DB has information on why the encounter even happened, which is connected to this point below:
As in to give a picture of how often people aren’t killed by police when they’re unarmed, without a mental health crisis and such. Disproportionally I imagine many encounters don’t escalate to death but they do attract attention because its quite a severe outcome and police are given the authority to act in such a manner, and often there isn’t mere tragic circumstances but excessive force and recklessness which harkens back to concerns of what underpins such violent practices among the US police resulting in higher deaths relative to most industrialized nations.
Yes, it is possible that for the same presumably illegal action someone may be more likely to call the cops if the alleged perpetrator is not white. It is also more likely that the caller will say the person more aggressive in that event, and if that happens the cops will already be primed to prepare for a confrontation. Yet I would not say this is the police's fault, and I would also not blame the cop if the call was misleading about the level of danger posed by the victim.
even with that priming though we expect a level of professionalism in how a threat is detained and there are examples of dangerous shooters who have been successfully detained without killing them. Makes one curious why unarmed blacks might be killed relative to those who are armed.
It's hard to know, we'll find out in the trial.
It could simply be them aggro and they escalated their own situation and he ran and they just amped up en more. But such aggression still seems tied the culture of policing which has to deal with violence but increasingly examples show a lack of professionalism and deescalation tactics.
Tell me, why is it that these incidents are as likely to happen in zip codes in areas that weren't even US territories in the 19th century as in the Deep South?
One of the studies you cited claims so. This explanation sounds suspect, unless you think all the US is the same as far as race relations go (clearly false).
Why assume racism is less in the north these days? Because they were the free states? More blacks live in the south and grow up along side whites. In the north they are so segregated that they may not know any black people except the stereotypes. It’s not like you go north and its a racial utopia, shit was still nasty when the black diaspora had people moving for new opportunities and got redlined and shit.
There may be differences around racial relations, like my example above of actually knowing black people. But neither undermines the issue of racism as the south can still get ugly.
But the unions play a major role, we know that because they have the actual power to lead to chaos if the cops refuse to work.
Experiences both within and outside the US show police strikes are chaotic and costly.
Yes, unions are a means of propelling the cops to out severe political pressure on local governments as is seen with a lot of black mayors having to concede to them and even pander a little after BLM anti police sentiments snd protests. On another subject, coo city in Atlanta is such an issue of huge contention for Georgians there.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics